A Web Site Helps Faculty Members Assess Their Instructional Goals

Have you ever done a task so routinely in your daily life that you no longer need to think about the steps it takes to accomplish said task? For instance, think about the first time you made your favorite dish for dinner. You probably took out the recipe, went to the store to gather the necessary ingredients, and then step-by-step worked your way through the preparation steps. When you were finished and enjoyed the dish, you said, “I will make this again.” Thus, as human behavior allows, each and every time you made this dish, you got better at not needing to refer to the recipe after every step and eventually it became a task that needed no instruction, no forethought… it became habit. I would contend this sort of conditioning is not only present in our daily task accomplishment, such as cooking or driving to a destination, but also in our professional lives as educators and student affairs professionals.

A few weeks ago in class, when discussing the hot topic of “faculty buy-in,” it was mentioned that faculty would avoid assessment if it was imposed upon them. One reason for this hesitancy to “acclimate” was because faculty become comfortable in their teaching ways – they do not want someone else to come in and tell them how they need to teach, what they need to teach, or to impose assessment on them – thus they shy away from investment into a new program, whether that be a curriculum change or assessment additions.

This conversation in class got my intellectual wheels turning, asking myself, why faculty would be so blatantly opposed to adding new information and teaching techniques to their repertoire if it was to support better teaching and student learning? But then it hit me, just like the aforementioned recipe example, faculty members who have been teaching for x number of years, no longer need to think about what they’re teaching, as they’ve already set out course objectives and goals ages ago – and as the old adage goes, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Thus, why would a faculty member or educator take time out of their already busy day to rework the wheel? It makes sense from a practical point of view related to time management and efficiency, and of course comfort.

However, as easy as it would be to say all professors or educators are lazy who disregard the addition of assessment means into their curriculum, I personally do not think that is the case. Why would someone commit years of their life to the study of education or a particular field with the intention of teaching only to become lazy and/or be unmotivated to enhance student learning? In my opinion, they just wouldn’t. However before you start rolling your eyes at my blissful ignorance, I would like to say, I do have a disclaimer: Although, I would like to be an idealist and think every educator across the country loves teaching and enjoys seeing students learn, I am aware that this is only idealism speaking and not reality; there are individuals who enter education so they can do research, there are educators who simply sought education after their perfect plan didn’t work out so perfectly, and then there are those who simply wouldn’t and don’t give a rat’s behind about student learning, it was just a job they qualified for and have stuck with it because it pays the bills. However, although acknowledging those anomaly educators, those that are in education for extraneous reasons, I would contend there is another “beast” out there preventing true educators from seeking the adoption of assessment into their classrooms. Thus, I set out to find potentially a more viable reason as to why educators would veer away from the adoption of assessment tools in their curricula.

As I was perusing Chronicle articles, I found one regarding faculty assessment of their personal instructional goals and then it hit me... What if faculty shy away from assessment because their frame of mind regarding what assessment is and how it can help them be better educators is dated and inaccurate as to what assessment really is today in the year 2010? Assessment, as a field, has only gained a lot of attention in the last decade or so, thus in the wonderful world of academia it is a fairly new area of study. And how many of us have had professors that seemed to have been teaching since the beginning of time? These faculty members may not know the importance of assessment or how one can assess without a standardized test because previously that was what assessment looked like – a paper and pencil fill in the bubble test.

So when I read Jessica Ludwig’s article, A web site helps faculty members assess their instructional goals, I was intrigued. Ms. Ludwig’s article explained how Tom Rocklin, an educational psychology professor at the University of Iowa, had taken the “Teaching Goals Inventory,” from our Angelo and Cross text, and made it an electronic survey for educators to take in order to assess and improve their instructional goals. The survey is available on the web at the following address: http://fm.iowa.uiowa.edu/fmi/xsl/tgi/data_entry.xsl?-db=tgi_data&-lay=Layout01&-view and allows educators to access it worldwide. The survey is a compilation of 52 educational goals that instructors are asked to rank from “not applicable” to “essential.” Once the survey is complete, the electronic survey categorizes or groups the results into “clusters” and shows the instructor which instructional goals they consider to be most important in their field of study, and inherently those that should be valued in their classroom objectives and course curriculum.

Rocklin stated in the article, “The exercise is not so much an evaluation as a ‘front-end planning tool.’” The site allows faculty and educators to anonymously evaluate their instructional goals without the pressure of someone else peering over their shoulder, and then after they receive their output or feedback they will be better equipped to create course goals and objectives with the “essential” components being capitalized upon. The site has served educators from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from nursing, to math, to special education.

Thus, maybe educators and faculty are not necessarily against or opposed to assessment plans, instead maybe they just don’t know what their goals or objectives should be anymore because the goals and objectives that used to work, when they first began teaching, are out of date and no longer match with the changing times and the ever-changing values associated with education or a specific field of study. Therefore, it might be time to break the monotony, and find a new “recipe” for assessment and instruction, one they need to follow step-by-step for awhile. When professors and educators create new instructional goals and objective plans, plans which place value on education and assessment so that our students can get ahead and meet the ever-demanding needs of our fast-paced world and changing economy, that is when education not only becomes informative, but also transformative.

Ludwig, J. (2000, November 3). A web site helps faculty members assess their instructional goals. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/A-Web-Site-Helps-Faculty-Me/36367/