The Tools for Teaching Class Participates in the Assessment Conversations Across Campus

From left: Tools Instructors Bill Meador (CHSS) & Diana Santiago (BIT), Participants: Steven Perry (BIT) and Alexandria Cisneros (ECA).

Tools for Teaching is an interactive, hybrid class for CNM’s Faculty and Staff to reflect on their teaching methods, incorporate new teaching strategies with feedback from their peers and instructors.  During week 6, an online week, the Tools for Teaching class attended CNM's Assessment Conference at the Park Plaza.

In earlier weeks the class had already worked on curricular design and practiced writing learning objectives that were measurable and observable in order to embed assessment of the key outcomes and focus on student learning.  The class learned about utilizing rubrics as an objective tool for assessment as well as a tool for scaffolding.  Each student then developed a rubric to assess the effectiveness of a syllabus and critiqued a peer's syllabus using their rubric.  The class also covered the topic of providing the students with frequent assessment feedback throughout the semester.

 Then, on October 19^th, the class attended the conference to participate in the collaborative discussions on the topic of Assessment and embedding the culture of student learning.  At the conference, keynote speaker Susan Hatfield posed the question, “What one thing can you do to help transform CNM toward a culture of student learning?”

 We posted this question in our discussion forum in Blackboard and had conversations with other faculty at the conference.  Here are just  a few items that Faculty said they would do in this effort:

• The guiding question, “How do you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your efforts to assess and improve student learning?”  I will spend time to incorporate ways to get feedback from the students to help evaluate the effectiveness.  This feedback can help guide improvements that I make to my class.

• Good teachers are good assessors.  I want to make sure that I am measuring the core competencies to ensure student learning is taking place for the course.  I want to provide students with practice and have them demonstrate what they have learned.

• Susan Hatfield's tip about aggregating your students’ performance on each dimension of a rubric to see what areas they (collectively) are having problems with is a good one.  I plan to incorporate this assessment technique to help identify areas that I need to spend more time on in order to facilitate the student learning.

• Not wait until things are “perfected”.  There are interactive classroom techniques that I can employ now, gather feedback on their effectiveness and adjust as needed.