But Am I Doing a Good Job Teaching?
As an instructional designer, I have a lot of conversations with professors. They come to me for help planning instruction. Maybe they want to use a new technology, and this requires some planning––and some reflection. “What do you want the students to learn?” is the chief question. But there are other questions: What do you want the students to learn? What will you see that lets you know they’ve learned it? What are your resources and limitations? What works well about your current practice––and what would you like to change? The most troublesome question sometimes is: “How will you measure your own success?” In learning circles, this is often called “evaluation.” You did something new: Did it work? One obstacle to evaluating changes to teaching is: we’re actually not very good at evaluating teaching effectiveness in the first place. There are competing models for how to do that. But on the practical level, we just don’t have a clear pathway to evaluating our own teach...
