By Sherman Dorn on May 14, 2012
I don’t have much to say about the FCAT writing SNAFU that’s followed the release of dramatically lower scores in this year’s exercises. Testing in general is a technical subject where sudden changes should prompt caution about drawing conclusions other than “Hmmn, that warrants some close examination.” Moreso with the type of “holistic” (i.e., one-dimensional) scoring that happens in FCAT writing and the attempt of the Florida Board of Education to “raise standards” in a period when the logistics of scoring the writing samples changed back and forth from two scorers with half-point options to one scorer and back to two scorers.
However, when several members of the Florida Board of Education contact reporters with identical responses to requests for comment, you’ve got a copycat/sock-puppet problem more than you have a test-scoring or -performance problem.
Posted in Accountability Frankenstein, Education policy, Florida |
By Sherman Dorn on May 11, 2012
Over on her blog, Rebecca Onion distills her tweeps’ recommendations for readings on (mostly college) teaching, and her list includes classics from McKeachie’s Teaching Tips to Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do. I like almost everything on the list a great deal, but I would not recommend that a teaching assistant (or faculty member) start with them unless she or he already has a good bit of (mostly happy) teaching experience under the belt. There are a few better sources to get started:
Huston is the (Benjamin) Spock of college teaching books in attitude: “Relax. You’ll be okay.” It and Rotenberg were the two books I wish had been around when I had started out as a T.A. in the late 1980s. Tremendously philosophical? Not really, nor are Huston or Boettcher/Conrad that deep in a theoretical sense, but if you have never taught a college class before, you need to know what to do Monday, as John Holt would put it, or you just need an orientation so you can get behind the wheel and start navigating. All of these books will help you do much more Monday morning than lecture like you remember being lectured to. For example, this coming Monday (the start of my frenetic six-week summer class), I’ll be drawing heavily from one of Huston’s first-day-of-term exercises.
Other books that Onion hasn’t mentioned?
Angelo & Cross is a classic now, a recipe book for qualitative informal assessments, some of which are now widespread such as the one-minute essay at the start or end of class. Stevens & Levi is a clear description of how to develop rubrics of different sorts, including giving teachers options for how much control to retain or give up to students. King & Cox is an accessible discussion of various technologies and is as important, I think, for its andragogy orientation to college teachers’ learning as for the specific technologies in the book. (King is a colleague in my college.)
Notes
Posted in Higher education, Reading, Teaching |
By Sherman Dorn on May 10, 2012
My role in the group evaluating LMS options ended yesterday, and I don’t know the recommendations of other individuals in the group, though I get sense of where we’re headed as an institution. For my part, after looking at Blackboard 9.1, Moodlerooms/joule, and Canvas, I recommended Canvas. We have a lot of transitions to plan at this point no matter what the institution’s choice is, and Canvas is relatively new, but I am confident I made the right recommendation. Some thoughts I’ve had in the last week, as I’ve built the summer course structure into Canvas (this is a face-to-face offering of an upper-division course in Schools and Society, what’s also sometimes called Social Foundations–I’m using the “free to teachers” version of Canvas, unless/until there’s a contract between USF and Canvas this summer):
- That took about a quarter of the time it would have taken in Blackboard.
- That took about a quarter of the time it would have taken to build in Respondus and upload to Blackboard.
- I look like I’m in some 1960s movie, but it took about three minutes to record a short video greeting for the whole class that’s the first thing they see.
- Oh, I can spend half a minute to leave a ten-second video greeting for each student after they accept the email invitation into the course.
- Hmmn… okay, I can see a workaround to get what I want to happen (a sequence of assignments, so students have to complete a quiz on plagiarism before they can upload papers, but without having unnecessary girders/infrastructure showing).
- I think I’ll give them hints about Canvas and let the interested students show the others what they can do.
- On second thought, I may definitely want to show the “What if?” feature in Grades and talk about it explicitly.
- Anticipated grading workflow: paper copy of rubric, scribble notes and a two- or three-sentence script for each, then use Speedgrader on “mute assignment” to score papers and use script from paper rubric to record a video comment. (Students will get the paper copy, too.)
I will be very curious to see how much they pay attention to the online version of the outcomes and grading scales. On the one hand, it’s transparent where I have clear expectations. On the other hand, students pay attention to such things differentially (sometimes judging that if instructions are very complicated, they’ll be discussed in class).
And now, I need to pay attention to the basics of running a compressed six-week course and ignore the temptation to play with Canvas some more…
Notes
Posted in Higher education, The academic life |
By Sherman Dorn on May 10, 2012
From John Biro, University of Florida chapter president of the United Faculty of Florida:
Dear Colleague,
Before the Administration imposes the draconian budget cuts it claims are unavoidable, it owes the faculty answers to these questions:
1. Why, instead of imposing a hiring freeze, is it continuing with extensive hiring? Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education lists over a hundred searches at UF, compared with a total of nine at all the other SUS institutions. About fifty of these have been posted since the first of April, long after the Administration knew the size of the cuts UF was facing. New postings appeared as recently as yesterday.
2. What are the commitments it has made that have reduced the reserves from the audited figure of $111m at the end of the last fiscal year to the $75m it now admits to? Why are these commitments more important than the programs it proposes to cut?
3. Why has it refused to agree to restore funding to the programs being cut, should the legislature prove true to its promise that the cuts are for only one year?
4. Why have some administrators received huge salary increases at a time when faculty are being asked to tighten their belts and staff are being fired from already-understaffed colleges and departments? The Provost’s $50,000 raise alone could fund the salary and benefits of a staff member, or the entire ‘Operating Expenses’ budget of a good-sized department.
The Administration claims to believe in and to practice shared governance. Yet it is making far-reaching decisions without explaining its reasons for them. To say only that spending reserves to avoid cutting is “not a viable option for UF”, as President Machen did recently, is not acceptable. Instead of asking the faculty which limb it prefers to have amputated, he should explain why the patient is in need of the knife at all. And if the explanation is, as he and Provost Glover have often hinted, that the administration is using the budget cuts by the state as an opportunity to pursue its priorities at the expense of faculty and staff in existing programs, those priorities should, at the very least, be subject to public scrutiny and debate.
John Biro
President, UFF-UF
Posted in Florida, Higher education, Union
By Sherman Dorn on May 8, 2012
Among many others…
Ms. Holscher
Ms. Fried
Ms. Brown/Ms. Bollinger
Mr. Gere
Mr. Schnitger
Mr. Vassos
Ms. Mook
Ms. Thompson
Mr. Harvey
Mr. Knowton
Prof. Jefferson
Prof. Caplan
Prof. Stuard
Prof. Lane
Prof. Spielman
Prof. Weinstein
Prof. Hamilton
Prof. Davidson
Prof. Pine
Prof. Roelofs
Prof. Park
Prof. Katz
Prof. Licht
Prof. Engs
Prof. Fine
Prof. Hunt
Prof. Preston
Prof. Berry
Prof. Brooks Higgenbotham
Prof. Borges
Prof. Lees
Prof. Watson
Prof. Menken
Posted in Personal |
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