I work directly with students supporting teaching and learning in HE

Evaluating your own teaching
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I work directly with students supporting teaching and learning in HE​

Evaluating your own teaching

You might find it useful to systematically evaluate and reflect on your teaching and learning activities to enhance your professional development and the learning experiences of your students. This section provides guidance and links to resources to help you to do so. Professional development is a continuous, iterative and overlapping process, which includes:
  • engaging in teaching-related and other CPD activities
  • applying the concepts and skills developed in your teaching practice
  • evaluating which aspects work, which do not, and reflecting on the reasons why, and
  • developing action plans based on evaluations and reflections for further improvement.
Emphasis on CPD and on its evaluation is reflected in the areas of activity (A5), core knowledge (K5) and professional values (V3) called for by the UKPSF (2011).
Adopting a reflecting approach involves reflecting in action as well as reflecting on action (Schön, 1983). It may be helpful to maintain a record of critical incidents in your teaching and learning activities. When reflecting on your teaching, it may be useful to record both positive and negative outcomes which might inform future practice and to do so from:
  • your own experiences as learners and teachers
  • your students’ eyes
  • your colleagues’ experiences, and
  • theoretical literature (Brookfield, 1995).
A template you might base your reflections on:
You might also wish to use rating scales/questionnaires of teaching skills to assess your practice at different stages. A few existing resources to do so are linked below:
Evaluating changes in students' approaches to learning is another useful way to appraise your teaching.

Measuring the impact that teaching-related CPD has on student outcomes​

Making causal claims about the impact that teaching-related CPD has on student outcomes is extremely difficult to do. This relationship is complex; it is problematic attributing specific action with student learning or to establish learning gain for students. There are two main ways in which teaching-related CPD might affect student learning:
  • impact on how students acquire course content
  • impact on how students learn.
These effects can be measured in terms of student satisfaction, changes to the way they study and their academic achievements. Currently most UK institutions measure student satisfaction through Student Perception Questionnaires (SPQs), also known as module feedback forms, and the National Student Survey (NSS) (reported though Unistats) as well as monitoring student achievements through degree classifications. There is currently less emphasis on how students study although there is a growing interest in this area.
If you are interested in exploring the impact of teaching-related CPD on students there are a number of ways that this can be done.
There are instruments that explore the students' perception of teaching and capture student study habits. These provide a snapshot of student behaviours which can be harvested over time to identify impact and change. The following are suggested as examples reported to have been used across the sector:
References:
  • Borton, T. (1970) Reach, touch and teach. McGraw Hill, London.
  • Brookfield, S. D. & Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
  • Gibbs. G. (1988) Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Oxford Further Education Unit, Oxford.
  • Johns. C. (1995) 'Framing learning through reflection within Carper’s fundamental ways of knowing in nursing'. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 22. pp 226-234.
  • Schön, DA. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books, New York.