Practice of Teaching Community to Promote Peer Review for Quality Assurance

Abstract

This article describes a two-year “lesson study” utilizing the peer review system “FD Commons” in a Japanese University. This project is unique because it relied on ongoing class observation guidance conducted by college teachers with extensive experience doing lesson study. This paper reports on how collaboration between faculty developers and professors shaped understanding of common criteria for assessing teaching and learning. Successive trials revealed the following three points: (1) prescriptive comments related to teaching skills and methodology were repeatedly recorded during the same class observation, (2) faculty developers’ comments were more descriptive than prescriptive and predictive, and (3) professors indicated more predictive viewpoints based on understanding of lecture content and student ability.