How best to evaluate clinician-educators and teachers for promotion?

The challenge of how best to evaluate educational scholars (and specifically, clinician-educators) and teachers for promotion continues to confront academia. While the work of educational scholars and teachers often overlaps, the terms for justifying their promotion differ substantially. In each case, the author maintains that evaluation should be oriented to evidence of the impact of their work. Educational scholars can be assessed mainly by objective impact, whereas the evidence for the impact of teachers should include profound, subjective effects on individual learners. For example, for clinician-educators engaged in scholarly work, the impact of that work can be identified in terms of changes in educational methods, career commitments, and practices (all intermediate outcomes), and even health outcomes. For teachers, in addition to customary criteria such as critical thinking, depth of knowledge, communication ability, and personal engagement, learners can be asked about the deep influence of these teachers. The author states his case for these principles, and also presents an innovative tool, the "impact map," as a way of graphically portraying the track record of an individual clinician-educator. Such maps are more vivid than narrative testimonials in organizing and displaying evidence of impact over time. This tool, combined with the author's other suggestions to assist the promotion process for educators and teachers, is aimed at fostering a greater emphasis on outcomes in assessing both clinician-educators and teachers to achieve greater rigor and fairness.