Making Effective Teaching and Learning Visible: Documenting and Reflecting on Our Work as Teachers St. Norbert College August 19, 2014 Pat Hutchings.

Making Effective Teaching and Learning Visible:

Documenting and Reflecting onOur Work as Teachers

St. Norbert CollegeAugust 19, 2014Pat Hutchings

The Plan

1. Purposes & context2. Approaches 3. Best directions for SNC

Acknowledgements

PART 1

Capturing the Intellectual Work of Teaching

A Meditation on Documentation

• A way to track/remember what I’ve done• Prompts me to set goals, be more ambitious,

to try new things• A way to connect with others (“how many

steps, Jane?”)• It’s satisfying, gives meaning, order

Why Make Teaching Visible? Why Document What We Do?

• To remember what we did • To set goals for improvement • To share our insights and practices with others• To contribute to the field• To take responsibility for the quality of what

we do as teachers • To have our work recognized and rewarded

Facilitator: person whose last name comes latest in the alphabet

Why Now?

• Lots of pedagogical innovation • New technologies • More diverse students• Higher expectations for learning for the 21st C. • Consequential insights from brain research• Growing calls for “high-impact practices”• Competition from outside traditional education• Calls for assessment, accountability • More urgency, fewer resources

7

Randy Bass, Professor of English, Georgetown University:

“One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a "problem" in one versus the other.

In scholarship and research, having a problem" is at the heart of the investigative process;…But in one’s teaching, a "problem" is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it….

How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated?”

--“The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What’s the Problem?” 1999.

"When all the careful, difficult, intentional, and scholarly work of planning and teaching a course is undocumented, it is lost for further use. Not only is it unavailable for the teacher's own reflection, but it is not there for aspiring teachers and colleagues to learn from. It is also unavailable to those making important decisions about hiring, promotion, and tenure, and to those mentoring colleagues who are being considered in those processes.”

--Dan Bernstein and Ellen Wert“Making Visible the Intellectual Work

in Teaching”

The Teaching Commons

• Faculty in all fields actively investigating, documenting their teaching, trading ideas

• More conferences, more research, publications • New ways to document—online, multimedia,

electronic course portfolios….• A growing movement for the scholarship of

teaching and learning—and a place for such work on campus

• A broader conception of teaching

Teaching

What goes on in class

Vision and design

Impact on students

Reflection Mentoring other faculty as teachers

??

What to Document?

• What questions do you have about your own teaching and your students’ learning?

• What would you like your colleagues (or others) to ask or know about your teaching and your students’ learning?

• What would you like to learn from/about your colleagues’ teaching?

Please work in pairs or threes

PART 2

13 (or so) Ways of Looking at Teaching

--with apologies to Wallace Stevens

V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Methodological pluralism

• Peer review > class visits• Teaching = course design,

interaction, student learning• 12 institutions, pilot

departments, developing and testing out new ways to document and share their teaching

• A menu of possibilities• “Three interactions”

AAHE From Idea to Prototype: The Peer Review of Teaching

1. Course Design

• Select a syllabus from one course you teach • Prepare 5-page memo– How is the course organized? What are its central

themes?– What are the main goals and why are they the right

ones? – How does it engage students with the key practices of

your field?– How does it connect with other courses in your dept? – Metaphors: is it a journey, a Greek tragedy…?

Try It

• Is your course like a journey, a parable, a football game, a museum, a romance, a concerto, an Aristotelian tragedy, an obstacle course, one or all or some of the above—or something else not on the list?

• How does your metaphor illuminate key aspects of your course?

2. Class Visit• Pre-visit consultation– Plan for the class session, including goals– Context within the semester– Advance reading or prep?– What observer should look for

• The visit– Take notes– Listen, watch

• Post-visit consultation

3. A Focus on Student Learning

• Pick a key assignment• Plus samples of student work • Representing varied levels of performance• Write a 2-3 page reflective memo commenting on what these

reveal about students’ learning in your course.– Why did you choose this assignment?– How is it important to your goals? – What do you hope students will demonstrate?– How do you judge their work? – Thoughts about how the assignment might be improved? – What do students’ responses say about the effectiveness of the

course, how it might be improved?

Enriching the Methodological Mix

• Very simple– Journal or reflections after class – Retrospective syllabus annotation—end of

semester • More elaborate– A scholarship of teaching and learning project

• Integral to teaching – One minute paper

• Done in community – A teaching circle– A reading group

• At the department or institutional level– Work on assessment– Creating a library of assignments

• Inviting student voices and participation – Focus groups with students– Student/faculty course design teams

What else?

Pull different kinds of evidence together

Around a single course

Include reflection

Brief, with layers/links

Selective, not for every course & not every semester

Useful for both formative and summative purposes

COURSE PORTFOLIOS

Pat’s Course Portfoliofor an intro poetry writing course

• Syllabus and an accompanying memo explaining the rationale for my approach

• Examples of course activities with reflections on rationale, how they worked

• Samples of student work– Two complete student portfolios, showing growth over time– Sets of one minute papers and how I used them to guide

class direction • Overall reflections on how it worked, what I would do

differently next time

• Christine Marvin, Associate Professor, Special Education and Communication Disorders“I was amazed and embarrassed to discover that I had course objectives I never taught, I had course objectives I taught but never assessed, I had course objectives I assessed and never taught, and I had material I taught and assessed but never listed as a course objective. By reorganizing the goals of my course, developing rubrics for evaluating student work, and assessing my classroom activities, I now have a focused approach for linking my teachingto my students’ learning.”

• John Comer, Chair and Professor, Political Science

I’ve always been somewhat unnerved by the role that student evaluations play in promotion and tenure. In the absence of something else to provide another perspective or another piece of information, tenure decisions are being made by 18, 19, and 20-year olds. The peer review of teaching project offers a valuable and useful component to supplement the studentvoice in evaluating teaching.”

Table Discussion

• Reactions to idea of the course portfolio and its elements?

• What’s appealing? • What would you add or subtract? • What would need to be modified to make it

useful in your context?• Can you imagine a way to introduce it on a

small scale as an experiment?

Facilitator: person whose last name comes earliest in the alphabet

PART 3Bringing it Home:

Institutional Implications

Principles for Documenting Teaching

• Student ratings are necessary but not sufficient• Use more than one source/kind of evidence• Capture the fuller range of teaching elements • Faculty own their evidence and are responsible

for framing/presenting it• Include a strong reflective component • Humility all around: this is human judgment• Campus culture matters

Campus Culture

1. Create occasions to talk about learning & teaching.

2. Make students part of the conversation. 3. Explore and develop new genres and forms

to document the work of t&l. 4. Evaluate teaching in ways that acknowledge

and value its intellectual, scholarly dimensions.

Adapted from Huber and Hutchings, The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons

1. Occasions to Talk

• University of Michigan math department seminar on student learning

• Gustavus Adolphus history department reading Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts—inviting faculty from nearby campuses to join

• SNC ?

2. Involve Students

• Western Washington—Courses where students study their own learning

• Elon University—Students as partners in course redesign projects

• SNC ?

3. New Genres

• Encourage and support the use of portfolios

• Video, multimedia…Carnegie Foundation gallery

• For different audiences

• SNC ?

4. Evaluate Teaching as Scholarly Work

1. Clear goals2. Adequate preparation3.Appropriate methods4. Significant results5. Effective presentation6. Reflective critique

--Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate.

Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997.

Trends in the Evaluation of Teaching in Liberal Arts Colleges

• Student ratings still most widely used.• But with a trend toward multiple sources.• Classroom visits up 20%, 2000-2010—to 60.4%• Self-evaluation used by 67% of colleges • Review of course syllabi and exams: 42% • A growing movement for course portfolios • Scholarship of teaching increasingly counted—

either as teaching or research• More external peer review

New Policies and Practices for the Evaluation of Teaching at SNC?

• What are your goals for the evaluation of teaching at SNC?

• What have you heard about today that might fit those goals?

• What approaches are the best fit with the SNC culture?

• What next steps are needed? Where to start?

If I were sitting where you’re sitting

• Start small, go slow• Create a safe zone for experimentation • Do small experiments on a pilot basis• Document what you do• Take stock regularly and systematically

At Your Tables

• What are your goals for the evaluation of teaching at SNC?

• What have you heard about today that might fit those goals?

• What approaches are the best fit with the SNC culture?

• What next steps are needed? Where to start?

Resources

• Bernstein, D., Burnett, A.N., Goodburn, & Savory, P. Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching. San Fran: Jossey-Bass/Anker. 2006.

• Chism, N.V.N. Peer Review of Teaching, A Sourcebook. 2nd Ed. San Fran: Jossey-Bass/Anker. 2007.

• Huber, M.T. & Hutchings, P. The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons. San Fran: Jossey-Bass. 2005.

• Shulman, L.S. “From Idea to Prototype: Three Exercises in the Peer Review of Teaching.” In Teaching as Community Property: Essays on Higher Education. San Fran: Jossey-Bass. 2004.

Resources

• Peer Review of Teaching Project (on course portfolios): http://www.courseportfolio.org/peer/pages/index.jsp

• Carnegie Foundation multi-media gallery of faculty explorations of their students’ learninghttp://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery_of_tl/castl_he.html

• Seldin and Miller on changing practices in faculty evaluation, from Academe, May-June 2014. https://www.aaup.org/article/changing-practices-faculty-evaluation#.U8BDa290wyl

Making Teaching Community Property

“We experience isolation not in the stacks but in the classroom. We close the classroom door and experience pedagogical solitude, whereas in our life as scholars, we are members of active communities, communities of conversation, communities of evaluation, communities in which we gather with others…to exchange our findings, our methods, and our excuses.”

Welcome to the Teaching Commons!