Assessing and Improving Your Teaching E-Book

Phyllis Blumberg

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 482

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In order to make appropriate changes to improve your teaching and your students' learning, first you need to know how you're teaching now. Figure it out for yourself and invigorate your teaching on your own terms! This practical evidence-based guide promotes excellence in teaching and improved student learning through self-reflection and self-assessment of one's teaching. Phyllis Blumberg starts by reviewing the current approaches to instructor evaluation and describes their inadequacies. She then presents a new model of assessing teaching that builds upon a broader base of evidence and sources of support. This new model leads to self-assessment rubrics, which are available for download, and the book will guide you in how to use them. The book includes case studies of completed critical reflection rubrics from a variety of disciplines, including the performing and visual arts and the hard sciences, to show how they can be used in different ways and how to explore the richness of the data you'll uncover.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

The Author

Chapter 1: Growing Your Teaching Effectiveness

The Goal: Promoting Excellent Teaching

Better Teaching throughout Your Career

Effective Strategies That Promote Better Teaching

Tactics for Better Teaching through Assessment

Informative and Constructive Assessment Model for Better Teaching

Rubrics as Self-Assessment Tools

Summary

Part 1: A Teaching Model That Promotes Better Learning

Chapter 2: Beliefs Leading to Better Teaching

Effective Teaching

Misconceptions and Accurate Beliefs about Teaching

Beliefs about Teaching and Their Corollary Implications for Better Teaching

Suggestions for Better Teaching Coming from This Chapter

Chapter 3: Essential Aspects of Effective Teaching

Structure for Teaching and Learning

Instructional Design Responsibilities

Assessment of Learning Outcomes

Teaching in Experiential Settings

Suggestions for Better Teaching Coming from This Chapter

Chapter 4: Documenting Critical Self-Reflection of Teaching

Reflection

Critical Review

Documentation

Integration of Reflection, Critical Review, and Documentation

Summary of Suggestions for Better Teaching Coming from This Chapter

Chapter 5: Evidence-Based Approaches to Enhance Teaching

Evidence-Based Teaching as a Developmental Process

Integrated Instructional Techniques That Are Evidence-Based, Best Practices

Transformative Results from Evidence-Based Teaching

Suggestions for Better Teaching Coming from This Chapter

Chapter 6: Finding and Using Literature to Promote Better Teaching

Sources about Teaching in Higher Education

How to Find Supporting Evidence

Suggestions for Using Literature to Promote Better Teaching

Part 2: A Model to Assess Teaching to Promote Better Learning

Chapter 7: Principles of Assessing Teaching

Beliefs about Teaching and Their Implications for Assessment of Teaching

Processes for Assessing Teaching

Summary of the Recommended Principles about Assessing Teaching

Suggestions for Using Recommended Principles of Assessment to Promote Teaching Growth Coming from This Chapter

Chapter 8: Model for Assessing Teaching

Assessment Principles

Informative and Constructive Assessment Model for Better Teaching

Suggestions for Self-Assessment to Promote Teaching Growth Coming from This Chapter

Part 3: Self-Assessment Rubrics

Chapter 9: How to Assess Teaching Using Rubrics Based on the Assessment Model

What Rubrics Are

The Rubric Format

Two Examples of Self-Assessments Using the Rubrics

Chapter Summary

Chapter 10: What These Rubrics Assess, and How That Improves Teaching

Self-Assessment Criteria

Rubric Sets Are Teaching Context Specific

Using the Self-Assessment Rubrics Effectively

Chapter Summary

How to Use the Rubrics Effectively

Cases Showing Effective Uses for the Rubrics

Case 1: How a Beginning Assistant Professor Used Rubrics to Plan and Track Her Personal Faculty Development

Case 2: How a Faculty Developer Used the Rubrics with a Pretenure Instructor to Facilitate Improvement

Case 3: How an Experienced Professor Used the Rubrics to Document Her Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Case 4: How a Pretenured Professor Used the Rubrics to Assess His Mentoring Undergraduate and Graduate Students in Research

Case 5: How an Experienced Clinical Professor Used the Rubrics to Assess His Changed Roles While Precepting or Supervising Students in Hospital Settings

Comparisons among the Cases

References

Appendix: Rubrics for Self-Assessment of Teaching: Tools for Improving Different Types of Teaching

Index

Cover design by Michael Cook

Cover image: © li jingwang/istockphoto

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blumberg, Phyllis, date

Assessing and improving your teaching : strategies and rubrics for faculty growth and student learning / Phyllis Blumberg. — First edition.

pages cm. — (Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-27548-1 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-118-41953-3 (ebk.) — ISBN 978-1-118-42134-5 (ebk.)

1. Reflective teaching. 2. College teaching. I. Title.

LB1025.3.B595 2013

371.102—dc23

2013013534

Dedicated with love to my sons,

Adam, Barry, and Noah Kosherick

This book includes Professional content that can be accessed from our Web site when you register at www.josseybass.com/go/Blumberg using the password josseybasshighered.

Preface

THE ORIGIN FOR THIS BOOK came from a department chair’s request. He asked me for a comprehensive teaching assessment instrument that could objectively measure teaching effectiveness that he could also use to help his faculty to improve. His professors were largely summarizing student course evaluations, and that did not give enough information. I checked the literature and was not able to find one that fit his needs. Thus began my quest for a better model to assess teaching. Since I see myself as a faculty coach and not a judge, I wanted the model to focus on improvement, not high-stakes decisions. Current methods of evaluating teaching do not generate the data needed to make good choices about how to teach more effectively. This book addresses that need. It emerged from my faculty development experiences and my convictions about what is good teaching.

This book is intended for all teachers in higher education, including those who teach in experiential settings. It offers suggestions for teachers at all stages of their careers. The overarching purpose of this book is to promote teaching excellence. Effective teaching promotes both deep and intentional learning.

This book describes a comprehensive plan for teacher development. It’s not something that should be done all at once, and it is not a quick fix for struggling instructors. This is a systematic process for career-long development of teaching effectiveness. I propose a hierarchical development and self-assessment model, but it is not necessary to do all of the steps; doing even one step helps instructors teach more effectively. In fact, making ongoing improvement may be more important than achieving excellence. The hierarchical model is based on essential principles in the literature on faculty development and cognitive sciences. The strength of this model places the locus of control with readers who want to improve rather than with external audiences who want to judge. Thus, this book deals with formative self-assessment rather than summative assessment.

The book begins by building the rationale for the assessment model and methods. It offers broad improvement strategies for career-long growth, describes a formative assessment model, and finally introduces self-assessment rubrics (see figure P1). Throughout, I offer many suggestions to increase student deep and intentional learning through better teaching. The cases describe how five professors improved their teaching. The appendix contains self-assessment rubrics.

FIGURE P.1 The Model of Better Teaching to Increase Learning Used throughout This Book

Part 1 describes a hierarchical approach to teaching better that integrates four well-supported, but previously separate, effective teaching strategies. An introduction and orientation to this approach is in chapter 1. Chapter 2 discusses misconceptions about teaching and recommends alternative ideas about teaching. Chapter 3 defines the essential aspects of teaching. Studying each of these aspects is the first effective teaching strategy. Chapter 4 discusses the role of critical self-reflection and the need for documentation of this reflection, the second effective teaching strategy. The third strategy for more effective teaching involves evidence-based decision making to guide practice and is the topic of chapter 5. Since many professors may not know the appropriate literature to support teaching, I devote chapter 6 to how to find such literature in your discipline and in general.

The last strategy is using self-assessment as a continuous improvement process. To assist in this process, I describe a constructive, self-assessment model in part 2 that assesses all of the essential aspects of teaching discussed in chapter 3. Chapter 7 describes principles of assessment to foster learning. Chapter 8 applies these principles to a new assessment model that fosters better teaching. Through critical self-assessment, evidence-based decision making, and rigorous data collection, instructors employ a broad-based and layered support for their teaching effectiveness.

This self-assessment model leads to a catalogue of critical reflection, self-assessment rubrics as I discuss in part 3. Chapters 9 and 10 describe how to understand and use the self-assessment rubrics, which assess many types of teaching and identify specific components of these types of teaching. The discussion shows the types of data that can be used to support claims of teaching quality and how the assessment standards provide suggestions for enhancement. This model and the resulting rubrics will change how you assess your teaching while raising the standard for what is effective teaching.

The five cases, which focus on faculty who have used the rubrics to assess their teaching, show the richness and variety of ways that teaching can promote better student learning. Reading these cases can show you how to improve your teaching and assess your effectiveness largely on your own, as these professors have done.

Acknowledgments

This book was possible only through the collaborative efforts of many people who helped me develop and refine my ideas, validated the rubrics, edited drafts, and offered suggestions for improvement. I offer them my sincere gratitude. Maryellen Weimer, my trusted friend and mentor, read many drafts of this book and offered insightful criticisms in the spirit of improvement.

People who collaborated on the development of the rubrics include faculty at the University of the Sciences, especially the Department of Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics: Linda Robinson, Annemarie Flanagan, Thomas O’Connor, Amy Jessop, Paula Kramer, Carlos Moreno, Thomas O’Connor, Steven Sheaffer, Elisabetta Fasella, Preston Moore, Cathy Poon, Fred Schaefer, Ruy Tchao, and Shanaz Tejani-Butt. Linda Nilson of Clemson University and Shirley Mier of Century College were especially helpful in formulating the rubrics. I also acknowledge the assistance of art faculty from other institutions who assisted in the development of the rubrics for the performing and visual arts, including Nicholas Morrison of Utah State University, Monica Ines Huerta of University of Michigan, Gail Rathbun of Indiana Purdue University at Fort Wayne, and Martin Springborg of Academy of Art University.

James Yarrish crafted the rubrics template.

Paul Halpern, Lia Vas, Susan Wainwright, Kay Scanlon, Gregory Theilman, Madhu Mahalingam, Roger Ideishi, Therese Johnston, Elizabeth Amy Janke, Bo Sun, Lindsay Curtin, Carol Maritz, Amy Jessop, Ruth Schemm, Shanaz Tejani-Butt, Pamalyn Kearney, Laura Pontiggia, Salar Alsardary, Alice Levy, and Maria Brown participated in the rubrics validation study. Linda Robison, a psychometrician who worked with me consistently throughout the development of the rubrics, also took the data submitted by these professors and completed rubrics on them for the validity study.

Many people offered wonderful advice on the wording and organization of the book, especially Maryellen Weimer, David Brightman, and Halley Sutton of Jossey-Bass, the two external reviewers, and the production staff at Jossey-Bass, Susan Geraghty and copyeditor Bev Miller. My sister, Ella Singer, proofread the final drafts and corrected the smallest mistakes that I overlooked. I also want to acknowledge the many instructors who are named throughout the book who willingly shared examples of their teaching reflections and self-assessments.

August 2013

Phyllis Blumberg

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

The Author

PHYLLIS BLUMBERG has dedicated her career to improving teaching in higher education and to increased learning. She has taught first-year college through graduate and medical students. She has been working with instructors in the health sciences and the sciences as a faculty developer for thirty years. Blumberg has worked with faculty at five universities in the United States and Canada on a one-to-one basis to help them change their teaching so that their students will learn more.

She is currently the director of the Teaching and Learning Center and professor of social sciences and education at the University of the Sciences. Faculty value teaching at this university and want to teach better. More than 80 percent of the instructors at her university voluntarily participate in at least one faculty development event or consult with Blumberg individually every year.

Blumberg is the author of more than fifty articles on active learning, learning-centered teaching, problem-based learning, and program evaluation, including a guidebook on how to implement learner-centered teaching, Developing Learner-Centered Teaching: A Practical Guide for Faculty (2009, Jossey-Bass). She is a frequent presenter at POD, the Teaching Professor, Lilly-East, and other higher education conferences. She has given workshops at numerous colleges and universities across around the world.

Blumberg earned her doctorate in educational and developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, Learning Research and Development Center, in 1976.

Chapter 1

Growing Your Teaching Effectiveness

An Overview

DOES THE FOLLOWING DESCRIPTION FIT YOU?

You want to know how you are teaching, so if need be, you can make appropriate changes that will improve your teaching and students’ learning. Like most other teachers, you start by looking at your most recent student evaluations and see that less than 40 percent of the students completed the online course evaluation. Is this a representative sample? Did more of the disgruntled group complete the evaluation than those who were satisfied? Did the really bright students who worked hard in the course evaluate it? Do the answers to the items on the survey instrument address those questions? Your summary scores on the quantitative questions indicate slightly above-average scores compared with other faculty in your department and college; however, the range on some of the questions is fairly large. Moreover, the comments do not offer any real insights. Several students say you are a nice person or a good teacher who treats students fairly. A few students remark that that the course was challenging. To students, “challenging” implies that the instructor made them work hard (Lauer, 2012). Is that a compliment or a complaint? One student did not like how you dress. A few felt the course would be better if it had been scheduled at a different time. What can you learn from feedback like this?

Feeling a little frustrated at the lack of concrete feedback from students, you look at the recent peer observations of your teaching (provided this feedback is available). The comments consistently say that your class was well organized, you know the material, and you maintain a good pace. Your peers note that your rapport with the students is good considering the size of the class, but they suggest that calling on students more by name might help. One suggests using a bit more humor. Another observed that most of the students were paying attention most of the time, but from time to time they got distracted, talking with each other and texting or checking Facebook. Other than trying to use student names, you did not learn much else from this feedback.

What to do now? Your department chair does not offer advice because she has not made classroom visits, so you decide to talk with an esteemed senior colleague in your department. He attributes his success to respecting students as individuals. But what does that mean, and, more pragmatic, how does a teacher show respect for students and with more than two hundred of them spread across three classes?

If you have concluded that the common practices for seeking information to help teachers become more effective does not work, I agree. Current methods of evaluating teaching do not generate the data needed to make good choices about what and how to change teaching. We urgently need new strategies and new tools to provide information for this process.

The Goal: Promoting Excellent Teaching

The overarching purpose of this book is to promote teaching excellence, specifically your teaching excellence. When students are learning and the educational experience is going well, both students and teachers are invigorated. This book identifies many ways in which you can gain insights that will foster better student learning. Learning can be defined in many ways. To clarify, in this book, I am using the term to mean deep and intentional learning. Deep learners gain understanding of the content as opposed to just memorizing it. They form many associations with the concepts and can recall the information and use it to solve problems in the future (Ramsden, 2003). When students purposefully gain knowledge and skills, and learning is not just an incidental outcome, they are intentional learners. Intentional learners spend more effort than what is needed to complete a task in a superficial way (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989). Intentional learning is the goal of all higher education, especially the general education curriculum according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2002). Effective teaching promotes both deep and intentional learning.

Many professors have not been trained how to teach. In graduate school, they learned the knowledge and skills of their disciplines and engaged in research. But they know little about how students learn generally or how they learn content. It is not surprising that some of these instructors are dissatisfied with the quality of their teaching. They aspire to be excellent teachers (Austin, Sorcinelli, & McDaniels, 2007) but discover that good teaching takes a lot of time—time that they may need to devote to do research. For professors who experience this stress, this book offers constructive ways to teach and how to improve it.

Are you hesitant about spending time developing your teaching skills? Given the pressures to conduct research, advise students, serve on committees, and respond to family responsibilities, you may think there is not enough time left to devote to developing your teaching. However, research shows that developing your teaching is an investment that pays off (Austin et al., 2007). This is an ongoing process, and you can devote a little time to teaching growth each month. In fact, small amounts of time continually are probably better than thinking you will focus on your teaching only during semester breaks.

After identifying ways to change how you teach, as suggested in this book, you may find that your faculty development or teaching and learning center are very helpful. These centers regularly offer programs that address specific aspects of teaching, and chances are good that you’ll meet other instructors concerned about improving their teaching. They may become colleagues to work with as you continue your quest for excellent teaching.

Better Teaching throughout Your Career

Academics need different kinds of instructional information at various times during their careers. Those at the very beginning need basic help in how to teach. Junior faculty members may spend too much time on their teaching without being very effective (Austin et al., 2007). Feedback is most helpful in the early years of academic careers if it is oriented more to development than evaluation (Rice & Sorcinelli, 2002). A few years later, as assistant professors approach tenure review, they may find using a systematic way to assess their teaching particularly useful, especially if it offers clear explanations of standards for good teaching (Austin et al., 2007). After tenure and sometimes when teaching the same courses repeatedly, though, professors can find their teaching becoming a little stale, so they may want some fresh ways of doing what has become perhaps overly familiar.

This book offers suggestions for teachers at all stages of their careers. It is a book for every teacher in higher education because every teacher can improve and every teacher should want to be the best teacher possible. The methods and tools described in this book can be especially helpful for assistant professors because they offer an organized and ongoing self-development process that can have huge payoffs if it is begun early in one’s career. Midcareer faculty, even very effective teachers, can use the model proposed in the book to continue their development as teachers. It works as well for teachers who may be struggling. Thus, faculty across the entire teaching career can benefit from this book.

Effective Strategies That Promote Better Teaching

I believe that a hierarchical approach that places the locus of control with the instructor who wants to improve, rather than with others who need to judge teaching performance, provides a robust teaching enhancement process. This process best fosters the kind of teaching that promotes deep and intentional student learning. The approach I advocate integrates four well-supported and effective, but previously separate, teaching strategies. Each successive level is based on a separate strategy and incorporates data and insights for better teaching from the previous level. While much literature exists to support each of these strategies individually (Brew & Ginns, 2008; Brookfield, 1995; Kolb, 1984; Kreber, 2002), no one has yet suggested that the strategies be used together. Figure 1.1 shows how I integrate the strategies. Although the concepts of critical reflection with documentation, evidence-based decision making, and self-assessment are consistent with the standards of practice used in other professions and with accreditation standards, they are not commonly used to improve teaching. Using these four best practices strategies in a hierarchical way yields new insights that inform ways to advance teaching and learning.

FIGURE 1.1 Four Effective Strategies for Improving Teaching: A Hierarchical Approach

In the following sections I summarize this process and note where you will find a detailed discussion of these concepts in this book.

Growth Strategy 1: Define the Essential Aspects of Teaching

In order to study teaching, you need to establish criteria that define teaching standards. Of the many descriptions of teaching, in this book I use Barr and Tagg’s (1995) learning-centered approach to teaching. They focus on what the instructor does to promote student learning, and not on the instructor’s behaviors as ends in themselves.

I categorize the essential aspects of effective teaching into three higher-order learning-centered guiding principles: the structure for teaching and learning itself, the instructor’s design responsibilities outside the direct teaching responsibilities, and assessment of learning outcomes. Each principle entails various components:

Guiding Principle of Structure for Teaching and Learning

1. Plan educational experiences to promote student learning.

2. Provide feedback to students.

3. Provide reflection opportunities for students.

4. Use consistent policies and processes to assess students.

5. Ensure students have successful learning experiences through your availability and accessibility.

Guiding Principle of Instructional Design Responsibilities

6. Conduct reviews and revisions of teaching.

Guiding Principle of Learning Outcomes

7. Assess student mastery of learning outcomes relating to acquisition of knowledge, skills, or values.

8. Assess student mastery of higher-order thinking and skills: application, critical thinking, and problem solving.

9. Assess student mastery of learning skills and self-assessment skills that can transcend disciplinary content.

These aspects of teaching are shared whether the teaching is didactic instruction, offered online, or experiential, as in clinical or studio settings. Chapter 3 discusses these essential aspects of teaching and the various experiential contexts for teaching.

Growth Strategy 2: Begin and Integrate the Study of Your Teaching with Critical Self-Reflection

Critical self-reflection and documentation of each of these aspects helps determine possible ways to improve teaching. The analysis of teaching through critical self-reflection promotes better teaching, which leads to increased student learning (Brookfield, 1995; Kreber, 2002).

I recommend analyzing your teaching philosophies and classroom policies to understand how your teaching affects student learning and attitudes. With a solid understanding of what, how, and why you teach, you can begin to see how to enhance your teaching. Critical self-reflection yields insights into your teaching that you can use to identify possible areas to change (Weimer, 2010). With those identified, you can prioritize the list and decide which ones to work on now and which ones can wait. This critical self-reflection is not the same as self-assessment of teaching. Chapter 4 describes the literature supporting critical self-reflection and how you can use it to promote better teaching.

Documentation of this self-analysis is a vital part of the process. This documentation should include a description of your rationale, how you communicate it to students, directions for assignments, and evidence that students achieved the learning outcomes. All of parts 2 and 3 of this book discuss this documentation process and the many benefits that accrue from using it.

Growth Strategy 3: Use Evidence to Support Teaching

A system that incorporates evidence-based decision making is superior to relying on perceptions alone (Brew & Ginns, 2008). The concept of evidence-based decision making is consistent with the literature on higher education (Shulman, 2004a, 2004b; Smith, 2001) and with the accreditation standards that professional and regional accrediting agencies use. Yet most instructors do not integrate these practices into their teaching (Handelsman et al., 2004). One reason is that current evaluation tools do not require or even suggest their use. Unless they are motivated by evaluation results, faculty frequently feel little reason to adopt practices that require more effort. The approach to better teaching described in this book uses evidence-based teaching as a standard criterion for all teaching. This strategy has two separate aspects: it recommends reading the literature on teaching effectiveness and advocates collecting data on your own teaching.

Use Pedagogical Literature

Perhaps more than any other strategy, reading the pedagogical literature on teaching and learning in higher education and in your own discipline can improve your teaching (Brew & Ginns, 2008; Weimer, 2006). Lee Shulman (2004a) defines teaching that is designed based on this literature as scholarly. Knowing this literature enables teachers to make better decisions about the instructional design of their courses (Handelsman et al., 2004). This is analogous to health care professionals using their clinical literature to inform clinical decisions. Chapter 5 discusses the argument for why evidence-based teaching leads to improved deep and intentional student learning and identifies the steps you can take to become an evidence-based teacher. Chapter 6 describes how to find and evaluate appropriate literature.

Since the major goal of improving teaching is to increase student learning, it is necessary for teachers to understand how students learn effectively. Educational and psychological research offer many insights into how students learn. The following classic resources, which use less psychological lingo and synthesize many studies, may help you understand the learning process better.

Recommended Resources on the Learning Process

American Psychological Association. (1997).

Learner-centered psychological principles: A framework for school reform and redesign.

www.apa.org/ed/governance/bea/learner-centered.pdf

Alexander, P., & Murphy, P. (1998). The research base for APA’s learner-centered psychological principles. In N. Lambert & B. McCombs (Eds.),

How students learn

(pp. 25–60). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Ambrose, S., Bridges, M., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M., & Norman, M. (2010).

How learning works.

San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (Eds.). (2000).

How people learn: Brain, mind, experiences and School.

Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Lambert, N., & McCombs, B. (Eds.). (1998).

How students learn.

Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Collect Data Systematically

Collecting data on your teaching entails asking questions about the effectiveness of your teaching practices. For example, students can be asked to complete a survey about how much they learned from various activities in the class. The SALG online tool provides a straightforward structure to obtain this kind of information (www.salgsite.org). It is easy to develop a simple survey that asks students what is working, what could be improved, and any suggestions for improvement. Cross and Steadman (1996) offer many suggestions for collecting data from students. You can also ask peers to review your course materials and offer feedback on specific aspects of your teaching, such as clarity of directions on assignments or if your grading rubrics are objective and fair. Follow-up data on how well students performed on certain assignments or examinations in more advanced courses can also be useful feedback.

Growth Strategy 4: Self-Assess Your Teaching as a Development Vehicle

Document formative self-assessments of teaching as a continuous quality improvement process. The insights you gain from analyzing the information gathered in the first three strategies become part of the self-assessment and development process (Weimer, 2010). If you conduct this assessment in the spirit of fostering better teaching, you will reap many benefits. When information is provided as nonjudgmental feedback, you can more easily use the data to change what you are doing. These formative assessments of teaching have two primary goals: to increase student learning and enhance your teaching. The latter is really a subgoal of the former because the objective of improved teaching is more learning for students. When assessments include suggestions for improvement, they can motivate good teachers to become excellent teachers.

Constructive Assessments of Your Teaching

Comments made by students, peers, or chairs tend to be general and do not help with decisions about what or how to change. Students may offer feedback that the material was difficult to learn, but that feedback does not make clear whether the issue is with your teaching skills, the inherent nature of the content, or the amount of material to be learned. Furthermore, most assessment feedback is high stakes in that it is used to make summative decisions such as annual reviews or promotion. A fellow faculty developer underscored the need for useful assessments of teaching to help instructors to develop with this comment: “I was reminded of all the assistant professors who are forced to use comments from a summative review committee [e.g., a third-year review committee] to try to improve teaching. But a summative review committee is frequently not an effective source of feedback, in part because the feedback is usually too general and in part because criticism from a decision-making body is often too threatening to people’s self-esteem for them to be able to hear and use that feedback.”

This book proposes a more productive way to assess teaching while using the information gained from many sources. Most assessments focus on summative evaluations that others will use to make decisions. This book does not do that; instead it describes ways to conduct your own formative assessments of your teaching that generate feedback and thereby foster your development (Smith, 2001). You will explore your teaching processes using an integrated model that focuses on teaching that promotes increased student learning. This is not a top-down or one-size-fits-all evaluation of teaching.

Tactics for Better Teaching through Assessment

The goal of this assessment is to identify specific ways to change your teaching so that it fosters greater deep and intentional learning for your students. Figure 1.2 shows how it works.

FIGURE 1.2 Four Tactics for a Self-Assessment Process to Promote Faculty Growth and Student Learning

Assessment Tactic 1: Use the Growth Strategies to Promote Better Teaching in the Self-Assessment Process

You can critically self-reflect and document (strategy 2) each of the essential aspects of teaching listed in strategy 1. This enables you to identify which aspects of teaching that you can change to promote better teaching. Using evidence-based teaching as described in strategy 3 will reveal many possibilities for changes. With these steps taken together, you can construct an integrative self-assessment of your teaching. The last section of this chapter summarizes this assessment model. Parts 2 and 3 of this book show how all of these separate elements lead to an assessment model and tools for self-assessment.

Assessment Tactic 2: Separate Formative from Summative Assessments

Most assessments are summative because data are usually collected to inform promotion and tenure decisions. For example, when assembling a teaching portfolio, teachers try to select material that puts their teaching in the best light. They select the most positive comments for inclusion in the portfolio and include only the highest course evaluation scores. But formative assessments are conducted for the purpose of improvement. Here the feedback identifies both strengths and weaknesses. Current evaluation methods do not make adequate distinctions between these two purposes. Instructors often use the same tools, such as student evaluations of courses and peer observations, for both formative and summative assessments (Dewar, 2011).

Current assessment procedures rarely identify what specifically needs to change because they don’t ask the right questions (Weimer, 2010). Summative assessments do not ask probing questions that yield detailed information on specific aspects of teaching. Since the purposes of the intended assessments in this book are to increase student learning through better teaching, the focus is exclusively on formative assessments. I will show how to use data from current tools in a more critical and reflective manner and also how new tools offer other insights that will lead to better teaching.

Assessment Tactic 3: Consider the Totality of Your Teaching, and Use Context-Specific Assessment Tools

Teaching is far more than just what happens in the classroom. Teachers design courses, develop syllabi, prepare for each class session, grade assignments, and work with students individually. Yet most assessments of teaching focus on what happens in class. Student course evaluations generally assess only teacher performance. Peers observe only one or two class sessions and might not look at course materials. Thus, these kinds of assessments do not provide data that consider teaching holistically.

Furthermore, many now teach in places outside the traditional classroom. Online teaching requires different skills and assessments needed to consider these unique aspects of teaching. Some teachers supervise students in experiential settings such as in community fieldwork or service-learning, mentoring students in research, or work completed in studio settings. Most teaching assessments ignore these other types of teaching despite their importance and role in student learning (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Whitt, 2005).

To examine all of these teaching roles, we consider these various contexts for teaching: I will introduce specific tools to reflect the unique aspects of teaching in different contexts in part 3. These tools look at the same essential aspects of effective teaching as listed in strategy 1. There are also components that are unique to specific situations. I include examples of instructors who teach in different contexts and have used this system to gain insights into how they can teach more effectively.

Specific Types of Teaching or Teaching Contexts

Teaching a course face-to-face or online where teachers have autonomy

Teaching a course face-to-face or online where teachers have limited autonomy

Mentoring undergraduate, graduate students, or postdoctoral fellows in research or an engineering project

Precepting or supervising students in clinical, field, or community settings

Teaching in studio settings in the visual or graphic arts

Teaching in theater or music or conservatory settings in the performing arts

Directing clinical work, experiential education, or service-learning

I introduce specific tools to reflect the unique aspects of teaching in different contexts in part 3. These tools look at the same essential aspects of effective teaching as listed in strategy 1. There are also components that are unique to specific situations. I include examples of instructors who teach in different contexts and have used this system to gain insights into how they can teach more effectively.

Assessment Tactic 4: Use Data from Many Sources to Inform Your Self-Assessment

These four strategies for effective teaching suggest many possible sources of data to inform self-assessments. Critical self-assessments should integrate information from all these sources: students, peers, chairs, the literature on how learning occurs, and your own insights. This book shows how you can integrate data about teaching so that your understanding of how your teaching has an impact on student learning. That insight then makes it possible for you to implement changes that will produce the deep and intentional learning you and all other teachers desire for their students.

Informative and Constructive Assessment Model for Better Teaching

My analysis of what happens now and my ideas for strengthening the formative nature of assessment led me to construct a layered hierarchy. This hierarchy is represented by an inverted pyramid in figure 1.3 and reflects the four strategies to promote better teaching in classroom, online, and experience settings. I used an inverted pyramid to reflect the lack of support most faculty have for their current ways of studying their teaching. Each layer on the hierarchy going up the pyramid increases the support for the teaching assessment. Currently most instructors uncritically summarize what others say about their teaching as the main method to determine their teaching effectiveness. Generally this information does not lead to insights into how to teach better. Therefore, I place the nonreflective summaries at the bottom of the pyramid, with the least support. As instructors move up the inverted pyramid, they must incorporate the lower levels.

FIGURE 1.3 An Informative and Constructive Formative Assessment Model for Faculty Growth and Student Learning

Furthermore, I integrated the strategies for better teaching, the layered hierarchy, and assessment tactics into an informative and constructive formative assessment model. If you collect data from many sources and not just from student course evaluations, you will have a much richer database on which to base your assessment of what is working and what you could change. Once you use pedagogical literature to support your teaching decisions, you will be using best practices in your teaching, and your teaching will be evidence based. Finally, if you conduct rigorous and systematic research on your teaching, you will know how effective your teaching is. You can visualize this model as a formative assessment matrix for classroom, online, and experiential teaching as shown in table 1.1. The columns in table 1.1 are a progression. Table 1.1 shows that the increasing quality of teaching standards can be applied to the essential aspects of effective teaching.

TABLE 1.1 Formative Assessment Matrix for Didactic and Experiential Teaching

Rubrics as Self-Assessment Tools

I use this matrix to create self-assessment rubrics. The essential aspects of teaching are the criteria to be assessed on the rubrics. The layered hierarchy can easily be transformed into the standards or levels on rubrics for assessing teaching, as table 1.1 illustrates. The column headings represent the layers of the hierarchy and become the standards or levels on self-assessment of teaching rubrics. The lowest level (on the left column of the hierarchy) does not contribute to personal growth efforts. Using any of the strategies required for the top three levels can lead to increased insights into effective teaching. Moving to the right or to be rated at a higher level requires meeting all of the criteria in previous levels; thus, they are cumulative. Effective teaching occurs at the second level (use critical self-reflection) and at the two higher levels. Most professors probably cannot do rigorous data collection for the majority of their teaching, but it is possible to use relevant literature and make your practice more evidence based. Part 3 describes these rubrics and how they can be used in more detail. The seven sets of rubrics can be found on online at www.jossey-bass.com/go/Blumberg.

Summary

Teaching is composed of many different skills that can be learned. Just like other skills, such as playing the piano or driving a car, instructors can improve their mastery of these skills with feedback and practice (McKeachie, 2007). This book describes a systematic, ongoing process model that faculty members can use throughout their career for continuous growth. This model is a comprehensive growth plan, not a quick fix. Easy ways, just like promised miracle cures or diets, rarely work. Using this model helps teachers in ways that lead to increased learning for most students. It is not necessary to complete all of the steps at once. Periodic critical reflection of teaching can lead to growth. Furthermore, reading a few good review articles on effective teaching methods can inspire you to change your teaching. The ongoing commitment and continuing but small efforts can have a large impact on your teaching effectiveness.

This process for systematic growth places the locus of control with instructors who want to improve rather than with external audiences who want to judge, and it deals with formative rather than summative assessment. Using this model, all faculty members will be able to teach so that students will acquire deep and intentional learning.

PART 1

A TEACHING MODEL THAT PROMOTES BETTER LEARNING