Beyond Student Evaluations of Teaching and Educator Portfolios: A Multisource, Longitudinal System for Evaluating Teaching

Traditional student evaluations of teaching and educator portfolios do not adequately assess the breadth and depth of medical educators' efforts. Current processes use limited perspectives, focus on a small portion of educators' work, and emphasize subjective opinions, which introduce bias. Use of these data for high-stakes decisions such as academic promotion contributes to inequitable career advancement. We propose a holistic, growth-focused, behaviorally anchored system of evaluation which incorporates perspectives of the learner, peers, and self, and which examines the full scale of educator activities from a single session, to course design, to development of educator skills over years.