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

In order to make appropriate changes to improve your teaching and your students' learning, first you need to know how you're teaching now. Figure it out for yourself and invigorate your teaching on your own terms! This practical, evidence-based guide promotes excellence in teaching and improved student learning through self-reflection and self-assessment of one's teaching. Faculty developer Phyllis Blumberg starts by reviewing the current approaches to instructor evaluation and describes their inadequacies. She then presents a new model of assessing teaching that builds on a broader base of evidence and sources of support, guided by four principles: consider the essential elements of effective, excellent teaching; critically self-reflect and document to discover ways to teach better, relying on information from many sources; use evidence from literature on teaching and learning or data you've collected yourself to make decisions about your teaching; use systematic data about your teaching and peer review to inform ways to improve teaching. From this new model Blumberg has developed self-assessment rubrics, available online for a variety of disciplines, including the performing and visual arts and the hard sciences, which the book will guide you in using. To illustrate the model, she includes case studies of completed critical reflection rubrics from a variety of teaching venues such as the classroom, research mentoring, and supervising experiential learning in health care to show how they can be used in different ways and how to explore the richness of the data you'll uncover. "Blumberg's elegantly organized continuous growth model for college-level instructors is the next best thing to having a faculty developer by your side. This book lays out the improvement process so clearly that faculty can implement it on their own." — Linda Nilson , author, Teaching at Its Best

Preface ix The Author xiii 1 Growing Your Teaching Effectiveness: An Overview 1 PART 1 A TEACHING MODEL THAT PROMOTES BETTER LEARNING 15 2 Beliefs Leading to Better Teaching 15 3 Essential Aspects of Effective Teaching 29 4 Documenting Critical Self–Refl ection of Teaching 49 5 Evidence–Based Approaches to Enhance Teaching 65 6 Finding and Using Literature to Promote Better Teaching 83 PART 2 A MODEL TO ASSESS TEACHING TO PROMOTE BETTER LEARNING 97 7 Principles of Assessing Teaching 97 8 Model for Assessing Teaching 115 PART 3 SELFƪASSESSMENT RUBRICS 129 9 How to Assess Teaching Using Rubrics Based on the Assessment Model 129 10 What These Rubrics Assess, and How That Improves Teaching 153 CASES SHOWING EFFECTIVE USES FOR THE RUBRICS 171 Introduction 171 1 How a Beginning Assistant Professor Used Rubrics to Plan and Track Her Personal Faculty Development 175 2 How a Faculty Developer Used the Rubrics with a Pretenure Instructor to Facilitate Improvement 187 3 How an Experienced Professor Used the Rubrics to Document Her Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 197 4 How a Pretenured Professor Used the Rubrics to Assess His Mentoring Undergraduate and Graduate Students in Research 207 5 How an Experienced Clinical Professor Used the Rubrics to Assess His Changed Roles While Precepting or Supervising Students in Hospital Settings 217 Comparisons among the Cases 229 References 233 Appendix: Rubrics for Self–Assessment of Teaching: Tools for Improving Different Types of Teaching 241 Index 323 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 josseybasshi.ghered.

Phyllis Blumberg is director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. She is the author of Developing Learner-Centered Teaching: A Practical Guide for Faculty from Jossey-Bass.