Annual faculty evaluations generally include evaluations of teaching, research and service. The research component is relatively simple to evaluate because the evidence of quality is easy to identify--grant dollars generated and their sources as well as numbers of publications and journal quality. Evaluating teaching activities, however, is another matter. Although teaching portfolios and student evaluations are useful tools, most faculty and administrators agree that good processes and comparative measures for evaluating teaching are difficult to find. To complicate the matter further, what constitutes good teaching is usually implied and not defined. A good definition of quality in teaching would be helpful, especially to assist new faculty in setting and working toward their teaching goals.Ideally, any activity should be evaluated by determining the outcomes that the activity produces. For teaching, the desired outcome is student learning. This might be quantified by student performance on each section of standardized tests in comparison to their national peers, the number of essential practice skills that students have developed and how well prepared the students are for subsequent coursework and/or practice. Such a group of tests or skill measures does not exist, and with many team taught courses, employing these tools for individual faculty evaluations would be impossible.An approach that is often utilized in other fields, employing "best practices," may be helpful. The underlying principle is that good outcomes are more likely to result if generally recognized good practices are employed. If we value good outcomes, we should then value the best practices that are most likely to achieve the desired result. Applying this concept to our teaching efforts, employing best practices in education will more likely result in better learning.Faculty should attempt to identify and agree upon best practices for teaching, i.e. those that they consider most valuable. The factors to be considered in developing a best practices list should take into account that students are humans, and as such, human characteristics and interactions between the faculty and students need to be considered. The nature of the interaction between teacher and student contributes greatly to interest in learning or to creating barriers to learning. A best practices lists should also recognize that faculty have educational responsibilities beyond presenting appropriate, contemporary material and testing on it. These responsibilities include serving as a role model of professionalism for students by helping students adopt the behaviors expected of a health care professional and by modeling those behaviors in the classroom. The evaluation process should attempt to gauge the extent to which the agreed upon best practices are being employed.Characteristics, behaviors, and effective techniques that good teachers have in common and that are expected by our accrediting agency have appeared in several publications.1,2,3,4 A compilation of some of these, ...
