How to improve undergraduate teaching

At present, undergraduate teaching at Canada's research universities is not highly respected by administrators. Nevertheless, universities are being forced to pay more attention to the quality of their undergraduate teaching by students. While most universities use teaching evaluations, the focus of the evaluations is to provide information to professors about their own teaching and to help students select courses. Surprisingly, teaching evaluations are not used systematically to improve the quality of teaching. This backgrounder outlines a performance-based reward system designed to improve undergraduate teaching, where departments would be rewarded based on an average of all teaching performances within the department.