Workshop on How (And How Not) To Evaluate Teaching

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Call for participation 

Prof. Richard Felder & Dr. Rebecca Brent will be coming to Malaysia to conduct a series of workshops. Below are the workshops planned:

WORKSHOP 2
A half-day Workshop on HOW (AND HOW NOT) TO EVALUATE TEACHING
Date: 23 May 2014 | Time: 9.00am – 12.00pm  | Venue: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru
Fees: Early Bird RM300 (USD 150) | Normal Fees RM400 (USD 200)

The usual way to evaluate how well a course was taught is to survey the students at the end of the course and compile and average the ratings. If the rating form was carefully designed and validated, this procedure provides unique and important information, but by itself it is not adequate to provide a good comprehensive evaluation of teaching quality. Students are not in a position to judge certain aspects of instruction, such as whether the course learning objectives were appropriate, the content was up-to-date, the instruction followed well-established pedagogical principles, and the instructor had an adequate mastery of the subject. Only peers can do that.

Recognizing this situation, a growing number of institutions have begun to include peer review of teaching in faculty performance evaluations, but here too there are problems. In most peer reviews a faculty member observes a single lecture, notes whatever catches his or her attention, draws conclusions that may reflect questionable preconceptions of what constitutes good teaching, and files a report. This procedure does not provide a reliable assessment of teaching quality: an observation conducted by a different observer or by the same observer on another day could lead to completely different conclusions.

There are better ways to evaluate teaching. The goals of this workshop are to present methods that have been proved effective and to equip participants to design an evaluation process that meets the needs of their department. The workshop addresses the following questions :

  1. How can I get reliable and valid student evaluations of teaching?
  2. How can I get reliable and valid peer ratings of teaching?
  3. How can I evaluate teaching performance comprehensively and effectively?
  4. How can I use evaluations to improve teaching quality (formative evaluation)?

Please browse our site for more information on the workshops listed above. More info can be obtained from the attached brochure. Please click here I-PHEX2014brochure to download the brochure