Teaching Tips Chapters (23-24)

Teaching Tips Chapters (23-24) Appraising and Improving your Teaching: Using students, Peers, Experts, and Classroom Research. • Prepared By:Muhammed Bakir Suleiman

Appraising and Improving your Teaching: Using students, Peers, Experts, and Classroom Research. • Improvement in teaching can be obtained from number of sources, including experiences in the classroom, reading about teaching, attending workshops and seminar and conversations with colleagues and students.

Challenges of Change: • 1-Intellectual:professors’ curiosity and creativity contribute to their success in academia. • 2-Motivational : college teachers are motivated to seek feedback. • 3-Social : professors know what is expected of them and want to be highly regarded socially.

Ways of finding new ideas for change are the following: • 1-Reading about teaching • Reading about teaching goes far behind despite having abundance of books, periodicals and newsletters about pedagogy. • 2-Workshops and Seminars • Another way of getting knowledge about teaching is through attending seminars and workshops. • 3-Conversations about teaching • Conversations with colleagues about methods and content are very fruitful.

New Ideas Prepare the Way for Change • It is certain that new ideas from reading, workshops, and conversations create conditions favorable for change. • New knowledge and Concepts Modify Cognitive Structures • Reading about attribution theory, for example, provides a wealth of knowledge and concepts. • New Skills Modify Practices • A new technique which is used in workshops and seminars is “wait time” that is the skill of pausing for an interval after posing a question.

Classroom Research • Classroom research and classroom assessment are very practical ways to appraise and improve teaching that are under the control of teachers themselves. It is a systematic inquiry designed and conducted for the purpose of increasing insight and understanding of the relationships between teaching and learning.

Another framework for change is called The Seven principles for Good Practice which are the following: • 1-Encourage student-faculty contact. 2-Encourage co-operation among the students. • 3-Encoursge active learning.(Use of role playing, or simulations, use field trips or internships). • 4-Give prompt feedback. • 5-Emphasize time on task. • 6-Commuinicate high expectations. • 7-Respect different learning styles and talents

Evaluate Your Efforts • A number of evaluation challenges should be addressed when teachers evaluate their efforts: • First, using different methods of teaching and not having enough research of comparison between the methods. • A second methodological problem is establishing a suitable control group. • The third problem is in establishing controls that the conditions of the experiment may introduce special factors that interfere with normal results.

A fourth problem is biased sampling. Students taking courses at a distant location learn as much as those on campus. • A fifth problem arises in the statistical methods used to analyze the results of teaching methods experiments. • A sixth problem is the interaction among teaching methods, student characteristics, teacher characteristics and other variables.

Uses of Student Ratings • There are four construction purposes for student ratings: • 1-Improve teaching. • 2-Providing data about teaching effectiveness. • 3-Aiding student choice of course and structure. • 4-Stimulating students to think about their education.

Choosing Items • In choosing items appropriate for different goals, you may be helped by differentiating five types of items: • 1-Items in which students report classroom events or teacher behaviors. • 2-Items reporting the student’s perception of his or her achievement of course goals. • 3-Items reporting the student’s own evaluation of the effectiveness of different aspects of the courses. • 4-Items reporting the student’s own behavior or thinking in the course. • 5-Items reporting student satisfaction.

Items for Improving Instruction • The use of student ratings is likely to result in improvement when (1) the ratings provide new information, (2) the teacher is motivated to improve; or(3) the teacher can use alternative methods of teaching. • When to Ask: The Value of Early Feedback • Teachers who gather information through early feedback show that they care about the quality of teaching and about the views of their students.

The following are sample items that can be asked on early feedback surveys: • 1-Learning objectives. • 2-Cousre structure. • 3-Content delivery. • 4-Student participation. • 5-Evalaution. • 6-Clasroom climate.

Using feedback to Improve • When you get your feedback, you have to use it effectively. How? • 1-Don’t become obsessed with the criticisms and negative ratings of a few students. • 2-Ask a colleague or consultant to go over the ratings with you to help interpret them. • 3-Summarize your impressions and plans for change and continuity.

Chapter 24 Ethics In College Teaching • What is ethics? • “Ethical standards are intended to guide us in carrying out the responsibilities we have to the different groups with whom we interact. And ethics violations can occur when we are tempted to act contrary to these standards.

Responsibilities to students • The author depending on both The American Association of University Professors (AAVP)and the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) gives some guidelines of responsibilities to students: • 1-To encourage the free pursuit of learning.. • 2-To demonstrate respect for students. • .3-To respect confidentiality. • 4-To model the best scholarly and ethical standards. • 5-Enhancing honest academic conduct. • 6-Avoiding exploitation, harassment, or discrimination

Teaching Tips Chapters (23-24)