"Dr. Barbara Watters" wrote:
> Currently, I am undergoing a review of my accomplishments in which my
> college will decide whether I'm worthy of continuing appointment. As I
> assemble my portfolio, I am faced with a question that we have discussed
> on TIPS, and also one that Jeff implictly asked. Exactly how do we
> document successful teaching? Length and/or detail of syllabi? Student
> evaulations? -- goodness knows that they are fraught with difficulties.
> Letters of appreciation from students? -- which can be far and few
> between (see Jeff's message). Grade distributions? (normality,
> skewness, etc.) My personal mission statement? All of the above, none
> of the above, something other than the above....!
>
> ....
> I'd enjoy seeing other TIPSters' "teaching mission statements" (and
> mission statements for service and scholarship, as well). Comments?
Barbara,
You are asking (at least in part) the following question: how can we measure
the effectiveness of our teaching? I imagine that the lack of a public
response to your post is due to the fact that there is no easy answer to this
question. In order to answer it, we first have to know what is meant by
"effective teaching." It seems obvious that effective teaching would consist
of whatever led to the accomplishment of one's teaching goal(s). This goal
usually involves the adequate learning of course information by students.
(But I suspect that some on the list might see this goal as relatively
trivial: they might wish to focus on something like transforming students'
views of themselves and their world. I don't know how one might be able to
get objective evidence that such a goal has been accomplished. Furthermore,
it is not one that college administrators would want to emphasize, which was
the concern of your post.) It is really a question of validity--of developing
a way of measuring what we intend to measure. I suppose that, in our everyday
teaching, most of use some notion of "face validity" to evaluate our
teaching: if, on the surface, the content of our teaching seems as if it
SHOULD facilitate the learning of course information, then we infer that we
are doing what we need to do. The question of what observations we should
make in order to estimate face validity is a major problem, however. The
observations we tend to make are determined by at least four factors: our own
experiences as students, our opinion as to the goal of a college education,
the opinions of other teachers about what constitutes good teaching, and the
opinions of our students as to the goals of their education.
In practice, however, most of us focus on the same thing as our students:
performance on tests and overall grades in the course. If we can increase
student performance as measured in this way, we believe that our teaching is
more effective. This is a practical approach because it is an objective
measure. But there also seems (to me, at least) to be something trivial and
maybe even unsavory about it. I suppose my parenthetical statement in the
previous paragraph beckons to me. As I stated in my last post, I believe that
most dedicated teachers have a sense of mission about what they do: in
essence, they hope to transform their students' views of themselves and their
worlds in fundamental ways. If we can specify more precisely what is meant by
this, we may be able to develop objective measures for our classroom use. For
example, a major goal in my courses is to develop critical-thinking skills
with regard to the topics discussed in the course. This seems to me to be a
requirement for a fundamental transformation of students' views; and it seems
that this can be measured in objective ways.
Thus, the first step is to describe precisely what one is trying to
accomplish in a course. This will probably differ for each of us and for
different courses. Only then could one begin to develop measures that could
objectively estimate the degree to which these goals are being accomplished.
I would like to think more about this, but I have to go. Anyone wish to
continue?
Jeff
--
Jeffry P. Ricker, Ph.D. Office Phone: (480) 423-6213
9000 E. Chaparral Rd. FAX Number: (480) 423-6298
Psychology Department [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Scottsdale Community College
Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626
"The truth is rare and never simple."
Oscar Wilde
"Instead of having 'answers' on a test, they should just call
them 'impressions'. And, if you got a different 'impression',
so what? Can't we all be brothers?"
Jack Handey
