Teaching, Assessment and Responsive Pedagogy
It was late at night at the Atlanta Sakai conference and I was thinking a little more about making pithy statements about the practice of teaching. At the tech demo table for Goal Aware tools I was asked whether I thought that faculty would be resistant to using Goal Aware tools to markup their assignments with the learning outcomes that they are supposed to be addressing and then thoughtfully rate students' performance towards learning outcomes. I am not qualified to answer (I am not a teacher) but that won't stop me from thinking a little about it...I'll even think out loud. It helps ground me in the rationale for the Goal Aware tools idea.
The movement toward standardization of learning outcomes in general is met with resistance. Whenever an outside agency steps in to regulate or inspect or make change in an existing system, those vested in that system are going to resist. The accrediting body for the School of Education doesn't force the schools that it inspects to adopt their standards, however. NCATE requires that the school articulate their own expectations of students. While not at all a trivial task, this makes the pill easier to swallow (doesn't it?). Even though the consensus building effort is extremely laborious (or so I have heard), I know that during the process faculty know that this is probably good medicine.When that consensus building process finishes its first iteration, I think you can hear the sigh of relief in surrounding hills and towns. There is real sense of accomplishment.
They don't say, "Hooray! Now we can get to work measuring student progress toward our outcomes; finding ways to improve our classes; adjusting our programs and our curriculum. After that maybe we can set new goals and outcomes for round two!"
Nope, you won't get a sigh of relief about that. This is endless work. Iterative and continuous work that conscientious teachers and administrators have to struggle with. The time and energy to generate good assessment data that can be relied upon to draw conclusions about the program and the classes will take away from the time spent doing other things such as research, planning new lessons and talking to students. To the less insightful it may seem counterproductive. Plenty of arguements can (and have) been made against it.
As a student in classes, I have experienced plenty of instances in my programs (not in the SOE) where I suspected that the faculty weren't on the same page. I realized that there wasn't a flow in the program. Assumptions were made about what I would know before I came into the class. I recall taking exams where scores were abysmally low, but corrected by grading on a curve. I've always thought there was something wrong with that as a student.
Imagine a class where students were supposed to be taught to swim. The faculty in the program expect students to emerge from the class being able to swim a variety of strokes and to be able to tread water. In this imaginary class the instructor sees that students are not learning to swim, for whatever reason. Maybe his methods aren't very good. Maybe his assumptions about what students already were capable of were off. Maybe students are distracted by too much chlorine in the water or they have poor eating habits. A reasonable action to take would be to adjust and respond to this signal. However, this teacher decides to lower the water level in the pool until the normal distribution of student height in the class yields the appearance of a class of students treading water and swimming across the pool. Progress as expected. Pity these students and the teacher of the next course in the sequence of the program: Lifesaving 101.
That's a silly example, isn't it? We know that good teachers need to be responsive to the results of the assessments they give. In the most fortuitous cases, this means that the teacher will be able to make up the gap between their own assumptions about students and learning in order to meet the goals of their class. In the less fortuitous case, goals must be adjusted. Communication has to happen outside the classroom. Programs may need tweaking. That is more work. It is essential work. In many cases it may be unappreciated work.