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Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN › Conference paper
Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN › Conference paper
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TY - CONF
T1 - Evaluating first-time lecturing: Where to start? When to stop?
AU - Whistlecroft, Lisa
N1 - Conference organised and proceedings published by HAN, the Humanities and Arts Higher Education Academic Network, supported by the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. ISBN 0 7492 7439 5
PY - 2000/1
Y1 - 2000/1
N2 - Course review and evaluation which, to have any meaning, must focus on teaching evaluation, are becoming a regular annual feature of academic life. At the same time, courses are becoming more modular, with a larger number of relatively isolated topics being slotted together to form a more or less coherent whole. How can a teacher of one of these topics evaluate her teaching, or her students' learning? How can a newcomer to university humanities lecturing start to assess her effectiveness and her contribution to the course (or even the degree scheme) as a whole? The author is an experienced evaluator of teaching resources with a career in computer-assisted teaching and learning support. She has recently completed her first lecture course on a non-technical, purely humanities topic. To add to the excitement, her topic was in a field not previously taught at her institution, and was part of a 'case-study' course comprising four, potentially unrelated, topics assessed only by examination. This paper describes the author's attempts to place her contribution to the course in a coherent framework, and presents details of her self-evaluation using both student feedback and examination evidence, cross-related with equivalent material from other topics in the course. The author considers the nature of prior experience which might be helpful to such a teaching-evaluation process, asks questions about the balance between inspiring students and imparting information, and draws conclusions on the benefits of informal as well as planned mentoring.
AB - Course review and evaluation which, to have any meaning, must focus on teaching evaluation, are becoming a regular annual feature of academic life. At the same time, courses are becoming more modular, with a larger number of relatively isolated topics being slotted together to form a more or less coherent whole. How can a teacher of one of these topics evaluate her teaching, or her students' learning? How can a newcomer to university humanities lecturing start to assess her effectiveness and her contribution to the course (or even the degree scheme) as a whole? The author is an experienced evaluator of teaching resources with a career in computer-assisted teaching and learning support. She has recently completed her first lecture course on a non-technical, purely humanities topic. To add to the excitement, her topic was in a field not previously taught at her institution, and was part of a 'case-study' course comprising four, potentially unrelated, topics assessed only by examination. This paper describes the author's attempts to place her contribution to the course in a coherent framework, and presents details of her self-evaluation using both student feedback and examination evidence, cross-related with equivalent material from other topics in the course. The author considers the nature of prior experience which might be helpful to such a teaching-evaluation process, asks questions about the balance between inspiring students and imparting information, and draws conclusions on the benefits of informal as well as planned mentoring.
KW - First person description of evaluation of first-time teaching
M3 - Conference paper
T2 - Evaluate & Improve: Investigating Lecturers' Teaching in the arts and humanities
Y2 - 9 October 1999
ER -