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Navigating Your First Nursing Faculty Evaluation: What to Expect and How to Prepare
The email arrives in your inbox explaining your first faculty evaluation is coming up. It might be described as a peer review of your teaching, an annual performance review, or the beginning of your tenure review process. Whatever the form, your feelings may be a mixture of anxiety, confusion, and the vague sense that you're about to be judged by people who have a lot more professional experience in teaching.
Don’t let that thinking derail you. Faculty evaluations are less about judgment and more about documentation (just like in nursing!). Once you understand that distinction, the whole process becomes a lot more manageable. This post will walk you through what typically goes into a faculty evaluation, what the reviewers are actually looking for, and how to write about yourself honestly without feeling like you're either bragging or throwing yourself under the bus.
What a Faculty Evaluation Actually Is (and Isn't)
First, a faculty evaluation is not a performance improvement plan. It's not HR flagging you for problems. In most institutions, it's a structured, recurring process that you’ll often complete annually (or every 2-3 years depending on your contract). It is designed to document your work across teaching, scholarship, and service which form the backbone of nearly everything important you'll be assessed on.
What the evaluation isn't is a surprise quiz. The criteria should be available to you well in advance, usually in your faculty handbook or department bylaws. If you haven't read those documents yet, that's your first homework assignment before moving forward. Understanding the specific weights your institution places on areas of teaching, scholarship, and service will help you calibrate how much time and energy to invest in each section of your self-evaluation. I highly recommend having a meeting with your program director or department chairperson to review the specific requirements of your institution before you try to write your evaluation completely on your own.
The Core Components: What Should Be in the Evaluation
Whether you're submitting materials for a peer review or preparing a full dossier for an annual review, most faculty evaluations cover the same core territory.
Teaching
This is typically the largest section for faculty at teaching-focused institutions, and a significant one even at R1 universities with very high research requirements. What belongs here isn't just a list of courses but rather evidence of your teaching effectiveness and your intentionality as an educator.
Include the courses you taught (including format), with enrollment numbers and whether they were new preparations. Note any curriculum development you did like revised syllabi, new assignments, or redesigned assessments / exams. Include your student evaluation scores if they are available, but don't let the numbers speak entirely for themselves. Context matters, and reviewers will know that student evaluation of teaching and effectiveness are imperfect instruments.
You should also document anything you did to improve your teaching. Did you attend any workshops, consult with your center for teaching and learning, or engage with pedagogical literature? This signals that you're a reflective practitioner, not someone who just shows up and repeats the same lecture year after year.
Scholarship
What counts here varies enormously by discipline and institution. At some schools, a peer-reviewed article is the gold standard. At others, activities such as a policy report, writing a book chapter, or presenting at a conference carries equal weight. Know your context.
Next, make sure you document everything. This is where I personally need to improve my workflow. Keep a running list somewhere on publications (accepted, in press, and under review), conference presentations, grants applied for and received, invited talks, digital projects, and any public-facing scholarship. A paper under review is still evidence of active scholarly productivity. A conference presentation represents intellectual engagement with your field even if it hasn't yet turned into a publication.
Don't omit things because they feel minor. Nursing faculty might feel like smaller, less recognized acts of scholarship don’t count. Don’t fall prey to imposter syndrome, and document all the amazing things you’ve contributed to!
Service
Service is the section most junior faculty under-document, partly because it accumulates invisibly. You said yes to the search committee. You advised the student organization. You attended every department meeting and contributed to curriculum discussions. Write it down. It counts and it’s important!
Distinguish between departmental service, institutional service, and service to your discipline (reviewing for professional practice journals, serving on conference program committees, etc.). Don't undersell community engagement either. While you can’t use personal service like being the organ-player at your church or a board-approved chaperone at your child’s school, if your scholarly work intersects with public-facing or community-based work, it can count. For example, if you worked with a local newspaper on a medical series or did an in-service at a public health clinic can both count as service (and possibly even scholarship).
One important note: if you are deliberately keeping service light on the advice of your mentor — that’s okay. You should acknowledge the reason, such as focusing on teaching and scholarship as a junior faculty, and then identifying some areas you’d like to explore in the future.
The Self-Evaluation: Writing About Yourself Without It Feeling Weird
This is the part most faculty dread. Suddenly you're being asked to write several pages explaining why you're doing a good job, and it feels somewhere between uncomfortable and vaguely dishonest.
Let's reframe it.
A self-evaluation is not a brag sheet. It is a narrative that helps reviewers who don't sit in your classroom, read your drafts, or attend your committee meetings understand the scope and significance of your work. You are the only person who can provide that context. If you don't provide it, the committee works only from the surface without understanding the why or the how behind any of it.
Writing About Your Strengths
The most useful frame for writing about strengths is specificity over assertion. Don't write "I am a dedicated teacher." Write about the specific pedagogical decision you made and why you made it. "
"After noticing that students in my XYZ course consistently struggled with the transition from reading research to applying it to clinical practice, I redesigned the third module around a scaffolded research proposal assignment that gives students low- stakes practice before the final project. Student performance on the final project improved, and several students mentioned in their evaluations that this was the first time they felt confident reading empirical articles."
That's describing your work effectively without coming across as bragging about it.
The same principle applies to scholarship. Don't say "my research is making an important contribution." Describe what gap it addresses, what you found, and what it means for your professional practice.
If you’re genuinely unsure about whether something rises to the level of "strength," ask yourself: would a fellow colleague be glad to know this? Would it help them see your work more fully? If yes, include it.
Writing About Your Weaknesses
Some faculty use the weaknesses section to flagellate themselves in ways that make reviewers genuinely worried. Others write something so vague and perfunctory like, "I sometimes take on too much," that it signals nothing except discomfort with the exercise of self-evaluation.
The goal is an honest, forward-looking reflection. You should name the area of growth to pursue, and then describe what you're doing about it.
For example:
"My publication pace slowed this year due to the demands of two new course preparations. I've spoken with my department chair about protecting at least one writing morning per week next semester, and I've set a concrete goal of submitting a revised version of my second article by March."
This approach works because it shows that you know what happened and why and that you have a plan. Reviewers are not looking for perfection. They are looking for evidence that you understand your own professional development and are actively engaged in it.
A Few Practical Tips Before You Submit
Start gathering materials early. The biggest mistake new faculty make is waiting until the week before the deadline to reconstruct a year of professional activity from memory. Keep a running document where you log publications, service commitments, teaching innovations, and professional development throughout the year. Your future self will be grateful.
Read previous evaluations in your department if you can. Ask your mentor or a trusted colleague if they'd share a redacted version of their own materials, or ask if there are departmental examples available. Tone and length expectations vary widely, and seeing what a successful evaluation looks like in your specific context is enormously helpful.
Have someone read your self-evaluation before you submit it. This can be helpful for someone to flag places where you're either underselling significant work or where the narrative is unclear to someone who wasn't in the room. A mentor, a peer, or a colleague from a different department can all serve this function.
Remember the audience. Your self-evaluation may be read by people outside your department. Don't assume reviewers know which of your courses is high stakes, which journal in your field is most prestigious, or what a particular service role actually involves.
The Bigger Picture
Your first faculty evaluation can feel like a high-stakes judgment, but its more useful function is as a tool for professional self-understanding. Done honestly, it gives you a clear-eyed picture of where you are, what you've built in a year, and where you want to put your energy next. The discomfort of writing about yourself clearly and directly is real, but it's also a skill that gets easier with practice.
Jacklyn DelPrete, EdD, CRNP, FNP-C is a family nurse practitioner, full-time graduate nursing faculty member, and founder of The Elevated NP. Questions or topics you'd like covered? Reach out at elevatednpteam@gmail.com.
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