Presenter:

Phyllis Blumberg: Assistant Provost for Educational and Assessment Development, University of the Sciences

Phyllis has presented at every Drexel Assessment Conference on assessing teaching, planning campus-wide assessments, succeeding with accreditation, alternative assessment techniques, etc. She is the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center and co-chair of the University Assessment Committee where she educated faculty and staff on how and why to do assessments that lead to improvements. She is the author of two widely read books published by Jossey-Bass, Developing Learning-Centered Teaching (2009) which is in the process of being revised and Assessing and Improving Teaching (2014).

Presenter:

Kymber Taylor: Senior Research Analyst, University of the Sciences

Kymber has close to 10 years of experience using data to deliver insights for both public and private institutions. She has supported university-wide assessment planning, regional and professional accreditors reporting, and strategic planning initiatives. Kymber communicates data in an accessible way for faculty and administrators who are not especially data driven. She has a reputation for helping people to represent data in easy to understand and accurate ways and thus is sought after by everyone at this university.

Description:  

Higher education institutions need to demonstrate that their teaching is effective for varied stakeholders including accreditors, legislators, students, employers and the public at large. However, faculty and administrators may be at a loss on how to define good teaching and how to assess teaching practices. Learning-centered teaching is an evidence-based best educational practice that defines aspects of effective teaching (Blumberg, 2009).Teaching effectiveness can be measured using learning-centered teaching rubrics. This workshop will introduce a revision of the components of learning-centered teaching along with revised evidence-based rubrics. The rubrics suggest actions that increase learning-centered teaching. Using the assessment cycle, participants will learn how to collect, analyze, summarize, plan for change, and effectively communicate teaching effectiveness. All of these processes and methods identify strengths, areas of improvement, and determine if benchmarks were achieved. They foster teaching improvement actions both for individual faculty members and faculty collectively within departments or colleges. We will discuss and practice using a currently recommended analysis tool, SOAR, and a new way to represent data, dumbbell charts, that can be used with a wide variety of types of data.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to… 

1. Use the evidence-based model of learning-centered teaching and its assessment rubrics is to make improvements in their own teaching or to suggest ways for others to improve their teaching effectiveness.
2. Use data to: a) plan for concrete actions to improve teaching using SOAR analyses and b) create easy- to-interpret graphs, including dumbbell charts, to concisely communicate individual and programmatic assessment results to suggest concrete actions for quality improvement.