Week 7 - Extra Entry

SENATE COMMITTEE ON TEACHING AND LEARNING’S GUIDE TO

TEACHING ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION

Remarks

The Guide is very clear in all its points concerning the assessment and evaluation of teaching. However, strictly speaking, how in is it possible to assess and evaluate teaching? Because the answer will depend on a great range of factors beginning with the context, subject, school, teacher, culture, surroundings, beliefs, etc.

As the text goes, “teaching is not right or wrong, good or bad, effective or ineffective in any absolute, fixed or determined sense.”¹ Instructors emphasize different domains of learning (affective, cognitive, psychomotor, etc.) and employ different theories of education and teaching methodologies (anti-racist, constructivist, critical, feminist, humanistic, etc.) (York, 2010). So how is it possible to compile a standard and fixed Guide to assess teaching? I believe that teaching should really be assessed more rigorously when the teacher has passed through the first stages of the profession namely knowledge and experience then after that and a lot of time someone learned may come and attempt to evaluate and assess a teacher.

On the other hand, if we talk about assessing and evaluating teachers with the sole purpose of bettering them through appropriate feedback then we will have a formative purpose in which I believe it to be excellent. Of course, this relates directly with the Practicum that we are doing this term and which its purpose is to practice and be assessed (given feedback upon).

As the article suggests, a dossier is a great way to document the development of a teachers achievements, undergoing through a period of time teaching and it registers systematically, and in depth, the process and papers thought which the facilitator went through.

Bibliography

York. (2010). http://www.yorku.ca. Retrieved 2011, from http://www.yorku.ca: http://www.yorku.ca/univsec/senate/committees/scotl/tevguide.pdf