Are You a Good Teacher?
A simple way to measure good teaching
What is ‘good teaching’ and how can we measure it? Good teaching involves good learning — for if students are not learning then an educator is not teaching. Good teaching then at least partly includes effective teaching.
Traditionally, we have measured effective teaching by looking at outcomes. Can students jump through the hoops at the end of a course? We do this by assessing whether students have mastered the skills or understood the concepts taught. We ensure educators have particular qualifications and experience to teach a discipline, and peer review of teaching may be used to assess how they communicate this knowledge.
But these methods don’t adequately measure ‘good teaching’.
If I attend a yoga class, I want to learn the correct technique. But, I also want to enjoy the class. I prefer some classes to others usually for one reason — the teacher. If the teacher is engaging then those in the class are engaged and enjoy the experience. And these classes are more popular and well attended.
To try and measure this experience many higher education institutions use student evaluations. Describing a teacher as popular in higher education though, is unpopular. As there is a view that being well liked does not equate to being an effective teacher.
Such a view is supported by studies that show student evaluations can be predicted based on educator personality. They are also shown to have gender and cultural bias, are influenced by the grades students expect to attain and by the weather! Unfortunately, they are also negatively correlated to academic achievement in subsequent courses and recognised measures of teacher effectiveness.
While student evaluations provide us with useful feedback and information their use in measuring ‘good teaching’ is limited.
I recently interviewed a colleague on how he believed we can measure good teaching. He takes a longer view and looks at the changes that result from students interacting with their teachers. In his discipline, engineering, he is interested in whether students become practitioners that exhibit integrity, hold respect for their knowledge base and each other, are conscious of their limitations and those of others, and are equipped to fill these gaps in their knowledge.
He teaches the students in his classes to become professionals that other people want to work with.
I like this measure of good teaching. We should regularly ask ourselves “Am I teaching so that my students graduate as professionals I will want to work with?”