Peer development and observation have a poor reputation in higher education, often experienced as a form of surveillance, micro-management, or top-down operational process rather than developmental practice.
What often begins as enhancement can quietly end in compliance. Somewhere along the way, a developmental conversation emerges, a rating is assigned, or a managerial checkpoint is completed. When this happens we, as a sector, lose something more valuable than a tick in a professional development review (PDR) system. We lose trust.
Compassion in higher education is often discussed in the context of students, for instance, regarding compassionate pedagogy and inclusive assessment. But what about for academics and other university staff?
If we view compassion not simply as kindness, or sympathetic pity, but at its core, the acknowledgement of struggle combined with the commitment to respond constructively, then peer development and observation become a truly compassionate act.
Teaching involves sustained emotional and intellectual labour. Colleagues are navigating large cohorts, large marking loads, AI disruption, metric pressures, student wellbeing complexities, widening participation commitments, and intensifying workload.
To ask colleagues to open their classrooms to one another requires psychological safety and trust, and designing processes that acknowledge vulnerability, but hold it safely.
Changing the dynamic
Across the sector, peer development and observation is frequently integrated within quality assurance systems. Even when described as developmental, it can feel evaluative.
When observation is experienced as upward reporting, practice checking, and informal line management or monitoring, then colleagues may teach to be safe rather than to be experimental.
Compassionate peer development and observation shift this dynamic. It is non-judgemental, owned by participants involved in the process, non-graded, dialogic rather than diagnostic, and a peer-led and reciprocal process.
The focus moves from “how did you perform?” to “what are you trying to explore or try out?” This is a very different question.
When designed well, peer development and observation fosters communities of practice, where colleagues can learn with and from one another over time.
As institutions reconsider how they support teaching enhancement in a climate of constraint and pressure, reclaiming peer development and observation as a compassionate, community-building practice is both empowering and strategically necessary.
When the process is viewed as developmental rather than managerial, colleagues describe feeling:
- less isolated in their challenges
- more intellectually connected with others
- more willing to admit what did not work and why
- more open to innovation and experimentation
- engaged in a reciprocal learning experience
- reflective and introspective in their approach to teaching
- supported through the ongoing enhancement of their professional practice
This is reflexive practice. And reflexivity requires compassion – for oneself and for others, enabling space to say “I am not sure this assessment landed as I intended,” or “this semester’s cohort was different – how will I approach the next semester?”
Without compassion embedded structurally into the process, those conversations simply do not happen.
Peer development and observation should not be a managerial instrument – but nor should it be informal or unsupported. The most sustainable approach is one sitting along continuing professional development (CPD) and PDR structures, which enable colleagues to reflect on their own learning and areas they wish to explore further based on peer (not top-down) reflection. In this way, the process is both recognised as valuable, self and peer driven.
It becomes expected but not inspected, supported but not scrutinised, recorded but not reported upward for evaluation. Growth then becomes relational.
Why this matters now
Higher education is navigating continued instability. In such volatile conditions, isolation can deepen. If we want university teaching to remain innovative and future ready, then we need environments that enable educators to think together without fear.
Peer development and observation, when grounded in compassion, becomes a mechanism for collective resilience, a site of distributed leadership approaches, a crucial space for critical but safe pedagogic inquiry, and a space for belonging. It becomes community infrastructure.
Care, like compassion, is often misunderstood as softness. In reality, it is structural design.
A compassionate peer development and observation model:
- clarifies boundaries
- protects confidentiality in that peers’ report on their learning and areas they wish to explore further
- resists grading and scoring
- centres reflexivity
- encourages dialogue.
This is not about lowering standards. It is about the quality of professional dialogue and enquiry.
Institutions face a choice. Peer development and observation can be a compliance process – a quality assurance tool or a line in a spreadsheet marked as completed. Or it can become a compassionate community practice, a mechanism for reflexive scholarship, and a place where educators can create spaces of belonging.
The difference lies not in policy, but in how power is distributed and whether compassion is embedded structurally rather than rhetorically.
If we expect educators to extend compassion to students, we must then design systems that extend it to them first.
