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Regular conversations about your teaching with colleagues is one of the best ways to enhance your work as an educator.
Peer dialogue can help you to identify and share best practice, support your colleagues, reflect on your experience, and gather evidence about the quality of your teaching.
What you need to know
Every member of staff with significant teaching responsibilities (including PGTAs and staff with honorary appointments) needs to engage with UCL’s Peer Dialogue scheme at least once a year. Peer Dialogue is normally organised by your department, though they may leave the choice of partner and topic entirely to you.
Record your engagement on a Peer Dialogue Capture Survey, and keep a copy for your own records.
On this page
What is Peer Dialogue?
Peer Dialogue at UCL is…
a framework for two-way conversations rather than a one-way observation, although observation may take place.
inclusive: everyone is expected to apply the process fairly to all colleagues regardless of title, role, length of service, type of contract, or any other characteristic.
a vital source of feedback for anyone involved in teaching, supervision, and assessment.
regular: everyone who teaches at UCL should engage with Peer Dialogue at least once a year.
relevant: it provides real-time feedback on the academic quality of your education practice.
supportive: the different options help you collect different kinds of evidence about the quality of your work and can bolster your claims about impact and good practice.
Peer Dialogue sits alongside Continuous Module Dialogue and ChangeMakers Dialogue as a means for educators to gain important information about their teaching. All these processes are designed to help you identify good practice and address problems that are within your control.
How to take part
Peer dialogue often focuses on a teaching ‘event’ such as a lecture, but it isn’t restricted to live teaching. You are welcome to discuss other key fields of activity such as:
Option A – Individual dialogue with a colleague
You work with a colleague to review, discuss and reflect on an aspect of your teaching.
This option is strongly recommended for departments with low NSS scores in ‘Teaching Quality’ and departments approaching an IQR. Here are the steps you might take to complete the process.
1. Choose a peer.
This should be someone of equal standing, ensuring you can listen to one another and speak freely and constructively. (For guidance about choosing a peer, see the FAQs below).
2. Brief your peer.
- Identify what you’d like them to review and explain why this issue matters to you. This isn’t easy but it makes you reflect on your teaching and helps your colleague understand what you’re looking for.
- Agree how the review will work practically and troubleshoot logistical matters. (For further guidance about selecting a topic, see the FAQs below).
3. Do the review.
The reviewer gathers data and notes points for discussion, based on what you both agreed earlier. How you approach the review will depend largely on the topic you have chosen.
4. Dialogue with your peer.
As the name suggests, this is the important part of the process. The reviewer should present their observations and raise some questions which can serve as the basis for a discussion. (For more guidance about this part of the Peer Dialogue process, see the Constructive Conversations toolkit).
5. Complete the Peer Dialogue Capture Survey.
The Peer Dialogue Capture Survey provides your department with a record and brief details about the process and what you covered, and with whom. You should also save a copy for your own records. The Capture Survey invites you to identify:
- what you covered
- what worked well, and what didn’t
- what action will be taken in light of the review
- what (if any) are the wider implications
- who else needs to know about this.
Option B: Group dialogues around curriculum and assessment
Colleagues work in groups to identify and improve an area of pvractice. This can be approached in two different ways:
1. Participate in a centrally-organised process that addresses a pre-identified topic.
This group dialogue will typically be programme or department-wide, and the group will probably be convened solely for the Peer Dialogue activity. It may focus on piloting an intervention or evaluating an area of practice.
- Take special care to give colleagues the chance to share their views, and make sure you feed back the Dialogue outcomes to participating colleagues. A summary based on what you write for the Peer Dialogue Departmental Summary may be sufficient.
- Departments and programmes organising this type of group dialogue can use the Researching your Teaching Practice Teaching Toolkit to plan their intervention.
2. Bring your own questions and topics to an existing discussion group.
Participants discuss various topics and offer different perspectives from their own experiences. The group may be centrally organised but attendance and participation is likely to be voluntary and there will be a high degree of collective ownership.
- Consider how individuals can capture their engagement and the ways they have supported others. Informal dialogue can be effective but it’s easy to lose track of the impact and colleagues may struggle to get the credit they rightly deserve for supporting others.
- This option may be a good way to engage senior colleagues, whose greater experience means they have a great deal to offer in a conversation where problems and questions are shared, and answers are sought.
Option C: Reflective dialogue
Using the questions below, tell a colleague about a recent teaching-related incident that has stayed in your mind and consider what you can learn from it. The incident can be good or bad, large or small, and it may be something that you alone noticed.
‘Analysing critical incidents can create a greater level of self-awareness and help us reevaluate established routines and procedures’ (Richards and Farrell, 2005).
- Can you describe what happened? Include details of the event itself, what led up to it and what followed.
- How did you feel about it?
- Why do you think it happened this way? Are there alternative explanations? (For example, would other people see the event in the same way?)
- What does the event (or your response) reveal about your own thinking and actions?
- Are there actions you need to take as a result? Has this dialogue led to insights that you need to share with others?
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Follow up actions
You will be sent a short Peer Dialogue Capture Survey by your ADE (aka head of teaching). Please fill this in and send it back to them to let them know you've completed your Peer Dialogue.
Don’t forget to save (duplicate) a copy of the Capture Survey for your own records. Over time you can collect evidence about your teaching conversations, which you can use to support claims about your development in a Fellowship case study or in academic promotion.
Remember to send a copy of the completed Capture Survey to the colleague(s) who supported you. It can be valuable evidence about how they have contributed to your development, and hopefully they will do the same for you too!
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Frequently asked questions
Must I choose someone from my discipline?
No! It can be helpful to choose someone who’s less familiar with your subject. A close colleague may take too much for granted and fail to identify good practice, and they are less likely to offer new ideas.
What can we talk about?
Anything that matters to you. A choice with clear reasons will lead to outcomes with clear relevance. But if you are stuck for ideas, student feedback from Continuous Module Dialogue is a good starting point. Using Continuous Module Dialogue [insert hyperlink] as the springboard for Peer Dialogue provides you with the opportunity to rigorously address a problem and close the loop in a short space of time.
Is there a basic checklist for good teaching?
The Office for Students’ definition of a high-quality academic experience makes a good basic checklist:
- Are the students taught up to date content?
- Does the teaching provide appropriate educational challenge for the students?
- Is there an appropriate balance and order between breadth and depth of content?
- Is there an appropriate balance between delivery methods, and between directed and independent study?
- Does the teaching help the students develop relevant skills?
If the Peer Dialogue entails observing a ‘live’ teaching situation, do I need to tell my students?
It is a good idea to let students know, but it is fine to offer a general statement such as: ‘my colleague and I are collaborating on a teaching project’.
Additional Resources
- Guidance for Academic Directors of Education
Peer Dialogue at UCL is a localised process. Academic Directors of Education are responsible for ensuring Peer Dialogue takes place every year in their department.
As in previous years, your responsibilities include:
- notifying colleagues they have to do it
- agreeing with your DTC how it will operate in your department
- receiving reports that it has been done
- sharing updates with DTC and Student Partnership Committee
- sending data to your Faculty Education Committee using a Peer Dialogue Department Summary Form.
Please include a link to the Peer Dialogue Capture Survey in the email. Details about how you should duplicate and distribute the Capture Survey are given on the form itself.
We appreciate that using the Survey may take longer than the process you have used in the past. We are encouraging staff to use a common process. It may mean more work at first, but will simplify the administration in the long run and make handovers easier.
In the next drop-down tab 'Email template for Academic Directors of Education' we have written some text you can use when you email colleagues to let them know that they need to do Peer Dialogue.
- Email template for Academic Directors of Education
Below is some text you may use in your communications with staff in your department.
To all staff who teach in the department:
UCL asks every member of staff with teaching responsibilities (including PGTAs and staff with honorary appointments) to engage with the UCL Peer Dialogue scheme at least once a year. The scheme offers three different options for what you do: it doesn’t have to be live observation.
There are some advantages to working with colleagues who know your subject in detail, but you are more likely to gain fresh perspectives if you work with colleagues who you know less well and who may come from different backgrounds to you. You are therefore strongly recommended to vary which options you choose and the people you work with.
When you have completed your dialogue, you must fill out the short Peer Dialogue Capture Survey. This will come to me and will help me keep track of completion rates and bring any good practice to my attention. You can find the link to the Capture Survey for [insert department name] here [insert link here].
Please remember that Peer Dialogue at UCL is:
- a framework for two-way conversations rather than just an observation, although observation may take place.
- inclusive: everyone is expected to apply the process fairly to all colleagues regardless of title, role, length of service, type of contract, or any other characteristic.
- a vital source of feedback for anyone involved in teaching, supervision, and assessment.
- regular: everyone who teaches at UCL should engage with Peer Dialogue at least once a year.
- relevant, because it provides real-time feedback on the academic quality of your education practice, and you are encouraged to use it proactively with this in mind.
- supportive: the different options help you collect different kinds of evidence about the quality of your work and can bolster your claims about impact and good practice.
Yours sincerely,
- Constructive conversations to improve teaching
This toolkit offers a simple framework to help you discuss your teaching with your colleagues in a Peer Dialogue context, and with your students in a Continuous Module Dialogue context.
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