Chapter 7: Using The Science of fair Process to Build and Deliver a Faculty Peer Coaching Program Available to Purchase

The Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria has run a coaching program for professors teaching across all their programs for the past 10 years. An exercise that started as a twice-yearly opportunity for faculty members to pair up and gain an outside perspective on their teaching has grown into a program fully integrated with tenure and promotion. While the peer coaching program started as a faculty support tool for new faculty and those interested in increasing their student review scores, the current program provides required documentation for tenure and promotion applications. This chapter will discuss how the program started and evolved and will include successes such as more enriched faculty relationships and shared teaching activities as well as drawbacks such as the difficulty faculty have in finding time to make structural changes to their courses and their teaching methods. The fair process coaching model is introduced as a way to run the peer coaching program. Made up of five stages: engaging, exploring, explaining, executing, and evaluating, the model leads coaches through a process that is intended to be honest, unbiased, and objective. Fair process coaching has led to greater faculty participation and more commitment to making the changes recommended by peers. Data collected from participants demonstrates the benefits of a peer coaching program and the opportunities to extend it even further. Finally, a “how to” module for schools that want to embrace faculty peer-to-peer coaching is included in the chapter.