Assessing Teaching: A Curriculum Theory Approach

I’ve been thinking a lot this past semester about how we assess teaching, for various reasons. During conversations about this topic, I realized that people come at it from different philosophical perspectives that depend on their worldviews (which aren’t mutually exclusive, but can occasionally clash). For the most part, I’ve heard people talk about evaluating teaching in higher education in three ways: student evaluations (usually end-of-semester surveys done routinely), peer observations (done in a variety of different ways in different institutions), and reflection on teaching via teaching portfolios or other forms of self-reflection.

While I agree that all these are important and that they gather three different and important perspectives that, taken together, give a pretty multidimensional (but still not fully holistic) perspective on teaching, I’d like to offer a curriculum theory approach as a lens for looking at this. The basic curriculum theory approaches discussed most in the literature are curriculum as content, curriculum as product, curriculum as process and curriculum as praxis (though these are by no means the only approaches, they’re the most popular ones). If you are unfamiliar with curriculum theory, here is a good, quick reference and if you want a book on this that also extends it from a higher education perspective, try this one by Barnett and Coate.

Curriculum as Content Transmission

If someone perceives curriculum as content, the first thing they would do when designing a course is to choose the content for it. This is problematic in many ways, including the hidden values behind which content gets included or excluded and how those choices privilege some learners while disadvantaging others (Michael Apple’s work on this is excellent, as is the work of several scholars of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy such as Ladson-Billings). Another critique of this model is that knowing the content does not necessarily tell us anything about how it will be taught, or what students will do with it once they’ve “learned” it. Designing multi section courses around the same content is not a guarantee of similar teaching quality or similar student learning.

Someone with a curriculum as content perspective would probably opt to assess teaching by:

1. Looking at someone’s syllabus. While this is a reasonable proxy for how well-thought out the course design is, it by no means tells us how well a course is actually taught in practice. We don’t know if this supposedly  good course designer who selected good quality content (according to some standard) is able to present the material well to students and engage them and assess their learning in the end. We don’t know if they’re good teachers – we just know how good they are at designing syllabi. I’m someone who often diverges from the syllabus according to students’ needs/interests (see curriculum as process, later).

2. Considering a teacher’s reading list. I can understand this, but it has the same issues as the general critique of curriculum as content: what are the values behind content choices and how do they marginalize or privilege certain learners? If assessing content is centered around checking if someone uses canonical knowledge, I would take issue with it, even though I would understand completely why this was done. If we were looking at content to check for inclusivity of diverse voices, I’d be more interested in it. Personally, I like to discover new readings during the course, whether on my own or by asking students to do their own research and bring their reading to class. I like to be able to add or remove readings based on how well the course is going, and sometimes I’ll find lighter reads or videos if students’ reading levels makes my original choices problematic for them to understand in the first place – because my course isn’t one that’s about teaching language, but about a subject matter I’d like everyone to feel equally able to discuss and write about. So whatever content I list on my syllabus won’t necessarily end up being what we cover in class. It’s also important to note that just listing particular content in a syllabus and asking students to read it does not by any means guarantee that they will read it, nor that they will all understand it, or that the course takes them beyond understanding it to applying or analyzing it, for example.

Curriculum as Product

Curriculum as product is closest to a neoliberal perspective and focuses on assessing, in the most measurable ways, the “outcomes” of the educational process – so student learning outcomes. We would say a curriculum is good if student learning outcomes are achieved, and that multi section courses need to have the same learning outcomes. The main critique of this approach is, like the content model, who gets to decide which outcomes are most valuable, why do we expect learners coming from different starting points and with different needs and interests to reach the same endpoint over a fixed period of time? How does this privilege some learners while marginalizing others? What about valuable learning outcomes that are more difficult to measure, such as attitudinal learning outcomes? What about long-term learning beyond a course? Most universities (at least American-style ones) heavily emphasize learning outcomes and aligning course designs to learning outcomes.

Someone from a curriculum as product perspective might opt to assess teaching by:

1. Look at how well-written learning outcomes are (and whether they e.g. target critical thinking and application) and how well-aligned they are to course activities and assessments. However, someone can be good at writing these and not necessarily at applying them, and vice versa. And some valuable course learning goals, particularly in humanities and social sciences, can be difficult to write in the ways a measurable learning outcome is expected to be written.

2. Look directly at student products – so student performance on assignments, projects, exams, etc. against something like rubrics or benchmarks. This will almost always completely mask the process of learning, unless the assessment itself has a reflection component

3. Look indirectly at student evaluations of the learning that happened in the course, with the assumption that students (the “product” of the teaching) perceptions are an indirect indicator of whether they learned well. While I think taking student perspectives and perceptions into account is really important, the way this is done at the end-of-semester rather than formatively throughout the semester is problematic and limits how much can be done with those evaluations. We also know these evaluations have been shown to be biased against professors who are minorities and women.

Curriculum as Process

This approach focuses more on the actual interaction process between teachers and learners, rather than pre-defined content and outcomes (the key figure here was Lawrence Stenhouse). It’s not that it is a content-less or outcome-less education, but one that centers process-related values before choosing content and outcomes, and recognizes the importance of context for teaching and learning. So, for example, choices of content might depend on what this particular group of students find engaging, or different groups of students might read different content depending on their needs. The main critique of this approach is that it depends heavily on the teacher’s judgment and is difficult to “measure”. Clearly, “measures” used in a curriculum as product approach would not be applicable here, and more complex and qualitative measures of good teaching would apply; there would also need to be a good degree of professional development and mentoring for teachers in order to trust them to autonomously make appropriate judgments, flexibly, in context.

Someone with a curriculum as process perspective might attempt to assess teaching via:

1. Peer observations – asking peers to observe teaching as it happens, in practice, not on paper. The issue here is that unless the peer observer spends time with the teacher before and after the observation to understand their thinking behind what they do, and observes them enough times, they would only get a glimpse of their teaching (and in a slightly artificial environment, as most people are used to teaching without being observed all the times and most students aren’t used to be observed, either) and may not get the whole picture. Doing this better would be quite resource-intensive for any institution. Of course, if the observer comes from a different teaching philosophy than the teacher, there may be clashes of opinion on whether some actions constitute good or poor teaching.

2. Student and teacher reflections. Instead of assessing student work or teacher syllabi (or at least in addition to them), one would look at student reflections on the learning process and teacher reflections on their teaching after the semester is over. These should also be formative rather than summative, happening multiple times throughout the semester as well as at or near the end, or even a while later.

3. Formative student perceptions of teaching such as mid-semester surveys and SGIDs that aim not to sum up learning, but to gain insight into what is working well and what can be improved during a semester or year of teaching. Teachers could themselves solicit student feedback as well, but occasionally having someone from outside collect feedback anonymously allows more sensitive issues to come up.

Curriculum as Praxis

Curriculum as praxis is based on critical pedagogy (so the work of Paulo Freire, which builds on the critical approaches to education put forward by the Frankfurt school). Such a curriculum would be focused on social justice and power and the ways in which a classroom/education can challenge inequalities and injustices in the status quo. Looking at macro inequalities as a guideline to both the curriculum content and its process is important – because even processes that are meant to be “democratic” are difficult to achieve when there are power dynamics. The work of Cornbleth  extends this approach by advocating for “critical curriculum in context”, where we not only consider macro power dynamics, but also micro power dynamics and intersectionality.

Someone with a curriculum as praxis perspective might do the following when assessing teaching:

1. Look at the power structures within an institution that may be hindering good teaching, whether in terms of the ways administration treats faculty, or the ways university policies (related to e.g. grades) limits a faculty member’s ability to teach to their best ability

2. Look at different types of teachers and where some might be more privileged or disadvantaged by their own intersectionality (e.g. race, gender, sexuality), or by conditions imposed by the institution (such as tenured vs non-tenure-track, adjuncts vs full-timers, etc.).

3. Look at the ways power is played out within the classroom, and assess good teaching as that which strives to treat learners equitably and promote a socially just learning environment

4. Look at curriculum documents with a critical eye as to representation of minority perspectives and the kinds of values they propagate

Of course this last model faces similar critiques to the process model – no neoliberal policy maker wants to deal with fuzzy concepts such as educational processes and difficult-to-pin-down social injustices. But at some point, we as educators need to stand up and say that those ways of assessing teaching via proxies do not represent what good teaching is (however we define it) and that we owe our students better, and we owe ourselves better. And I haven’t even gotten into Hidden Curriculum. But here’s a good book on that, edited by Margolis.

What are some other institutional ways of assessing teaching? Which curriculum approach do they fall under? Tell us in the comments!

["Weltanschauung" flickr photo by Robert Couse-Baker shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license]