Documenting Teaching Excellence
Promoting the university’s vital mission
Karin deJonge-Kannan, PhD, & Travis N Thurston, PhD
Discover a more meaningful approach to showcasing your teaching with Documenting Teaching Excellence, an open-access guide for instructors across disciplines, roles, and career stages. Grounded in real-world examples and diverse institutional contexts, this volume positions documenting teaching not as a box-checking exercise, but as a creative, reflective, and collaborative act. Through practical strategies and conceptual frameworks, contributors demonstrate how instructors can curate evidence of their impact, transform experience into compelling narratives, and align their work with broader institutional missions. Emphasizing that teaching excellence is cultivated through community, reflection, and continuous growth, this book invites readers to rethink how teaching is understood, shared, and valued in higher education.
Table of Contents
Together, these tools empower instructors to craft a powerful narrative that tells the story of their teaching excellence journey for annual review, tenure and promotion, and ultimately continued professional growth.
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Recommended APA Citation
deJonge-Kannan K. & Thurston, T.N. (Eds.) (2025). Documenting teaching excellence Promoting the university’s vital mission. Utah State University. https://doi.org/10.26077/a115-0450
As higher education faces greater scrutiny than ever, a reset in how we conceptualize excellence in teaching is warranted. The belief that effective teaching is, or even could be, an individual enterprise limits student learning... [and] reinforces perceptions that higher education has lost its value.
About Empower Teaching Open-Access Series
The Empower Teaching Open-Access Book Series features a variety of peer-reviewed books focused broadly on the multi-disciplinary work of teaching in higher education. Books in the series align with the mission of the Center for Empowering Teaching Excellence (ETE) to bolster the culture of teaching excellence for students, staff, faculty and administrators. The books in this series share insightful and innovative perspectives on teaching and learning, and through a partnership with USU Libraries the books are offered in an online and open-access format to amplify the voices of authors and contributors in the series.