The ET Cohort Program is a semester-long program during which faculty teams from each department collaborate to draft their unit’s new guidelines for teaching evaluations.
The work consists of:

• Four, 2-hour work sessions with some pre-session work/readings
• Disseminating information about the project and collecting feedback from departmental colleagues
• Engaging in ongoing discussions with departmental leadership
• Producing a draft of guidelines for evaluating teaching  

Over the past year, the ET Leadership Team has worked with two cohorts (Pilot cohort in Spring 2018; Cohort 1 in Fall 2018) of faculty representatives from 24 academic units to help them develop guidelines that are specific to their disciplinary and departmental needs. In August 2019, the remaining 15 departments (Cohort 2) began their participation, with full implementation of the project slated for Spring 2020.

Along with the faculty teams, chairs meet to be briefed on the work that their faculty are engaged in, provide insight into the annual review process, and to draft criteria that aligns the annual review process with the teaching evaluation guidelines. This set of criteria then is shared, modified and approved through departmental processes.

Drafts of guidelines are due on Nov. 5th, 2019 and drafts of rubrics/criteria are due by Dec. 6th, 2019. Faculty will use the new practices for evaluating teaching in their annual report in Spring 2020.

Beginning October 25th, 2019, the ET Leadership team will be offering ET Open Labs to help faculty identify teaching & learning evaluation tools to meet their interests and needs. For the Fall 2019 semester, these open labs will be Fridays, 10 AM to Noon in GL 156 (the ETS Faculty Resource Center).

• Faculty Leads: ET Faculty Leads are departmental representatives that work together in groups (typically three per department) to develop a written proposal for their unit’s new teaching evaluation practices. These faculty use their disciplinary/departmental lens to distill the overarching framework of excellent teaching and the data sources used to explore it. They also make recommendations for data collection that they believe will be most appealing and useful for their colleagues.
 
• Facilitators: Facilitators are CAT faculty developers as well as faculty fellows who assist the faculty teams with drafting the ET guidelines for their department, including working with faculty leads during ET work sessions, providing adequate support to their assigned departmental groups outside of the work sessions, helping faculty leads draft the most effective language for their departmental proposal, as well as reading and providing timely feedback on completed proposal drafts.


• ET Core: A team that includes faculty with experience as chairs work to create the program materials, support faculty leads in developing and writing their guidelines, work with chairs to create rubrics/criteria, direct the redesign of SPOTs and Panther180, and support the dissemination of information about the project. 
 
• ET Steering Committee: Consisting of faculty, administrators and staff, the steering committee ensures that the administrative tasks required to facilitate the Evaluation and Rewarding of Teaching Initiative are completed and that the project meets the needs of all stakeholders.