Teaching Culture Survey 2019

TU Delft take-aways

In 2019  a Teaching Cultures Survey was dispersed amongst TU Delft lecturers to gather their views about the status of support for university teaching at TU Delft. 29% of our lecturers have responded. The outcomes are taken very seriously at TU Delft as part of the professional development of teaching career paths. The findings have been compared with peer universities around the world, amongst them also the 4TU in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands the Teaching Cultures Survey was introduced and sponsored by 4TU.Centre for Engineering Education.

Results
Over 1000 members of the TU Delft academic community took part in the survey, ranging in seniority from PhD students to senior university management. The results show that survey participants were positive about TU Delft’s support for university teaching but would like to see greater recognition of teaching within the academic career in appraisal and promotion. Here are five interesting findings:

1. Professional development: the majority of staff values pedagogical training and development as a regular part of one’s job (86%). TU delft provides a supportive learning environment opportunity to develop and improve teaching practices (63%);
2. Teaching is undervalued: over 50% feels that teaching is a career limiting path, and only 25% feels teaching provides a positive impact on career progression;
3. Prioritizing teaching excellence: almost 63% of staff would like university teaching to be very important in promotion opportunities. The support is largest among university leadership;
4. Commitment to rewarding teaching excellence: academic staff feels there is a low commitment towards rewarding teaching excellence; 16%. Yet the more senior levels perceive this commitment as being very high (more than 80%) across departmental, faculty and institutional leadership; 
5. Teaching deserves more attention in the annual appraisal: only 22% stated substantial interest was shown for teaching activities during the annual appraisal.

More information
The Teaching Cultures Survey was developed by a global partnership to explore and track the culture and status of teaching in universities. It stems from the Teaching Excellence Framework by Ruth Graham, an open-access career framework to help universities evaluate and reward the teaching achievements of their academic staff.