Category Archives: Assignments

Peer Review of Teaching

The University of British Columbia is moving towards emphasizing and improving the practice of peer review of teaching. This website explains the project and its history:  http://ctlt.ubc.ca/about-isotl/programs-events/ubc-peer-review-of-teaching-initiative/

I have recently received a draft of a set of guidelines for the Faculty of Arts, a draft that is still in development so what I say below may change. But still, I find the whole project very interesting and potentially quite valuable.

Explanation and evaluation of some specific aspects of the program:

1. Data sources for peer evaluation of teaching are wider than just one class visit. The guidelines give several options for other sources, stating that not all of these need to be used. Some options:  course materials, such as syllabi, assignment instructions, even possibly samples of student work; one or more meetings with the instructor; meeting with students; statement of teaching philosophy; past student evaluation results; contributions to curriculum or new course development; innovations in teaching practices and/or use of technology; evidence of professional development re: teaching beyond the classroom; evidence of reflection upon teaching; teaching load (number and types of courses); grad students supervised; grad student publications and awards; information solicited from grad students. This seems an excellent way to get a better picture of someone’s teaching capacities than just visiting one course meeting. Of course, it has to be handled carefully within departments so that what is requested of each person in terms of documentation is relatively uniform so as to avoid perceptions of unfairness. Considerations of workload come in here too–gathering and looking over this information can take a significant amount of time and effort, on the part of both the reviewer and the instructor him/herself.

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Potential problems with comments on students’ essays

[The following is from my monthly reflections journal for the UBC Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Leadership program I’m attending this year (a year-long workshop focused in part on general improvements in pedagogy, but also in large part on learning about SoTL and developing a SoTL project). Warning–a long post!]

I recently read an article by Ursula Wingate of the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College London, entitled The impact of formative feedback on the development of academic writing,” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education Vol. 35, No. 5 (August 2010): 519-533. I am very interested in this article b/c it deals with a question I myself have wondered, in relation to my teaching in Arts One: why do some students improve so much in their writing over the course of the year, and why do some fail to do so? I was thinking this might be a future SoTL project for me, and I’m glad to see that there is literature on this…so I’ve got some work in the future, looking through that literature!

In this article Wingate reports on a study focused on two research questions:

(1) Can improvements in student writing be linked to the use of the formative feedback?
(2) What are the reasons for engaging or not engaging with the assessment feedback? (p. 523)

The sample was a set of essays by 62 students in a first year course focused in part on writing (the course was part of a program in applied linguistics). Comments on essays were coded according to which category they belong to in terms of assessment criteria, and the researchers compared the comments in each category from an early essay to those on a later essay from each student. They separated students into three main categories: those whose essays showed equally high achievement over the two assignments, those whose marks improved by at least 10% between the two essays, and those whose marks didn’t show much of a difference between the two essay (+ or – 5%).  After this separation they ended up with 39 essays. They list a few reasons why they didn’t include other students in the study, but those aren’t crucial to what I want to comment on here (I think). Mostly they were looking to find why some students improve a lot and some don’t, so the second two groups make sense, but the first group (those who were consistently high achievers) were included to see if they could find out in interviews some useful information about how/why they are academically engaged.

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Developing a SoTL project

I have just begun attending a year-long faculty certificate program on the scholarship of teaching and learning here at UBC. One of the main things this program is designed to do is to support faculty who wish to start engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

Just for quick reference, “scholarly teaching” refers generally to a practice where educators base their pedagogical practices on as much evidence as they can from relevant research, studies devoted to showing what is most effective for what sorts of desired outcomes, etc. SoTL, then, is doing this plus engaging in research oneself, and disseminating that somehow to colleagues (e.g., through conferences, publications, etc.).

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Commercial Free Philosophy (Open Access)

Just came across this site run by Rick Grush at UCSD:  Commercial Free Philosophy, which argues for the promotion of open access research and publication in philosophy (and, of course, other academic disciplines).  This really caught my interest and I couldn’t agree more with the following, from the Commercial Free Philosophy website:  “Briefly, the business model on which commercial publishing is based is not only grotesquely outdated, but it is contributing directly to some serious social evils. And so it now strikes me that continuing to support commercial publishing, is, frankly, unethical.There was a time when the dissemination of scholarly work required the help of publishers, and so it made sense for academics to transfer various rights to these businesses, and to pay for their services. Now, though, the ability to disseminate research is ubiquitous and free. Ironically, most publishers now work hard to RESTRICT access to the work of philosophers, to those who can pay for it. This may not seem like a problem to professional philosophers at wealthy universities. But it is a problem for students, and for anyone not fortunate enough to be in the financially elite class.”

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Making the Reading Worth Doing

The title of this post was the title of a presentation by William J. Melanson (from University of Nebraska at Oklahoma) at the recent American Association of Philosophy Teacher‘s biannual conference at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.  The problem he addressed is:  how can we encourage students to do the reading, when it is often very difficult (especially for those new to philosophy)?  One thing that keeps them from doing the reading is teaching in a way that makes it such that they don’t have to do it.  For example, some of us (myself included) have taken the strategy of telling students they should do the reading before class, and then spending class time outlining what is in it.This makes some sense, of course, when the reading is complex and the argumentation requires careful analysis in order to make it clear.  But it can also send the message that it’s not necessary to do the reading before class, because after all, the professor will just go over it in detail in class anyway.  What other options are there? Continue reading →

Posters in Philosophy

Just returned from the biannual conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.  What an excellent conference with an excellent group of people!  I will be posting a few entries related to presentations and workshops I attended at the conference.

One was by Kristin Schaupp at Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who said that in large philosophy courses, one assignment she has used with success is a poster.  Instead of having each student do one, she breaks the class into groups who stay together the entire term.  One of their assignments as a group is to create a poster, similar to those presented at conferences in the social and natural sciences.  They have several “poster days” at the end of the term, so that each group has a chance to show their poster and discuss it with other students in the audience.  Continue reading →

Peer Review of papers in large classes

In an introduction to Philosophy course in Spring 2010, which had around 120 students and six discussion sections, I did several experiments. One was with having students do a peer evaluation of each others’ papers. This was pretty tricky in such a large class. It was not as successful as I had hoped, mostly because of the logistical difficulties. Continue reading →

Learning to read

Upon reflecting on my own lecture style, I found that it is very common for me to spend lectures outlining arguments from the assigned texts–I present main points in the text as I see them, and the supporting arguments.  I am acting as interpreter of the texts, which is not surprising given the difficult nature of many philosophical texts and the fact that I am often teaching first- or second-year students (many of which have had little to no experience reading such texts).  But of course, in doing this I am discouraging students from outlining the arguments themselves, trying to come to grips with them in the readings before coming to lecture.  Why do careful reading of the text before class if the professor is just going to tell you what the text says (in his/her own interpretation)?  Some students will do so anyway and then be able to ask good questions and offer alternative readings, but many will not. Continue reading →

Student presentations

In small classes in the past, I’ve had students sign up for a day on which to do a presentation to the whole class. They had to come up with several questions for the group to discuss, and present reasons why these questions are important (maybe some background information, connection to larger themes in the texts, etc.). I found that even when students asked excellent questions in their presentations, it was too often the case that few or no other students would engage with their discussion questions. I’d have to push and pull to get people to talk. I began to wonder if this was in part because of the problem of discussion in large-ish groups: it’s too easy to just sit back and hope someone else says something!

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Students’ own philosophies

I have sometimes wondered just why it is that introductory philosophy courses rarely focus on students’ own philosophical views in the sense of asking them to come up with their own answers to the “big questions” without having read the “classics” beforehand. Or, in the sense of having a capstone assignment where they are to synthesize what they have studied and their own views into a philosophy of their own. Sometimes I do the former, but only in the form of short questions during the first or second class, to get people thinking, and then we drop this pretty much entirely when it comes time to start reading the major philosophical works on the reading list.

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