Top Ten Ways to Investigate Classroom Teaching

1. Top Ten Ways to Investigate Classroom Teaching How do I truly know; let me count the ways.

2. An Evaluator’s Challenge: • How to discover what classroom teaching and learning experiences are taking place? • How to identify the effects of those teaching and learning experiences on the teacher and the students? • How to describe, understand, and communicate the teaching/learning relationships that may lead to more effective classroom outcomes?

3. And what if the evaluator is not available to do all the work?

4. How can you help K-16 teachers to evaluate their own classrooms?

5. Continuum of Evaluation Strategies • Systematic examination of one’s own classroom teaching demands time, resources, expertise and EFFORT. • It is unreasonable to expect any instructor to implement the same kinds of designs and methods used by an evaluation expert. • It is reasonable to make instructors aware of a variety of techniques that can provide helpful feedback to improve teaching decisions and student learning.

6. Continuum of Evaluation Strategies • Order these evaluation options according to: • The number of individuals needed for the evaluation: • Yourself • Your students • Your colleagues • Your evaluator • The needed resources • The amount of time • The amount of expertise

7. Continuum of Evaluation Strategies • All these ways can provide helpful feedback to improve teaching and learning. • As the evaluation strategies increase in complexity, conclusions about your own classroom can have increasing levels of certainty and recommendations beyond your classroom can have increasing generalizability.

8. Top Ten List Ways to Investigate Your Classroom Teaching

9. #10 What did my students think they learned in class? • Daily Student Feedback • What do you think is the most important thing you learned today? • What questions do you still have about today’s topic? • How did you feel about today’s class activities? • Weekly Student Feedback • What did you learn this week? • What most helped you learn in the course this week? • Suggest course activities and assignments that might help you learn even better.

10. Harvard One-Minute Evaluation • "What was the most important thing you learned during this class?" • "What important question remains unanswered?” One-Minute Evaluation Questionnaire Resource

11. #9 What do I think about today’s class? • Your classroom as “Research Lab,” “Field Site,” or “Virtual Test Pad” • Keep a “lab notebook” or “field journal” recording your observations, interpretations, and/or reflections after every class. • Self-Assessment: Use these notes to identify which new techniques work well; what contextual factors influence effectiveness; and how you can improve the experience.

12. Scholastic Self-Assessment Checklist on Assessment

13. #8 What do my students think about my teaching methods? • Pretest/Posttest students on the learning value they ascribe to the various teaching principles and learning activities • Active student learning through up-to-date teaching technologies and methods • Interconnectedness to other disciplines and to the natural world • Critical thinking about current events and practical applications to students’ own lives • Effective interactions among students and appropriate analysis of information • Reflecting standards-based curriculum {from VCEPT project.

15. #7 How do my students feel about their ability in this subject? • What are students’ attitudes toward STEM and WHAM subject matter? • Science, Technology, Engineering, Math • Writings, History, Arts, Music • How confident are students in their own background knowledge and understanding in this subject? • Pretest/Posttest students on their self-assessed knowledge, skills, and attitudes in your course.

17. #6 What have my students learned in my course? • Assess the change in students’ understanding by the end of your course • Select a sample of key questions measuring the essential knowledge and skill course objectives (e.g. from previous year’s homework, quizzes, and exams) • Pretest/Posttest students with these questions (On the pretest allow students to answer “I don’t know”) • Analyze the Pretest and Posttest differences to identify effective and ineffective student learning areas

19. #5 How do my students do on standardized achievement tests? • Compare your students’ knowledge and understanding to “external” measures • Identify a standardized exam or standardized test items your students should have learned in your course [from Praxis test; mandated state exams; TIMMS; NAEP; and/or published college content exams, e.g. Force Concept Inventory] • Pretest/Posttest students using this standardized exam or your set of standardized test items

20. Comparisons with the Best

21. #4 How do my students’ opinions compare to other students? • Assess the change in students’ attitudes in reform courses and in more traditional courses • Find a K-12 colleague who teaches the same subject in the same grade or a course with the same state standards. • Find a college colleague who teaches a different section of your course, the same course in a different semester, or a course with similar students. • Pretest/Posttest students’ attitudes in both courses about the use of preferred teaching practices and their own confidence levels before and after the different courses.

24. #3 What are we all actually doing during class? • Conduct systematic classroom observations • Use an observation checklist that records both teacher and student behaviors, e.g. number & types of teacher questions; accuracy & types of student answers {PRS}; types of classroom instructional strategies; level of student engagement; target cognitive skills levels, and so on • Have a colleague or student assist you

29. #2 How much do my students learn compared to other students? • To what extent are there student achievement differences between reform and traditional courses? • Work with a colleague who also teaches your course to develop areliable and valid student test of the most important course objectives • Discuss the specific instructional practices and course components both instructors use • Document the amount of “reform” and “traditional” teaching practices your colleague and you use in each course (the #3 way) • Pretest/Posttest students in both courses and compare student achievement with different teaching practices

31. And the #1 Way to Assess Classroom Learning Effectiveness

32. #1 How much do studentsreally learn in reform and traditional courses? • Compare equivalent students’ achievement in both reform and traditional courses • Identify multiple ways to assess students’ learning in a reform and traditional course[e.g. standardized and teacher-made tests; homework; novel problems; papers, projects – any valuable learning outcome.] • Pretest/Posttest students in both reform and traditional courses using these multiple assessment tools {Solomon four-group design!} • Compare patterns of student learning across--and within– courses • Carefully document exactly what happened in both types of courses {fidelity of treatment}

33. How can I evaluate…Let me count the ways.