Assessment of Classroom Instruction
1. Choose an Appropriate Focus Class
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Using Success to Discover Best Practices
The goal of RISD classroom assessment is to develop best practices from successful teaching. In order to do this, it's important to start with a single class that you're comfortable teaching; one that you feel is successful. In this way you can begin to understand just what it is that makes the class a success for both you and your students. A common mistake is to begin too aggressively by attempting to assess many classes in a single semester. The below five questions (Cross & Angelo, p. 47) can be useful in selecting your first class to assess.
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Have you taught this course before? |
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Will you be teaching this course again soon? |
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Overall, do you feel this course goes well? |
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Is there a specific, reasonably limited element of the course that you would like to improve? |
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Will you have the time, energy, and opportunity to carry out an assessment and take appropriate follow-up measures in this course? |
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If you answered "no" to any of these questions, you may want to consider another course for your first project. It is possible to select a class which fails question number 3 above, but this is called a "problem first" approach, which is not recommended. If the instructor feels that the class is not going well, assessment will merely prove her assumption correct. It's considered more effective to discover what is going right, and then, through the process of reflection, to transfer this success to your other classes.
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