Welcome back from the dark side! That’s what I’ll say when I greet instructors and faculty members who – at some point – fell down the slippery slope of hardcore assessment only to one glorious day question their practices and the mismatch between their assessments and learning objectives – leading them to reflect, read, question and then return to the brighter side of the assessment paradigm. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: April 2012
(Em)Power in the Classroom Series (part 4)
This past week Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem, UT hosted the 4th Annual Conference on the Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement (SoTE) in Higher Education. I had the pleasure of presenting on my experiment with sharing the power in the class. My talk was entitled ‘Sharing the Power: A Community of Learners from Day One’. Interestingly, the director of the UVU Faculty Center along with a student also presented on Sharing the Power in the classroom. Our two sessions, offered back to back, provided a great platform for discussing the opportunities and challenges present in sharing the power.
I shared with the audience some recent feedback I received from my students during an informal midterm qualitative feedback session. I asked them to reflect on the following and give me some input: Continue reading
(Em)Power in the Clasroom Series (Part 3)
In this series, (Em)Power in the Classroom, we have so far considered what it might look like to share the power with students in the design of courses. In Part 1, I discussed how we worked together as a class – operating more as a learning community – to develop our class culture, our policies, our assignments, etc. I relinquished quite a bit of control in this process rather than adhering to a well-structured syllabus ‘dictating’ how the course will unfold. In Part 2, I presented our process for developing a grading system in the course – the result being a fairly fluid system that focuses more on successfully completing assignments to satisfy various criteria as measured by a simple qualitative likert scale, rather than striving for numbers and percentages equated with letter grades and based on unclear standards. Continue reading
Raichle (Rai) Farrelly 