Phyllis Blumberg - Assessing and Improving Your Teaching: Strategies and Rubrics for Faculty Growth and Student Learning

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blumberg, Phyllis, date

Assessing and improving your teaching : strategies and rubrics for faculty growth and student learning / Phyllis Blumberg. First edition.

pages cm. (Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-27548-1 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-118-41953-3 (ebk.) ISBN 978-1-118-42134-5 (ebk.)

1. Reflective teaching. 2. College teaching. I. Title.

LB1025.3.B595 2013

371.102dc23

2013013534

Dedicated with love to my sons,

Adam, Barry, and Noah Kosherick

This book includes Professional content that can be accessed from our Web site when you register at www.josseybass.com/go/Blumberg using the password josseybasshighered.

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Preface

THE ORIGIN FOR THIS BOOK came from a department chairs request. He asked me for a comprehensive teaching assessment instrument that could objectively measure teaching effectiveness that he could also use to help his faculty to improve. His professors were largely summarizing student course evaluations, and that did not give enough information. I checked the literature and was not able to find one that fit his needs. Thus began my quest for a better model to assess teaching. Since I see myself as a faculty coach and not a judge, I wanted the model to focus on improvement, not high-stakes decisions. Current methods of evaluating teaching do not generate the data needed to make good choices about how to teach more effectively. This book addresses that need. It emerged from my faculty development experiences and my convictions about what is good teaching.

This book is intended for all teachers in higher education, including those who teach in experiential settings. It offers suggestions for teachers at all stages of their careers. The overarching purpose of this book is to promote teaching excellence. Effective teaching promotes both deep and intentional learning.

This book describes a comprehensive plan for teacher development. Its not something that should be done all at once, and it is not a quick fix for struggling instructors. This is a systematic process for career-long development of teaching effectiveness. I propose a hierarchical development and self-assessment model, but it is not necessary to do all of the steps; doing even one step helps instructors teach more effectively. In fact, making ongoing improvement may be more important than achieving excellence. The hierarchical model is based on essential principles in the literature on faculty development and cognitive sciences. The strength of this model places the locus of control with readers who want to improve rather than with external audiences who want to judge. Thus, this book deals with formative self-assessment rather than summative assessment.

The book begins by building the rationale for the assessment model and methods. It offers broad improvement strategies for career-long growth, describes a formative assessment model, and finally introduces self-assessment rubrics (see ). Throughout, I offer many suggestions to increase student deep and intentional learning through better teaching. The cases describe how five professors improved their teaching. The appendix contains self-assessment rubrics.

The Model of Better Teaching to Increase Learning Used throughout This Book

Part 1 describes a hierarchical approach to teaching better that integrates four well-supported, but previously separate, effective teaching strategies. An introduction and orientation to this approach is in chapter 1. Chapter 2 discusses misconceptions about teaching and recommends alternative ideas about teaching. Chapter 3 defines the essential aspects of teaching. Studying each of these aspects is the first effective teaching strategy. Chapter 4 discusses the role of critical self-reflection and the need for documentation of this reflection, the second effective teaching strategy. The third strategy for more effective teaching involves evidence-based decision making to guide practice and is the topic of chapter 5. Since many professors may not know the appropriate literature to support teaching, I devote chapter 6 to how to find such literature in your discipline and in general.