2008 Summer Institute

The Value of Goals

Judging from initial feedback, the 2008 Summer Institute on Course Redesign succeeded rousingly, and expectations were high due to faculty interest in pedagogy and the renown of the speakers (see Team-based Learning website and books published).

Dr. Dee Fink challenged us to imagine our ideal class: bright, engaged and motivated. What would you want these students to be able to do after the class-in life? At the right we have the aggregated responses.

They asserted that curriculum design won’t work if you don’t know your outcome, what you want students to do at the end of the course. This allows for backwards design and makes choosing learning activities easier. This likewise facilitates the assessment of learning.

I wonder how past and present colleagues (particularly in the humanities) feel about setting goals and measuring our own success in promoting student learning (individually – not in any comparative sense. Let’s not digress into NCLB. Please take a minute and do the survey to the right - a quick and anonymous assessment itself).

Some think of teaching as an art and resist the idea of intentionality in creation. My mother, the artist and art history teacher, used to point out that great artists were well-trained. Also, the Latin root for "art" gives us also artifice, artificial, etc. Artists make the difficult look deceptively easy.

A final note: the conclusions of recent empirical research on Latino Students published in Excelencia in Education call for "short-term measures of academic progress to guide improvement in curricula instruction, and support services for Latino students."
The study notes that their conclusions would serve any student population.

For more online resources on assessment see our Bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/gdixon/assessment