NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

This "A-word" often crops up with another A-word—"accountability." Last year's Teaching Committee of the Faculty Assembly at UCD recognized how often faculty and institutions are under mandates to assess teaching, and therefore the committee selected "Assessment" as the theme topic to be focused on by this office in academic year 95-96.

There is good reason for this selection; assessment done poorly can at best be a waste of time and at worst be destructive to collegiality. However, when well done, assessment can improve the quality and enjoyment of teaching. An institution that learns to do it well can give itself some deserved accolades—both for avoiding constructing a house of horrors and for generating many options for continuous improvement.

In the August issue (v. 4, n. 4) of this newsletter, we described the core of building our personal teaching system as resting in being able to define the key points of our own teaching philosophy. Thereafter, "assessment" becomes a fairly straightforward exercise of demonstrating that we practice our philosophy and that we produce good results.

Assessment can begin at (1) the level of daily or weekly inspections of our classes by classroom assessment techniques (CATs). These are largely brief instruments like the "one-minute" or "muddiest point" papers. These methods provide quality controls that help us to know if our students are learning in the ways that we believe that they are, and define those topics that are giving our students the most difficulties. Assessment can also take the form of (2) inventorying what teaching skills are actually being employed in our classes. Formative surveys such as UCD's 60 point "Survey of Classroom Skills" help us to analyze our teaching and to see what more we can do to improve students' learning. We are all familiar with (3) summative evaluation through the CU System's Faculty Course Questionnaire (FCQ), which primarily measures students' overall satisfaction with the course and instructor. For complete assessment, we also need (4) a fairly direct measure of students' learning such as a knowledge survey given before and after the course or a review of exams, quizzes, or graded projects.

A "teaching portfolio" is a way of presenting our teaching philosophy, assessments and other supporting materials in a brief package that will allow any reviewer to easily see what we do and what results we obtain. In the forthcoming months, we will present workshops and newsletters that detail all of these aspects of assessment. A high point of the year will be a workshop on the teaching portfolio led by the dean of teaching portfolios himself, Peter Seldin of Pace University, on February 2, 1996. The next issue of Nutshell Notes will provide details on signing up for this workshop.