Assessment: the action or an instance of making a judgment about something. (Merriam-Webster)
I teach a course for adjuncts at the college once each semester. It is a three hour session that is part of an overall certification program for adjunct faculty. I taught the class this week and found that most of my class had never taught before. That was a bit surprising! Usually I have a mix of faculty with experience at multiple schools or even years of experience at JCCC, but in this class I was introducing new faculty to the concept of assessment when they were still trying to figure out the basics of teaching!
Because of the new faculty in the class, we went a little more in depth with some of the basics of evaluation, testing, and how to use assessment to improve teaching. Actually, I used the word pedagogy to talk about teaching styles but that term was new to some of them as well.
It was a great experience to talk with new faculty about how to “make judgements” about the student learning in their classroom. Discussing the importance of gathering data to support curriculum changes and ways to align course objectives and course assessments using Bloom’s taxonomy.
Sometimes when we have taught for a long-time we forget the importance of going back to basics. Why and how do we assess student performance? What impact can our assessment make on the curriculum? What are the tools of the teaching trade? The evening reminded me of the importance of assessment and establishing good practices at the beginning of a teaching experience.
My judgement about this group of faculty is that they will do well – very well.
