Resources
Actual students weigh-in on what they like and dislike in how a syllabus is constructed.
Don't wait for an end-term course evaluation. Find out how your course is working in time to make improvements.
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: In order to make appropriate changes to improve your teaching and your students’ learning, first you need to know how you’re teaching now. Figure it out for yourself and invigorate your teaching on your own terms! This practical evidence-based guide promotes excellence in teaching and improved student learning through self-reflection and self-assessment of one’s teaching. Phyllis Blumberg starts by reviewing the current approaches to instructor evaluation and describes their inadequacies. She then presents a new model of assessing teaching that builds upon a broader base of evidence and sources of support. This new model leads to self-assessment rubrics, which are available for download, and the book will guide you in how to use them. The book includes case studies of completed critical reflection rubrics from a variety of disciplines, including the performing and visual arts and the hard sciences, to show how they can be used in different ways and how to explore the richness of the data you’ll uncover. (From the Publisher)
Student ratings of instruction are hotly debated on many college campuses. Unfortunately these debates are often uninformed by the extensive research on this topic.
Podcast Series. This podcast series includes interviews with BYU faculty as well as excerpts from invited speakers. We offer them in multiple formats to make it easy to watch and listen at work, home, or on your iPod. You might even choose to use a clip from one of the presentations in your teaching.
Peer review provides informed considerations of a candidate’s teaching that student ratings cannot address: breadth, depth, and rigor of course objectives and materials; patterns of and procedures for course management; and a contextualized sense of the interactions between teacher and students as a whole.
Teaching portfolios: formatively, the portfolio helps you reflect systematically and regularly upon your teaching; summatively, portfolios provide a much more comprehensive and accurate picture of your teaching than any other single device.
While student ratings of instruction (commonly called course evaluations) are usually seen as a form of summative evaluation of a course and an instructor, they can also be used to improve a course and an instructor’s teaching.
Interpreting student ratings of instruction can be challenging, but these guidelines and suggestions will help you extract useful information from your student ratings.
A quick review of the concept and basic contents of a teaching portfolio, by Boston University's Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.