Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog – Page 25

Let’s Talk about Assessment — Katherine Lithgow

How often have you marked assignments and provided comments only to find that the students don’t even bother to pick them up? Or they get the feedback and then make the same “mistakes” on the next assignment? How often do you sit down with your colleagues and discuss how they would mark particular assignments?

Assessment Literacy: The Foundation for Improving Student Learning (2012), discusses why students often fail to act upon feedback- they often don’t understand what the feedback means, or if they do, they don’t know what to do to address the feedback- and offers suggestions on how we can improve the process.

What captured my attention was the notion of improving the assessment process through the development of an assessment community of practice (CofP) whose membership consists of ALL parties involved in the assessment process- students, instructors and anyone else who provides feedback to students.

The authors remind us that providing feedback is a complex, social process and not an end product. In the community of practice approach to assessment, the process becomes an invitation to students to participate in the discipline’s community and engage with more accomplished members in order to learn the conventions, culture and language of the discipline’s community through observation, discussion and engagement. By actively participating in the community, ALL PARTIES will come to have a shared understanding of the criteria which will be applied when making marking decisions, and this will help ensure that marking is objective and reliable.

And how does this shared understanding come about? Well, it comes about through formal and informal social interactions- talking with each other-dialogues, peer-to-peer discussions, student-to-faculty discussions. And by taking steps to create an environment which encourages students to ask questions of their instructors, their classmates and of themselves, and which fosters their capacity to peer evaluate and self-assess. Students are more inclined to engage in the assessment process and use the feedback when they feel comfortable in the community and do not feel belittled. Forming positive relationships is important; students are more apt, as we all are, to apply and act upon feedback when it comes from a trusted and caring source, and when it is viewed as part of an ongoing learning process where they can act upon the feedback rather than a ‘final product’.

The authors argue for taking a program wide approach to assessment rather than a course-based approach which is what is more commonly in place. In a course-based approach, students often feel that the feedback is unique to the course or the instructor, and they do not see how the feedback will help them in future courses.

They suggest that in an environment that cultivates an assessment community of practice, students and instructors are more inclined to think of courses as part of a program, and assessment as part of a process that allows for more focus on ‘deep’ learning and the development of skills and concepts that are slowly learnt over time and not within the duration of a semester.

The authors do not claim to have all the answers on how to facilitate this type of environment, and acknowledge that it takes time and effort to cultivate a community of practice around assessment. But wouldn’t it be worth it if we could help our students engage with, and effectively apply, the feedback that we’ve been spending so much time providing?

10th Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference July 2013 — Paul Kates

The 10th Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference took place in Boston this year and I was lucky enough to attend. There were over 200 presentations throughout the three day event. I was drawn towards talks about mathematics and MOOCs – massive open online courses. You can find my notes on the talks I attended online.

Many of the presentations were recorded and most presenters provided slides. If you find a talk in the conference schedule or list of talks in my notes that you want to know more about please send me email at pkates@uwaterloo.ca.

How Co-op Changed My Perspective on Teaching – Haley Roberts

Since high school, teachers have warned me about university. They would tell me that when I get to university, no one will come to class with copies of the lecture notes for me, and they will just talk at me for an hour. Coming out of my first year of university, I would have to agree. They may not have stood at the front of the room just talking for an hour, but they made up for it in other ways. For the majority of my first eight months in university, I found myself sitting in a math class writing down numbers and symbols as quickly as I could until my hand hurt.Some professors stood with their back to the class and wrote the entire time, and some brought overhead slides jam-packed with writing. I found myself more focused on writing down what was on the board and the solution to that really hard assignment question than listening to what the professors were saying while they wrote. Eventually, I came to accept that I would spend the next four years perfecting my note taking skills rather than my math.

What I didn’t expect was what I would come to learn about teaching in my co-op work term. I have had the wonderful opportunity to spend four months with the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE). Being with this department, I have not only learned things about the working life, but about university teaching. Each and every person at CTE has a passion for teaching and learning and they help faculty at the University of Waterloo explore alternatives to talking at their students for 50 minutes. I quickly learned that teaching is not standing in front of people, memorizing some facts and regurgitating them back. Teaching is helping people understand the who’s, the what’s, the why’s and the how’s. Teaching is definitely not one dimensional and it can happen in thousands of forms. From flipped classrooms and experiential learning to creating memorable lectures and classroom delivery skills, CTE is providing graduate students, faculty, and staff with workshops to help improve their teaching and their students’ learning.

After four months of watching in awe at how classes can be, I find myself wondering how I can avoid being talked at during the next term. Don’t get me wrong though, I did learn a lot of math, and not every class can be changed for the better, but every once in a while, it would be nice to try something new.

Contemplating Quality + Teaching at Waterloo – Donna Ellis

Over the last few months, I have been working on a multi-institutional project on identifying indicators of an institutional culture that fosters “quality teaching”. One report that our group has been reviewing comes from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Institutional Management in Higher Education group. Published in 2012, the report entitled Fostering Quality Teaching in Higher Education: Policies and Practices outlines seven policy levers that institutional leaders can use to foster teaching quality. The levers provide reasonable actions to take: raising awareness of quality teaching, developing excellent teachers, engaging students, building organization for change and teaching leadership, aligning institutional policies to foster quality teaching, highlighting innovation as a driver for change, and assessing impacts. But what constitutes “quality teaching”?

At its most basic level, the authors indicate that “quality teaching is the use of pedagogical techniques to produce learning outcomes for students” (p.7). More specifically, they explain that quality teaching includes “effective design of curriculum and course content, a variety of learning contexts (including guided independent study, project-based learning, collaborative learning, experimentation, etc.), soliciting and using feedback, and effective assessment of learning outcomes. It also involves well-adapted learning environments and student support services” (p.7). These definitions focus on student learning, the honing of instructional and critical reflection skills by teachers, and the need for institutional infrastructure to support learning. What they do not focus on is the adoption of any particular pedagogical method nor the specifics of an instructor’s performance in a classroom (think about what course evaluations tend to highlight…).

The authors also identify the need to ground any efforts to shift the quality of teaching – or the culture in which teaching happens – within a collaboratively developed institutional teaching and learning framework. This framework should reflect the identity and differentiating features of an institution and define the “objectives of teaching and expected learning outcomes for students” (p.14). At uWaterloo, we have endorsed the degree level expectations (undergraduate and graduate) as the benchmarks for program level outcomes. But we do not yet have a succinct statement about our goals regarding quality teaching.

Our newly released institutional strategic plan asserts that one way we will offer leading-edge, dynamic academic programs is by “increasing the value of teaching quality and adopting a teaching-learning charter that captures Waterloo’s commitment to teaching and learning” (p.11, emphases mine). I wrote about another institution’s teaching and learning charter in the September 2012 issue of CTE’s Teaching Matters newsletter. What will our charter entail? What do we value about teaching and learning? What kind of institutional culture do we want to promote with regard to teaching quality at Waterloo? These aren’t small questions, but they’re very exciting ones to contemplate.

Good Teaching, Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning – Monica Vesely

I recently had the good fortune to attend the New Faculty Developers Institute in Atlanta where I attended a session on Supporting SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning). As many of us are now preparing for the start of a new academic year in September, this topic area is, if not top-of-mind, at least a component of the many thoughts swirling in our brains. With this mind, I thought I would share my synopsis of this session with you.

The presenter, Thomas Pusateri from Kennesaw State University, opened the session by citing excerpts from Hutchings and Shulman that endeavoured to make the distinction between good teaching and scholarly teaching, and ultimately, the scholarship of teaching and learning (from “The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments,” in Change, September/October 1999. Volume 31, Number 5. Pages 10-15.)

Hutchings and Shulman proposed that “all faculty have an obligation to teach well, to engage students, and to foster important forms of student learning” and they concede that “this is not easily done” and that “such teaching is a good fully sufficient unto itself”.

The authors go on to say that “when it (the practice of good teaching) entails, as well, certain practices of classroom assessment and evidence gathering, when it is informed not only by the latest ideas in the field but by current ideas about teaching the field, when it invites peer collaboration and review, then that teaching might rightly be called scholarly, or reflective, or informed”.

They suggest that the final step of “making one’s scholarly teaching public (“community property”), open to critique and evaluation, and in a form that others can build on” transforms the scholarly teaching into the scholarship of teaching and proceed to define it as follows:

“Scholarship of teaching will entail a public account of some or all of the full act of teaching—vision, design, enactment, outcomes, and analysis-in a manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher’s professional peers and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of that same community.”

If we choose to take up the torch, how can we navigate the path from good teaching (in and of itself a laudable goal) to scholarly teaching and then, to the scholarship of teaching and learning? Below I have gathered just a few of the many resources available to help guide your way:

On-campus: University of Waterloo Resources

External Conferences and Professional Organizations

Journals

Happy travels!

Sharing Views along the Road – Shirley Hall

One of the greatest perks of attending a conference is the opportunity it provides to stay awhile, explore the surrounding area and meet the folks who call it home. This year’s conference of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) – pronounced “stell-ee” with affection – was held on Cape Breton Island. Cape Breton University (CBU) provided a beautiful setting for this year’s theme, “learning to live, learning for life”. Though my visit was brief, the island and it’s people left a lasting impression on me.

Starting with the ‘community’ cab ride from the airport (no single fares from Sydney airport that night!) through to the open and friendly banter of the conference organizers, hoteliers and restauranteurs, the generous nature of the people of the island became clear. I soon learned that Cape Bretoners are very much at ease sharing their views, be they landscapes, seascapes or tales of lore.

The sharing of stories was evident throughout the conference as well, with Dr. Richard Gerver opening his keynote address with “I would like to share with you some of my thoughts on teaching and learning…” He spoke frankly about his life experiences, many included in his new book, “Change”. I think I will make it one of my summer reads. Another wonderful plenary ‘conversation’ was hosted by the 3M National Student Fellows. They spoke eloquently and honestly about how we can all get caught up in the ‘cult of busyness’ and how important it is to take time to pause, to listen, learn and reflect. some other engaging sessions I attended covered topics such as the Sustainable Happiness project, (Dr. Catherine O’Brien., CBU), as well as research on the current state of SoTL in Canada (Dr. Brad Wutherick, University of Saskatchewan).

As we dug in to our amazing feast, the banquet evoked a different kind of sharing, with pieces of lobster flying across tables! The incredible musicians shared lyrical stories steeped in the folkore of the island and we danced and celebrated the night away with great enjoyment. The final great privilege of my journey was a fabulous roadtrip, driving the Cabot Trail with two colleagues. Our shared journey included lunch, lively conversation about the beauty of the place, and shared stories of life long learning. The experience of attending this year’s conference will not be soon forgotten, I will cherish this most memorable trip.

The disposition to think critically – Veronica Brown

As I write this post, several Waterloo colleagues are attending the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s (STLHE) annual conference. Seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on my experience at last year’s conference. STLHE was the first conference I attended when I joined CTE three years ago. It was held in Toronto that year, wrapping up on the same weekend as the G-20 summit. Last year, it was in Montreal, where I watched people march a block or two from our hotel as part of their day of protest.

Interestingly, the session that continues to haunt me was related to critical thinking. In her session, Beyond skills to dispositions: Transforming the critical thinking classroom, Shelagh Crooks, a professor at Saint Mary’s University, explored elements of the instruction of critical thinking, her goal to “raise questions in the participants’ minds about the purpose of critical thinking education, rather than propose clear solutions”(Abstract, para.3). She certainly fulfilled that goal in my case.

This idea of the disposition to think critically is what is really stuck in my head. Not just for critical thinking, but other areas of the curriculum in which we must move beyond the knowledge and skills of a topic and encourage thought in the affective domain. Consider themes such as health and safety, societal or environmental impact, ethical behaviour, integrity, teamwork, management, etc. As educators, what is our role in the development of our students? Take health and safety for instance. Is it enough for our students to know about hazardous materials, for example, and to have the skill to work with them appropriately? Or is there a third element, to actually value health and safety? To look critically at a situation, to question a current practice when appropriate, to have the disposition to continuously look at the lab through a health and safety filter.

And so here I am, a year later. I find myself with more questions about this disposition idea than answers. It is something I am exploring as part of the curriculum work I support. Many of us are wondering not only about teaching and learning in the affective domain but, as a next step, how to assess it. If developing this disposition is our instructional goal, how will we know our students have achieved it? If this is a question you are pondering, too, let me know, I’d love to chat with you about it.

WaterlooWinter — I realize this image isn’t related to critical thinking but I thought I would share it for anyone missing the snow…