Premios docentes con impacto: más allá del reconocimiento a la excelencia

Teaching awards are dynamic instruments for developing institutional initiatives and promoting quality in teaching. In Spain, their trajectory has less history and little has been published on the subject. However, in Central Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, awards have been part of higher education for several decades. After years of granting awards, institutions want to know if they are changing the perception of the importance of university teaching and how they should be designed so that, in addition to recognizing and honoring teaching excellence, they also promote the systematic development of a learning culture within the organization, as well as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). In this article, we review the literature on excellence initiatives in teaching and specifically on teaching excellence awards; we show the conceptions of excellence underlying the awards and the advantages and challenges derived from their implementation. There is evidence that teaching awards that not only recognize an exemplary teaching career but also promote the development of transformative projects have a greater impact not only on individual teaching development but also on collective and institutional development. An example shown is the Teaching Development Award of the Zurich University of Teacher Education. Finally, some recommendations for their implementation are presented.