You don't have to wear the flame resistant suit on my account. I don't hate SLOs, I don't worship at their shrine either. I do them because I gotta. With all the other things that go on in my professional life, related to being department head, and otherwise, this one just isn't worth getting upset about. It doesn't take that long to write them, edit them and devise ways to assess them. So I just get it over with.
Maybe they help and maybe they don't. I just get them done - push my staff to also - and let the chips fall... Nancy M LBCC -----Original Message----- From: Annette Taylor <[email protected]> To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Jan 17, 2011 11:39 am Subject: RE: [tips] Curious about department heads Nancy and others: Why would you not agree with the philosophy behind your SLOs. Isn't it your purview to develop them as a department? I find that many departments take such a negative attitude that they fail to take advantage of their opportunities to redevelop these. That is the beauty of the process: you have right to control of development of your SLOs, as long as you can show alignment (and let's face it, I'm sure you can) to the college's SLOs. We in psychology are particular at an advantage because the APA has already developed these for us, if you choose to use them as is, or to reasonably modify them. Then call on the APA as your evidence for their appropriateness. I have found them to be quite useful. I have used them for YEARS. I have had SLOs since I started teaching over 25 years ago. I wonder why this seems like such a new and foreign concept to so many people. I just always "assumed" that everyone did this because it occurred in all the psych classes I was in over my many years of education. My path was quite unusual as I attended 3 different graduate programs, making lateral and radical changes along the way and 5 different undergraduate programs (OK, that was youthful wanderlust). There were always SLOs--maybe called learning objectives rather than outcomes but similar in character and intent. I'm always extremely surprised when I hear folks tell me that they've never listed their learning objectives/outcomes on a syllabus. Wouldn't you want to have some kind of goal to reach? Some purpose, some baseline level of knowledge you'd like to have students attain? Clearly there are catalogue descriptions of courses--wouldn't we want to have some integrated course goals? In our department, several years ago, before the big SLO craze began, we developed common learning outcomes simply because we found that adjuncts were teaching all over the place, and we could not depend on students to have a common knowledge/skill set when taking a next course. Now, we know that at least a fair effort is made for all students to have had some specific knowledge acquisition made available to them so that when we see them in another course we have confidence in what they should be coming to us with. (Example: in lower division research methods ALL students must write up at least one complete APA style research report, so that when they get to the upper division capstone lab we know they have had the opportunity to practice this skill at least once before and we don't need to teach it completely from scratch for hit and miss previous teaching. This makes teaching the capstone more reasonable, successful and less frustrating.) Of course there is no guarantee any single student learns any specific bit of stuff, but we find that this is certainly working for us. So I'm not sure why people would disagree about construction of SLO's even if there is some minor disagreement about assessment. OK, I'm ready, flame-retardant suit just zipped up. Thick skin in place. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 [email protected] From: drnanjo [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 9:23 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Curious about department heads Though I am a department head currenly, I can only speculate. I'd never ask to look at a faculty member's online course shell unless there were some compelling cause. And even with a compelling cause the union and contract tend to exert a lot of restrictions on such activity. For example, nothing of an evaluative nature can take place in a physical or online classroom unless 1) it's the scheduled time for that evaluation or 2) there's some major complaint about the instructional quality. Something super serious, not just "this teacher is soooooo unfair..." Could this have to do with Student Learning Outcomes? At LBCC we are under quite a bit of duress from administration to place SLOs on our syllabi, even if we don't agree with the philosophy behind their construction and assessment. Maybe this instructor has yet to show evidence of placing them in a location at the sites where students will be made aware of them? I'll keep thinking about it. Nancy Melucci Long Beach City College Long Beach CA -----Original Message----- From: Michael Smith <[email protected]> To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Jan 17, 2011 9:13 am Subject: [tips] Curious about department heads I'm curious about what TIPsters think. A friend of mine received an email from his department head requesting hat the department head have access (viewing only I presume) to his nline courses (I think 'classes you teach' was the actual words). The reason being because the department head thinks that it "makes sense". I was wondering what TIPster's thought of the 'makes sense' part. Does it really 'make sense'? n what way? Or is the 'sense' a mild form of administrative paranoia that they ave to know everything that goes on? r is the 'sense' just because they want to know? -- - Mike For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn. 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