AME Teaching

This week I have enjoyed several chats on how to evaluate effective teaching. Typically, I try to frame this as Assess, Measure and Evaluate (AME) Teaching. So, I would like to share several resources that might provide support for those of us striving for continuous improvement and realize the severe shortcomings of student evaluation of teaching (SET). You may recall an article that I shared in December 2018 on the problems with SETs, where I shared Berks (2005) article on Twelve Strategies to Measure Teaching Effectiveness. For today's article, Chick (2021) at Rollins University has compiled a useful set of definitions and resources for measuring effective instruction. The website shares three basic steps for evaluating teaching:

Defining Effective Teaching
Understanding Your Lens
Using Tools to Guide Your Evaluation

For the Lens section, the author shares the resource, “How to Document Effective Teaching” by Brookfield, which presents a framework of four lenses for examining teaching through one’s own; one’s students'; one’s peers’; and the literature on teaching and learning. The author reinforces Berk's (2005) work sharing ways to collect evidence on effective teaching, which can include a) class observation, b) teaching narratives, c) teaching artifacts, d) external letters, and of course e) students’ perspectives (note the focus is on student perception, not evaluation).

The website provides a selection of instruments, ranging from simple to complex:

A simple observation tool focusing on instructor’s goals, alignment of activities, student engagement, and instructor awareness of learning.
A rubric based on USC’s detailed definition of excellence in teaching.
A rubric and documentation tools based on Barbeau & Happel’s six categories of “Critical Teaching Behaviors,” “evidence-based instructor behaviors proven effective in increasing learning gains and retention.”
An instrument based on Chickering & Gamson’s “7 Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” with indicators for evidence for each and where it can be observed in F2F or hybrid/virtual courses.