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Teaching at UK
Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1994)
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| Teaching Goals | TLC Porfolio Library | TLC Resource Library |
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| Teaching Goals | TLC Porfolio Library | TLC Resource Library |
The term"essay" comes to us through Michel de Montaigne, who used the French "essai" to mean "a try" or "an attempt." "Essai," in turn, had its roots in two Latin words--- "exigere," to examine, and "exagium," a weighing or balancing. In this brief essay, I'm going to try to convince you that examining our teaching goals carefully--- and balancing them against our students' learning goals--- can help us become more effective, and perhaps even excellent, college teachers.
Even if you don't care a fig about assessment, though, setting and pursuing explicit goals can make teaching and learning more effective in your classroom. Psychology and everyday experience show that by setting challenging but attainable goals for ourselves, and achieving short-term successes along the way, we increase satisfaction, gain greater confidence in our ability to achieve further goals, and feel more motivation to continue. Many of us have had this "success breeds hard work breeds more success" experience while developing athletic, musical, foreign language or other similar skills. (Some folk even claim to experience this goal- related "self-actualization'' while dieting, but that remains to be confirmed.)
If the above is reasonably accurate, then goal-directed teaching and learning ought to be more effective and satisfying for both faculty and students, especially when both pursue complementary goals. But how can we achieve this optimal experience? First, we make our teaching goals explicit, and compare them with our colleagues. Second, we help students make their learning goals clear and compare them with our teaching goals. Third, we assess how well we are achieving our goals, help students do the same, and make the necessary adjustments based on the results of our assessments.
To provide faculty a quick and easy way to begin uncovering their deeper implicit goals, Professor Cross and I developed the "Teaching Goals Inventory,'' or TGI, with help early on from Elizabeth Fideler. The TGI is a questionnaire that invites faculty to rate their instructional goals for a single course. It contains 52 goal statements, covering a wide range of learning outcomes each to be rated on a five-point scale running from "not applicable" to "essential."
In 1990, nearly 3,000 faculty from two- and four-year colleges responded to a survey version of TGI. Some of the results surprised us. For example, we found that teaching goals in our sample differed little by race or gender of faculty --- or even by type of institution --- but markedly by academic disciplines. Nonetheless, faculty from all disciplines agreed that developing higher-order thinking skills --- such as analysis, ap plication, and problem-solving --- was among their most "essential" teaching goals. Overall, teaching discipline-specific knowledge and skills ranked second to developing higher order thinking skills. (For more in formation on the TGI, see Angelo and Cross, 1993). Follow-up interviews confirmed our sense that most faculty saw teaching specific disciplinary content largely, though not entirely, as a means to develop more general and lasting skills, abilities, habits and values.
We developed a simple gap-detection routine to use in our workshops. Start by listing your most important (espoused) teaching goals for one course. Then find all the places in the syllabus where you actually, explicitly promote those goals through lectures, labs, discussions, assignments, and the like. Next, find those moments when you actually assess or evaluate students attainment of those goals. Those goals which you actually teach to assess, and evaluate rep resent the goals-in-action. Don't be too hard on yourself if there's little or no evidence of action on some of your espoused goals. That's typical. In using the TGI, faculty often discover that they have many, previously implicit essential teaching goals. Sometimes they decide they may have too many. Italians have a nifty saying for this all-too-human tendency: "Fra pensare e fare, ch'e il mare." Between thinking and doing there is the ocean. (Well, OK, it rhymes in Italian!) Discovering that some of our most fervently espoused goals may not be expressed through our teaching can be the first step to ward closing the gap.
I think that these differences in teaching goals raise questions about the equity and comparability of the education students receive, particularly in required, general education courses and foundational courses in the majors. These differences also raise troubling assessment questions. If faculty have very diverse teaching goals, then it is not meaningful or responsible to assess the outcomes of their efforts with common instruments. And if faculty teaching goals differ from the stated goals of the program or institution, then focusing assessment on the latter goals risks failing to notice what is being accomplished. To usefully assess the effectiveness of teaching and learning, we need to know what goals teachers are working to achieve. While academic freedom might be endangered if faculty were required to teach only to certain goals, I don't believe that asking faculty to make our goals explicit is unreasonable. Rather, I believe asking the question of ourselves and dis cussing the results with our col leagues and our students is a necessary step toward meaningful assessment and instructional improvement.
Argyris, C., Putnam, R. and Smith D. M. (1985) Action Science. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, Inc.
Peter, L. and Hull, R. (1969) The Peter Principle. New York: W. Morrow.
This article is reprinted with permission from the POD Network, a publication of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education.
The TLC has portfolios that have been recognized by chairpersons or deans as exemplary examples of the portfolio. Please feel free to come and browse. The importance of lowering excessive student anxiety with respect to communicative ability in a foreign language is great since this anxiety can lead to a significant learning block. The need to lower what is termed the "affective filter" has led me to do what I can to provide a caring, nurturing, student oriented classroom atmosphere. To this end I emphasize my concern for the individual, build in many opportunities for pair and group work (which tend to be less stressful as well as allow more time for practicing the language), develop the creative aspect of mock real-life scenarios (ordering food in a restaurant in a second-year German class, for example, or developing a new ending for a literary text in a literature class) as well as inject as much personal enthusiasm, creativity and humor as possible in each class. These principles also hold true for my work with my beginning teachers as they, too, tend to be most anxious about their own attempts at teaching. Students respond particularly strongly to these aspects of my classroom practice, citing over and over again that my enthusiasm, vitality, and friendliness are my greatest strengths--- next to my knowledge of the subject matter.
My belief that students must be responsible for their own learning has grown since the time when, paradoxically enough, I discovered after taking part in a workshop designed to map individual instructional styles that I placed the responsibility for student learning totally upon myself! This finding jarred me into a long process of reevaluating my relationship to my students. I asked myself some tough questions--- was I, for example, infantilizing my students by, at least, internally taking on all this responsibility? A dialectic of change began wherein external changes in my classroom behaviors and expectations paralleled internal changes in my attitudes. I now consciously place more of the responsibility for their own learning onto the students.
In GER 206, Oral Practice, each student must work with a partner in choosing a chapter in the text for the class to work with for approximately two weeks; each team must explain its choice to me. I act as facilitator and resource person; the class in effect constructs their own course around activities and content areas they deem most valuable. A student in a 206 class in the spring of 1991 commented specifically that "Frau Worley bestows a type of autonomy on the students that stimulates motivation."
The Methods of Teaching German, Spanish, and French classes have been reconceptualized so that there is increasingly less lecturing on my part and proportionately more active involvement on the part of the students--- they work in groups to present and demonstrate the various methods of language teaching; they work in language specific micro-teaching sessions to practice teaching the skills I have outlined for them; they themselves take various instructional-styles in vendors to learn about their teaching preferences.
I am particularly pleased that this course has become so successful, that students comment that "this course should be a requirement for anyone even considering teaching a language. It is truly an enlightenment!" or that my "belief that the subject matter is of value... translates what could be boring into a stimulating, challenging experience." I am currently experimenting with a new course, Graduate Studies 600, The Scholarship of Teaching German, designed to motivate the German department's teaching assistants to see themselves as teaching professionals, as colleagues involved in keeping up with and contributing to research in teaching. Students in this course must, for example, design, carry out, and write up foreign-language teaching research projects.
Critical Teaching and Everyday Life
by Ira Shor
This book develops teaching theory side-by-side with a
political analysis of schooling. The author's central theme is a commitment to learning through
dialogue and to exploring themes from everyday life and poses alienation and mass culture as
key obstacles to learning
For more information on the Teaching and Learning Center Library, see Teaching at UK,Volume 1, Number 3.
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