Faculty evaluation as a means of faculty development.

Although there is little evidence that evaluation actually helps improve teaching, some conditions increase the likelihood of evaluation leading to improvement, including a combination of student ratings with educational consultation, comparison of student ratings to self-ratings, feedback early enough to provide time for improvement, and linkage of faculty development to the promotion-retention-tenure process. These conditions were built into a family practice faculty development program. The faculty development program was carried out in steps analogous to a medical model with which faculty already were familiar. An educational consultant took an instructor's teaching "history" and conducted a "physical examination" of his teaching. The evaluator collected "laboratory" data regarding the instructor's teaching and made a "diagnosis." He provided "treatment" in terms of educational consultation and "assessed" the changes in the instructor's teaching. A repetition of the data collection and consultative process demonstrated improvement in clinical teaching, particularly with regard to the skill of leading a collaborative group discussion during resident teaching rounds.