Assessing the Teaching of Writing: Twenty-First Century Trends and Technologies - Softcover

Dayton, Amy E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087421954X ISBN 13: 9780874219548

Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Although fraught with politics and other perils, teacher evaluation can contribute in important, positive ways to faculty development at both the individual and the departmental levels. Yet the logistics of creating a valid assessment are complicated. Inconsistent methods, rater bias, and overreliance on student evaluation forms have proven problematic. The essays in Assessing the Teaching of Writing demonstrate constructive ways of evaluating teacher performance, taking into consideration the immense number of variables involved.

Contributors to the volume examine a range of fundamental issues, including the political context of declining state funds in education; growing public critique of the professoriate and demands for accountability resulting from federal policy initiatives like No Child Left Behind; the increasing sophistication of assessment methods and technologies; and the continuing interest in the scholarship of teaching. The first section addresses concerns and advances in assessment methodologies, and the second takes a closer look at unique individual sites and models of assessment. Chapters collectively argue for viewing teacher assessment as a rhetorical practice.

Fostering new ways of thinking about teacher evaluation, Assessing the Teaching of Writing will be of great interest not only to writing program administrators but also to those concerned with faculty development and teacher assessment outside the writing program.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy E. Dayton is associate professor of English at the University of Alabama. Her research interests include historiography, community literacy, language attitudes, literacy in literature, assessment/teacher training, composition theory/pedagogy, and models and methods for community outreach.

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Assessing the Teaching of Writing

Twenty-First Century Trends and Technologies

By Amy E. Dayton

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2015 the University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-954-8

Contents

Foreword Edward M. White, 
Acknowledgments, 
Section I: Frameworks and Methods for Assessing Teaching, 
1 Assessing Teaching: A Changing Landscape Amy E. Dayton, 
2 Assessing the Teaching of Writing: A Scholarly Approach Meredith DeCosta and Duane Roen, 
3 Making Sense (and Making Use) of Student Evaluations Amy E. Dayton, 
4 Watching Other People Teach: The Challenge of Classroom Observations Brian Jackson, 
5 Small Group Instructional Diagnosis: Formative, Mid-Term Evaluations of Composition Courses and Instructors Gerald Nelms, 
6 Regarding the "E" in E-portfolios for Teacher Assessment Kara Mae Brown, Kim Freeman, and Chris W. Gallagher, 
Section II: New Challenges, New Contexts for Assessing Teaching, 
7 Technology and Transparency: Sharing and Reflecting on the Evaluation of Teaching Chris M. Anson, 
8 Telling the Whole Story: Exploring Writing Center(ed) Assessment Nichole Bennett, 
9 Administrative Priorities and the Case for Multiple Methods Cindy Moore, 
10 Teacher Evaluation in the Age of Web 2.0: What Every College Instructor Should Know and Every WPA Should Consider Amy C. Kimme Hea, 
11 Using National Survey of Student Engagement Data and Methods to Assess Teaching in First-Year Composition and Writing across the Curriculum Charles Paine, Chris M. Anson, Robert M. Gonyea, and Paul Anderson, 
12 Documenting Teaching in the Age of Big Data Deborah Minter and Amy Goodburn, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Assessing Teaching

A Changing Landscape

AMY E. DAYTON

Assessing the teaching of writing is a process fraught with conflict. Despite a significant body of research pointing to the importance of multiple assessment measures and careful interpretation of the data, the evaluation of postsecondary teaching still relies heavily on a single measure of performance — the student ratings score — and interpretation of this score is often done in a hasty, haphazard fashion. Aside from student ratings, other data on teaching effectiveness tend to be collected in piecemeal fashion, without sufficient space for reflection and dialogue. When it comes to assessment, practical realities — including a lack of time, administrative resources, or knowledge about best practices — frequently trump our intentions to do a comprehensive job of evaluating classroom performance. Without clear guidelines for collecting and interpreting data, the outcome can be influenced by individual biases about what counts as evidence of good teaching. This collection offers new perspectives on that question of "what counts," pointing to ways that we can more effectively gather data about teaching and offering practical guidance for interpreting it. It also suggests ways we can improve our practice, mentor new teachers, foster dialogue about best practices, and make those practices more visible.

This book is for teachers who want to improve their practice, administrators and program directors who hire and train instructors, and faculty and staff in writing programs, centers for teaching and learning, and other instructional support units on college campuses. Although its primary audience is composition specialists, the collection offers practical suggestions and perspectives that apply to many contexts for postsecondary teaching. The tools presented in these chapters — mid-semester focus groups, student evaluations of instruction, classroom observations, teaching portfolios, and so on — are used across the disciplines, in many instructional settings. While some chapters focus on specific methods, others provide new frameworks for thinking about assessment. In her chapter on writing center(ed) assessment, for instance, Nichole Bennett describes a philosophy that could work for both writing programs and other sites for teacher training across campuses. This approach involves bringing teachers and tutors into the broader conversation about the program's missions and goals, and asking them to reflect on assessment data. By making assessment a broad, program-wide conversation, we invite stakeholders at every level to participate in setting goals and outcomes and gauging how well those outcomes have been met. The authors of chapters 6 and 7 argue for an ethos of transparency, suggesting a need to set clear standards for how materials might be read, to give teachers a sense of agency in deciding how to represent their work, and to share evidence of teaching quality with broader audiences while contextualizing the data for outside readers. These more inclusive, transparent models allow us to engage both internal and external audiences in more productive dialogue.

This collection arrives at a time when the public dialogue and political context for postsecondary teaching are particularly fraught. Challenges include a decline in state funding, public anxiety over the rising cost of college, concern about the value of a degree in today's lagging economy, and, to some extent, hostility toward college professors. An example of this hostility is found in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's recent book, Academically Adrift, which criticizes faculty for being more interested in their research and the advancement of their disciplines than in their students' progress or the well-being of their institutions — a trend that, in the authors' view, has contributed to an epidemic of "limited learning" on college campuses (Arum and Roksa 2011, 10 — 11). (See Richard Haswell [2012] for a critique of their findings and methodology). At the state level, this picture of the self-interested, disengaged faculty member permeates our political rhetoric. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that recent state election cycles have been dominated by efforts to curb faculty rights, including measures to limit salaries and collective bargaining rights, attacks on tenure and sabbaticals, and proposals to require college faculty to teach a minimum number of credit hours (Kelderman 2011). In a 2010 Wall Street Journal piece, "Putting a Price on Professors," Simon and Banchero (2010) point to some other developments. Texas state law now requires that public universities publicize departmental budgets, instructors' curriculum vitae, student ratings, and course syllabi, making all of this data accessible "within three clicks" of the university's home page. At Texas A&M, university officials have gone even further, putting a controversial system in place to offer cash bonuses to faculty who earn the highest student ratings, and creating a public "profit and loss" statement on each faculty member that "[weighs] their annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained" (Simon and Banchero 2010; see also Hamermesh 2010, Huckabee 2009, June 2010, and Mangan 2000).

This push to make college faculty more accountable — and to quantify their contributions — comes, ironically, at a time when tenured, sabbatical-eligible faculty members are dwindling in numbers, being replaced by part-time and non-tenure track teachers whose situations are often tenuous at best. A New York Times article reports that "only a quarter of the academic work force is tenured, or on...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 087421954X
• ISBN 13: 9780874219548
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland