Reflective assessments can be a far more valuable way of assessing teacher effectiveness that what is used in practice today. One technique requires students to write down a series of “I learned…” statements to summarize what was learned in a class, exercise, or assignment. Another technique requires students to draw a vertical line on a blank piece of paper, label the left column as ‘Clear’ and the right column as ‘Unclear’, and then list the things in the class, exercise or assignment that were clear or unclear in the appropriate column.
In my school, every other quarter, a full-time instructor will sit in your class for 30-40 minutes to assess your teaching effectiveness. This is not much time, and I am not sure a realistic way to assess a teacher’s effectiveness. Although I have received positive assessments from these full-time instructors, the feedback is at such a high-level that there is not much I can use to improve my teaching effectiveness. We also get evaluations from students at the end of the quarter which sometimes provide data that is useful for the next time the course is taught, but often has feedback that would have been useful for the quarter in which the student was enrolled.
I intend to use both the clear/unclear windows and “I learned…” reflective assessments in my classroom this quarter to enable me to incorporate feedback in the current quarter. I also will share these assessments with colleagues and my department chair to get their feedback on usefulness, and discuss whether we can add reflective assessments to the current student evaluations and full-time instructor assessments.