Documenting Your Teaching
Since many of us are still early in our terms (those on the quarterly systems are just beginning), I thought I would share an article entitled, “Documenting your Teaching: A Guide to Promote Reflective and Responsive Instruction” by Spicer-Escalante and Read (2022). The authors shared details on how to capture and reflect on our teaching using various tools, of which you can select the ones that best fit your approach. The article provides guidelines for how you can collect, explain, and showcase effective instruction for dossiers based on materials from oneself/others, and products of effective teaching and student learning (Seldin et al, 2010).
You may recall some of these tools from Berks 2005 article, “Survey of 12 Strategies to Measure Teaching Effectiveness” where he suggested the following sources of evidence to measure teaching effectiveness: (a) student ratings, (b) peer ratings, (c) self-evaluation, (d) videos, (e) student interviews, (f) alumni ratings, (g) employer ratings, (h) administrator ratings, (i) teaching scholarship, (j) teaching awards, (k) learning outcome measures, and (l) teaching portfolios.
In today's article, the authors suggest data which could be collected which include:
Teaching responsibilities (or perhaps opportunities);
Teaching philosophy
Active teaching methods
Journaling about your teaching
Self and Collaborative Assessment (class observations)
Products of effective teaching and learning such as
student scores before and after a unit/concept;
student essays, creative work, fieldwork reports;
student conference presentations; and
examples of graded student essays along with your comments.
Realizing all of this data collection takes time, which is always in short supply, perhaps identify only a couple of these techniques and gather a little data at a time to help your continuous pursuit of teaching excellence.
References
Spicer-Escalante, M., & Read, S. (2022). Documenting your teaching: A guide to promote reflective and responsive instruction, Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence, 6(2), Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26077/b22a-7f64
