Assessing and Improving Your Teaching: Strategies and Rubrics for Faculty Growth and Student Learning

In order to make appropriate changes to improve your teaching and your students' learning, first you need to know how you're teaching now. Figure it out for yourself and invigorate your teaching on your own terms!

This practical, evidence-based guide promotes excellence in teaching and improved student learning through self-reflection and self-assessment of one's teaching. Faculty developer Phyllis Blumberg starts by reviewing the current approaches to instructor evaluation and describes their inadequacies. She then presents a new model of assessing teaching that builds on a broader base of evidence and sources of support, guided by four principles:

1. consider the essential elements of effective, excellent teaching;
2. critically self-reflect and document to discover ways to teach better, relying on information from many sources;
3. use evidence from literature on teaching and learning or data you've collected yourself to make decisions about your teaching;
4. use systematic data about your teaching and peer review to inform ways to improve teaching.

From this new model Blumberg has developed self-assessment rubrics, available online for a variety of disciplines, including the performing and visual arts and the hard sciences, which the book will guide you in using. To illustrate the model, she includes case studies of completed critical reflection rubrics from a variety of teaching venues such as the classroom, research mentoring, and supervising experiential learning in health care to show how they can be used in different ways and how to explore the richness of the data you'll uncover.

"Blumberg's elegantly organized continuous growth model for college-level instructors is the next best thing to having a faculty developer by your side. This book lays out the improvement process so clearly that faculty can implement it on their own."

—Linda Nilson, author, Teaching at Its Best