Chapter 15: The Benefits of Peer Coaching at Every Career Stage Available to Purchase

This chapter explores the process of creating and implementing a peer coaching faculty learning community (FLC) at a small liberal arts college. The experiences of five faculty members who participated were examined in-depth. Two of the faculty were untenured and expressed that they joined the FLC because they wanted to improve their teaching in order to achieve tenure. They began the experience unsure of their teaching effectiveness and acknowledged that they were nervous about being observed by a peer. The other faculty participants were tenured, full professors, who consider themselves skilled teachers. These faculty members expressed that they wanted to examine and further develop particular aspects of their teaching, as well as help support the use of peer observation as another means of determining teaching effectiveness because of concerns about bias in student course evaluations. The authors participated as two additional members of the sevenmember FLC, one paired in a peer coaching dyad with one of the untenured faculty members, and one paired with one of the tenured, full professors. Through pre-and post-observation conversations, observations of teaching, analysis of teaching reflections, and interviews, we examined the participants’ experiences with peer coaching, and the impact it had on their teaching practice. This chapter highlights that participation in peer coaching has benefits for all faculty regardless of their experience, skill level, or tenure status.