Portuguese universities are concerned with the quality of teaching but few activities are actually put in practice by institutions or in a micro level by lecturers themselves. Externals evaluations of courses take place in institutions every three or four years but these evaluations do not go deep in exploring the teaching effectiveness. Issues such as pedagogy have turned to be a 'myth' difficult to deal with by some engineering and science staff. Thus, research developed by Tavares, Brezezinski & Huet Silva (2002) revealed the concern of Engineering and Science academics in pedagogical issues and its relevance for improving the students' achievement and motivation at the University of Aveiro. Therefore, it is important to work with faculty regarding the improvement of quality in teaching and learning. Faculty seminars, workshops and colloquia about teaching are still effective practices for encouraging interaction and collaboration among faculty regarding teaching (Paulsen & Feldman, Isabel Huet e Silva Jose Tavares University of 1995) but other methods are also explored in the literature, such as team teaching (Baldwin and Austin, 1995), Collegial coaching (Keig & Waggoner, 1994) and students' evaluation questionnaires (Marsh, 1982, 1984). Within this scope, this study aims to analyse the views of a group of engineering academic staff regarding the effect that each method has on improving the overall quality of teaching at the University of Aveiro, to discuss what makes good professionals more efficient and motivated and also to discuss the future of institutional evaluations of teaching quality. For a better understanding of the political measures adopted by the institution we also interviewed an active member of the evaluation committee for the teaching quality at the university. Content analysis of the interviews reveals a strong emphasis on the need to attribute more importance to teaching in terms of career progression. The philosophy underneath some of the teachers' lack of motivation to improve or developing better teaching strategies is that the effort in trying to make teaching more efficient is not in fact rewarded by academia. This type of reward would be the strongest incentive for lecturers, but not the only one. A systemic evaluation of teaching practice either developed by peers, students or external audits would certainly make a move towards a better effort in improving teaching. In parallel to the external audits the University of Aveiro created in 2003 a committee to establish points of action for promoting the overall quality of teaching and learning. The work paper is still in progress but the main ideas will focus in actions connected to pedagogical and administrative issues.