The courage to be vulnerable: exploring experiences of peer and self-assessment of teaching in nursing education

Abstract

Background: Within academia, more than one measure of assessment is required to ensure teaching success and ongoing teaching development. Peer assessment of teaching is one of the methods that can benefit teaching development; however, there is currently a lack of nursing research literature regarding the processes, outcomes, and use of self-reflection in the peer assessment process. In the spring and summer of 2015, the development and implementation of a tailored pilot project of peer and self-assessment of teaching occurred within an undergraduate nursing program at a Western Canadian university. The overarching philosophy of the pilot project of peer and self assessment was one of using peer to peer developmental feedback as a means of creating a community of support for professional teaching development. The study reported on in this paper is an initial step in addressing a lack of research literature within the field of nursing to support the practice of peer assessment of teaching as a sustainable and effective means of offering teaching development support. Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore and describe the experiences of teaching faculty participants in the pilot project of peer and self-assessment of teaching. Methods: A qualitative descriptive design was employed to explore the experiences of pilot participants. Focus group discussions and individual interviews were used to gather data. Participants: A total of 12 nursing educators involved in the pilot project participated in the study. Findings: Conventional content analysis of the combined data rendered themes around vulnerability and the influence and importance of establishing trust in selecting a partner, making teaching public, improving teaching practice, and maintaining accountability and responsibility. Conclusion: Peer and self-assessment of teaching has the potential to benefit professional teaching development in nursing education. Both peers within a peer and self-assessment partnership can experience feelings of vulnerability. Having the courage to be vulnerable or identifying and overcoming vulnerabilities and establishing trust with a teaching colleague can result in mutual learning, can benefit individual and team growth, and can enhance accountability to the undergraduate nursing curriculum and student learning. Keywords: professional development, qualitative study, nursing faculty, self-reflection, peer assessment IntroductionSuccessful teaching is inarguably a common goal of educators, and it is one that is complex and challenging to measure. In nursing education, the current gold standard approach for measuring teaching success is through the use of student evaluations of teaching.1 While student evaluations of teaching are widely used and, for the most part, recognized as useful measures of teaching competence, solely relying on one form of 18Tanner et al feedback can have a negative impact on teaching development and the quality of education delivered to students.2 Nursing as a profession remains under pressure to ...

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“…An additional result, not answering the aim of the study, was that some of the teachers expressed concerns and nervousness about being observed by a colleague. Similar experiences have been discussed previously (Tanner et al, 2017), in terms of vulnerability, in the sense of making individual teaching public for other learners. Another study has shown that fear of criticism can be a barrier for the peer observation process (Adsehead et al, 2006).…”