Educational Decree Number Twenty Three

I am reading my way slowly through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. As mentioned in a previous post, I had delayed reading this book because I recall Harry being particularly whiny, but also because there would be a number of education-related themes I would find interesting and would like to muse about in my blog. That brings me to today’s topic: Educational Decree #23.

Backdrop of the story: Headmaster of Hogwarts has falling out with Minister of Magic, who is afraid of his power and position being challenged (that in itself is material for a separate blog post). The Minister therefore enacts a number of educational decrees to allow his underling, one Dolores Jane Umbridge (who’s name sounds like “umbrage”), to infiltrate the school and essentially take control of it. In Decree #23, Umbridge is named “High Inquisitor” (a poor but telling title) and has the power to inspect the standards of teaching.

Assessment is now one of the key things that faculty in colleges and universities all over the U.S. are grappling with – it’s called the “A-Word”. There are plenty of Arguments with Administration about Assessment being foisted upon faculty. Assessment, in itself, is not a bad thing. In fact it can be a good thing. The way it is executed, however… well, let’s just say there are plenty of bad examples to go round. In Harry’s encounter with Umbridge’s first class, she actually seems to start off as a good teacher. She clearly identifies the Course Aims and puts them up on the board. Then she just has them read the textbook in class, which is about the worst use of class time I can think of. I recently finished reading Teaching Naked by Jose Antonio Bowen, who argues cogently how to best use class time for active interaction with students, and to use technology as a strong supporting tool for the outside-of-class preparation for the in-class interactions.

Back to inspecting the standards of teaching: While Umbridge’s motives are misguided, she does actually visit classrooms to observe teachers in action. She takes notes. She talks to students about their experience. She talks to the teachers, makes the effort to learn a bit more about them and their methods, and she follows-up with the results of her inspection. This is more than I can say for how teaching is evaluated in colleges and universities. The device most often used is the end-of-term teaching evaluation that students fill out. They are often filled with questions of the “Rate from 1 (worse) to 5 (best)” type. There is space for comments, but the results are most often compiled and tabulated as an average from the Likert Scale questions, thus reducing a teacher’s effectiveness to 4.63 or some other similar number.

I’m very fortunate to be in a department of very strong teachers and colleagues who clearly care about student learning and constantly try to improve their teaching. For faculty members on the tenure track, there are three full reviews before the candidate receives tenure (by passing all three). For the teaching part of each review, the candidate submits their student evaluations and their course materials. At least six other people in the department make classroom visits in the first two reviews, and for the third review everyone tries to visit if their schedule permits. This isn’t just senior faculty members evaluating junior faculty members – everyone participates! Since we’re a collaborative and congenial group we actually give and receive feedback. (Our adjunct faculty are also reviewed although there are fewer class visits.) We don’t do any post-tenure review, although I think we should.

Visiting other people’s classes is one of the things that helped me improve as a teacher. In my first two years as a faculty member, I visited the classes of everyone else in my department so I could get a sense of different styles and approaches used. I learned a lot of useful things through observation and follow-up conversation, both things that would work well and things that would fall flat. I’m glad that the department had a culture where I felt welcome to visit. As a result, I have welcomed anyone else to visit my classroom. It is not my sacred space, nor do I feel like someone else is acting as High Inquisitor. In fact I get to enjoy the post-class conversations I’ve had with my colleagues who have visited. Many of my more experienced colleagues were able to point out things I did not notice and I was able to improve on them.

I think of all these classroom visits as part of my professional development as a teacher, both when I visit and when someone else visits my classroom. Often when we think about professional development, we think about sending folks to a “course” of some sort where some “expert” or “consultant” talks to us, often about things we already know, for some huge sum of money that the institution pays for. Now, I think there is room and sometimes need for the outside consultant for some things, but there is a free-of-charge, culture-building, wealth-of-experience right there in one’s own institution. We should take advantage of it!