This week's post is intended as a palate cleanse after my deep-dive (over the past 3 weeks and more) into whether or not intensively volunteering in a professional society is worth it.
In the spirit of reflecting on time and whether it's well spent, I'm re-booting a post from earlier this year. In it, I detail how I go about articulating my own goals for a course, how I facilitate students stating their own goals for their time in the class, and how I handle us all reflecting on the outcomes at the end.
This process is good for students [1].
But, I'm willing to argue it is more important for us, as instructors.
Not just because reflection is good for us. But, because it can be really damn hard to gauge whether we're doing a good job. And, the end-of-semester evaluation process is flawed and biased (read the post I'm re-booting here for citations). Peer evaluations required (at least at my institution) for promotion and retention reviews aren't focused on gauging efficacy, either. And, to be frank, many assessment efforts at programmatic and departmental levels are calibrated to make an accreditation entity happy, not foster efficacious teaching.
Too often, this reality leaves us instructors trying to do a good job but only able to hope we actually are. Unless you have real experience with scholarship of teaching and learning, pedagogical assessment, or the like, most of us are just slopping around in a muck of self-doubt, lacking knowledge/capacity to gauge our impacts on our own.
The result is predictable: fatigue, despair, and eventual burnout. This happens because it's impossible to keep up enthusiasm and intellectual engagement with a challenging, on-going responsibility when (a) we never know if we're doing a good job and (b) most of the feedback we get is unhelpful, uninformed, and/or negative. This is not a recipe for fostering people's development as teachers. It's a recipe for quiet quitting or outright quitting.
The simple act of articulating goals can genuinely help you counteract this negative spiral.
Yes, it's true. Once you articulate goals, you have to use them. But, you can!
I explained how I do it in this blog post. It's about a 10-minute read, and the reflection and facilitation activities therein might take you the rest of half an hour or so.
That means, in less time than a regular faculty meeting, you can set yourself and your students up to be able to say:
This is what we intend to get out of the course,
this is how we're going to work toward those goals, and
(at the end of term) here's how we made progress toward those goals.
This exercise makes learning (and the associated effort of students and instructor) visible. Tangible even. (And isn't this what we and students so often complain is missing!?)
Very importantly, this process sets you up to counteract the slide into burnout. Knowing what you're trying to do and documenting progress toward those goals helps you:
Banish the self-doubt gremlins,
Document students' learning gains with minor effort on your part,
Draft the language for your next annual/promotion/retention review (a) efficiently and (b) confidently.
In other words, you can use this process to achieve some serious peace of mind.
That is absolutely worth ~30 minutes of your time now and about 30 minutes-2 hours at the end of term. (Lemme know how it goes!)
Click here to read/work through the "how do you know you're doing a good job" process. 👇
How about you?
Do you already use a process like this to plan for and document student learning (and thereby your efficacy as an instructor)? If so, how do you do it differently from what I described? If not, what do you think keeps you from doing it? What could help you try it this semester?
NOTES
[1] There's lots of research on the role of metacognition and reflection in learning. If you're interested, let me know. I'm happy to share citations. But for now, suffice it to say, this is an evidence-based practice with a long, productive history.
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