Valuing teaching through better assessment of teaching


Valuing Teaching through Better Assessment of Teaching

Last September, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by senior writer Beth McMurtrie titled “Americans Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges?” The subtitle was telling: “The evidence doesn’t look good.” In the article, McMurtrie explores a number of signs that colleges and universities don’t really value good teaching. Most college professors, she writes, don’t receive much training in teaching during grad school or on the job. The instructional work force is dominated by contingent instructors with heavy teaching loads and little support. Teaching is valued in word, but not in deed, with research counting more during promotion and tenure reviews for faculty. And even when those reviews value teaching, they lack meaningful methods to evaluate teaching, relying instead on problematic student evaluations.

That’s a hefty set of challenges, but it’s also something of a roadmap for colleges and universities who want to take their teaching missions seriously. How can we better prepare and support faculty for what is, in most cases, their primary professional responsibility? How can we improve the labor conditions within higher education so that instructors have the time and resources to teach well? And how can we improve the evaluation of teaching in ways that promote good teaching? I’ve been fascinated by McMurtrie’s roadmap since it came out, and I’m going to spend some time exploring that roadmap on the Intentional Teaching podcast in 2024.

In this week's episode, I dig into that last question: How can we improve the evaluation of teaching? Researcher Corbin Campbell was quoted in a Chronicle article recently, saying, “Folks will say quality teaching is hard to measure. Quality research is hard to measure, but we do it.” I’m excited to bring a conversation with two academics who are contributing to efforts on their campuses to assess and evaluate teaching in more meaningful ways.

Beate Brunow is the associate director at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching at Penn State, and Shawn Simonson is a professor of kinesiology at Boise State University. Both have been involved in the development of new frameworks for defining effective teaching, and both are using those frameworks to change how teaching is evaluated at their institutions.

  • At Penn State, the faculty senate issued a call for better evaluation of teaching and the resulting committee work produced a new Faculty Teaching Assessment Framework that delineates four elements of effective teaching: effective design, effective instruction, inclusive and ethical pedagogy, and reflective and evolving practice. Teaching evaluation at Penn State will now include student feedback but also peer review and self-reflection. The framework has led to revised student feedback questions that rolled out in the fall, and this spring departments are updating their peer review procedures to align with the framework.
  • Meanwhile at Boise State, Shawn and his colleagues Brittnee Earl and Megan Frary have developed a similar framework for assessing teaching effectiveness, which they wrote about in a recent College Teaching article. Their literature review led them also to identify four elements of effective teaching: course design, scholarly teaching, learner centeredness, and professional development. And like Penn State, they call for the use of student feedback but also peer review and self-reflection. They're currently working with departments at Boise State to use their framework to assess teaching more meaningfully and foster growth mindsets in instructors there.

My conversation with Beate and Shawn covers a lot of ground, from the problems with relying on student feedback alone to the challenge of implementing meaningful peer review of teaching to the organizational change necessary to improve our teaching assessment processes. If you care about teaching and learning in higher ed, I think you'll find the conversation interesting. You can listen to the newest episode of Intentional Teaching here (or read the transcript!), or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Conferences to Consider

I'm involved in two conferences in 2024 that readers of this newsletter might find interesting.

  • Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R) - That's a very long title for a very good conference for which I serve on the advisory board. UPCEA, the online and professional education association, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is presenting the 2024 DT&L conference in conjunction with the 2024 SOLA+R event, with the combo conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 22-24. DT&L has traditionally focused on the work of distance and online education, while SOLA+R has provided a space for online education leaders to gather. The joint conference brings together online educators, instructional designers, online administrators, and anyone interested in campus-wide digital transformations. Session proposals are due January 12th, so if presenting your work at this conference sounds interesting, get on that!
  • Institute for New Educational Developers - The POD Network sponsors the annual Institute for New Educational Developers, and this summer it's hosted online by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. This four-day virtual conference will be a fantastic opportunity for those new to the work of educational development to learn from senior colleagues in the field and build their networks of peers. If you're in your first couple of years working at a center for teaching or learning, INED is definitely for you. And for the first time, I'll be on the "faculty" for INED! I'm leading sessions tentatively titled "Discipline Matters (or Does It?): Consulting Outside Your Field" with Rosemary Tyrrell and "Promoting Evidence-Based Practices for the Use of Technology in Learning" with Flower Darby. Registration is now open for INED 2024.

Intentional Tech Slow Read

Inspired by a couple of slowreads shared with me by friends, I'm hosting a slow read of my 2019 book Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching this winter! The idea is to take a couple of months to read and discuss Intentional Tech with a virtual book group of interested colleagues. Here's how this will work:

  • Starting Monday, January 22nd, you're invited to start reading Intentional Tech one chapter a week for the next seven weeks. I'll share the reading schedule here in the newsletter, along with weekly reminders. Each chapter focuses on a different teaching principle relevant to using technology: creating times for telling, providing opportunities for practice and feedback, making visible thin slices of student learning, and so on.
  • Every week, I'll share a few discussion questions to help you go deeper with the week's chapter and apply it to your own teaching. The questions will be here in the newsletter and you're welcome to respond to them however and wherever you like, but I'll be encouraging discussion of the questions in my Patreon community. The Patreon platform has solid discussion forums that work well on both laptop and mobile.
  • Also in my Patreon, I'll have a bonus resource to share each week related to the chapter at hand. These will be a mix of new instructor vignettes like those found in the book, new audio interviews with faculty about the ways they teach with technology, and mini teaching guides on particular teaching topics. These will only be available to my Patreon community, although I might share a few of them more publicly later in the year.

There are, of course, lots of ways to read Intentional Tech. You can order a paperback copy through Amazon and other retailers, you might have electronic access through your institutional library, and my Patreon supporters can get a code for 20% off the book when ordering through my publisher West Virginia University Press.

A lot has changed in the educational technology landscape since Intentional Tech came out in 2019, and I'm excited to explore that changing landscape with y'all through this slow read! And we'll have it all finished the week of March 4th, which is right before my spring break and maybe yours, too.

Thanks for reading!

If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague who might like it! That's one of the best ways you can support the work I'm doing here at Intentional Teaching.

Intentional Teaching with Derek Bruff

Welcome to the Intentional Teaching newsletter! I'm Derek Bruff, educator and author. The name of this newsletter is a reminder that we should be intentional in how we teach, but also in how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this newsletter will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.

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