Evaluate your Teaching Practice
Evaluating and reflecting on your teaching and professional development is central to becoming a more effective teacher. This section considers how you might apply these principles in your teaching practice, including prompts for undertaking professional development to improve your teaching and share what you have learned with others. One way to think about evaluating your practice might be to ask yourself, "What do I want to know or demonstrate about my teaching?" This helps you to decide what sort of feedback you need and, therefore, what sort of evaluation needs to be carried out.
Formative evaluation asks, “How is my teaching going?”
It provides information on the effectiveness of your teaching. You should collect data at the early or mid-way points of the course, allowing you to assess your performance and modify your teaching accordingly. Formative evaluation can be directed at the student learning experience as a whole (levels of satisfaction, engagement and support) or a particular aspect of teaching and learning (the formative evaluation of a new teaching resource). Formative evaluation is geared towards professional development and improvement.
Summative evaluation asks, “How did my teaching go?”
It is usually carried out at the end of a course and generally measures the student’s learning experience overall (levels of satisfaction, engagement and provided support). However, a formative evaluation can be directed towards a particular aspect of teaching (e.g. a new approach such as case-based learning). Summative evaluation informs summary judgements of teachers, the appropriateness of course material, learning, teaching and assessment methods, and provides information for quality assurance and external review.
The University uses a centralised online system to support summative courses and teaching evaluations for most formal courses. You can keep up to date with evaluation policy by visiting the university's page on ‘SET’ (Summative Evaluation Tool)
Types of Evidence
We can obtain feedback on our teaching from different sources - informal and formal. These include our own reflective practice from peers and students. Together, this feedback provides us with evidence of teaching effectiveness and helps us to determine where improvements might be made.
Student feedback
Examples include questionnaire surveys, interviews, focus groups and informal feedback during classes. Students are considered "cognitive witnesses", fair and reasonable judges about the quality of teaching that they experience. While student evaluation is useful, it has its limitations and data gathered from student evaluation should be triangulated with other forms of evaluation, such as self-evaluation and peer review.
Peer review
Peer evaluation involves obtaining collegial feedback on the quality of teaching through the teacher inviting constructive criticism of their teaching. Peer evaluation has the potential to provide important insights into teaching practice that cannot be obtained through other sources. The observation typically provides feedback on teaching style and method (as opposed to content) and is usually structured as follows:
- Pre-observation discussion in which the observer and the observed meet briefly to agree on the aspects of teaching that will be observed;
- The act of observing and recording what is observed and
- The debrief is carried out as soon as possible after the observation and may include oral and/or written feedback.
The FMHS has developed its own resources for peer review.
- See FMHS Peer observation of teaching on the intranet.
- The Faculty maintains a list of staff with experience in peer-reviewing teaching, which you can also access in the link above. You may wish to ask one of them to observe your teaching and give you some feedback.
If you want to initiate a peer observation on your own, the University of Auckland provides resources to support this process - TeachWell Peer review resources.
University policies suggest/require that a beginning teacher should seek peer review of their teaching within the first two years of teaching. Including evidence that your teaching has been reviewed is currently required for people seeking continuation at or promotion to the level of associate professor or professor.
Self-review and reflection
Self-evaluation is at the heart of good evaluative practice and a key part of professional reflective practice. Reflecting on your teaching helps to improve students' educational experience and identify areas for professional development. It might also help you to prepare for a performance review and assess your readiness to apply for promotion and continuation. One example of self-evaluation is a reflective journal in which you record your thoughts after teaching events.
Questions that you might want to consider include:
- Did I meet the aims that I established for my teaching?
- What techniques did or did not work?
- Did the students appear lost at any stage?
You may also want to consider videotaping some of your classes and viewing them at a later stage. Videotaping your teaching could also be used as a resource for your colleagues to view and offer constructive criticism.
Developing your teaching practice
Academics with teaching responsibility must frequently review their teaching skills and undertake professional development aimed at enhancing their teaching capacity. The University provides workshops throughout the year. You can view the topics and dates and book workshops on career tools on the university intranet.
At the FMHS
Both the Centre for Medical and Health Sciences Education (CMHSE) and the Learning Technology Unit (LTU) run workshops, research meetings and seminars on various topics throughout the academic year. The CMHSE also offers postgraduate qualifications in clinical teaching, which for teachers involved in clinical education, may be an alternative to the CLeaR postgraduate programme.
Within the Schools, a number of educational courses and programmes are also provided, which may be more discipline or profession-specific.
Beyond the University
Other ways of staying up to date with teaching practices include being involved with educational projects (particularly those working collaboratively between institutions, countries or professions) and attending educational conferences or subject or profession-specific conferences and meetings with an education focus. Increasingly, health professional education is moving towards sharing practice across professions and working interprofessionally. Finally, reading subject discipline or educational books and journals is helpful to keep in touch with new ideas, innovations and practices in your own subject area and more widely. This type of engagement (Scholarly teaching) is also important to consider when seeking promotion - you can read more about it in the following section (Contribute to scholarship, research and professional activity).
Measuring Impact
Dr Thomas Guskey - a CPD expert at the University of Kentucky - has suggested that there are three ways to evaluate the impact of CPD:
- We might measure changes in beliefs and attitudes about teaching;
- We might measure changes in educational practice;
- We might measure changes in student learning, e.g. improved learning outcomes.
The final measure would seem to be the most important - ultimately, we want to know that CPD resulted in changes in student learning. This change might be an improvement in the student experience of learning. For example, students might report that they enjoyed learning more as a result of a change in teaching methods. This is important as we want students to enjoy their learning so that they have a passion for the subject and so that they leave university as lifelong learners. Change might also be measured in terms of improvements in student learning i.e. better outcomes. While it can be difficult to isolate improvements that result from a CPD activity, an attempt has to be made.
Practice Points - Narratives about your Evaluation Practice
- Maintain a record of the sorts of evaluations you routinely use to monitor your teaching effectiveness. These could range from 'quick and dirty questionnaires' to the University's evaluation forms. Where any of these exercises have raised issues for you, record these and document the steps you have taken to address them.
- Some thoughts about maintaining a record of evaluation were set out in the Evaluating Teaching Practice section. It is vital that you maintain a longitudinal record of the evaluations you have done and the responses made. This includes evidence that you have opened yourself up to reviews of teaching by your peers, have records of these, and have recorded the steps taken to address a reviewer's comments. You should maintain evidence that you are seeking feedback about your teaching from students and that you are acting on that feedback. You should be able to demonstrate that your evaluation practices are in line with the University's assessment policies.
Further Resources