Making Effective
Teaching and Learning Visible:
Documenting and Reflecting on
Our Work as Teachers
St. Norbert College
August 19, 2014
Pat Hutchings
The Plan
1. Purposes & context
2. 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?
Facilitator: person whose last name comes latest in the alphabet
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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
Why Now?
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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
Vision and
design
Reflection
What goes
on in class
??
Impact on
students
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
AAHE From Idea to Prototype: The Peer Review of Teaching
• 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”
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
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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.
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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?
COURSE PORTFOLIOS
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
Pat’s Course Portfolio
for 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 teaching
to 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 student
voice 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 3
Bringing it Home:
Institutional Implications
Principles for Documenting Teaching
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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 goals
2. Adequate preparation
3.Appropriate methods
4. Significant results
5. Effective presentation
6. Reflective critique
--Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate.
Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997.
Trends in the Evaluation of Teaching
in Liberal Arts Colleges
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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
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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: JosseyBass. 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-practicesfaculty-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!