Teaching Effectiveness Frameworks

 TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS FRAMEWORKS

 

What is effective teaching and how does our campus know when it is being implemented? At CSUN we are teaching courses using different modalities while trying to improve graduation rates and eliminate racial equity gaps. We are better equipped to measure successful and productive teaching when we know what we mean by teaching effectiveness.

This toolkit is intended to be a resource for individual faculty and departments to organize their values of teaching effectiveness. We hope this will aid how departments operationalize evidence-based teaching values thereby bringing greater transparency to all faculty on what exactly it is meant by good teaching.

 

On this page, we will address:

  1. Why define teaching effectiveness?
  2. Frameworks, rubrics & resources on teaching effectiveness
    1. Learning-Centered Instruction
    2. CSU's Quality Learning & Teaching 
    3. Equity Minded Teaching
    4. STEM Teaching
  3. How is teaching effectiveness defined in the RTP process?
  4. How do I develop values for effective teaching?


Why define teaching effectiveness?

A clear definition of what a university expects from all its instructors allows faculty to understand what they should strive for as they serve students in the teaching and learning relationship. Students benefit when faculty have a clear definition of effective teaching including how to improve. Faculty success results when they know what is expected of them, including how they will be evaluated. 


The old “I’ll know good teaching when I see it” has come to pass in higher education; there are evidence-based interdisciplinary observable and measurable standards that can be clearly communicated to instructors. When a community or a department has an agreed-upon understanding of what good teaching entails, what emerges is a more sophisticated shared language that can pave the way to solve complex problems which may require risk-taking and innovation.

 

Framework, rubrics, and resources on teaching effectiveness 

A teaching framework should enable an instructor to enact a predictable approach to facilitating learning so that all students can reach the course outcomes. This is a comprehensive way of organizing the multiple aspects of designing, prepping, facilitating a course in a way that is conscious and reflective of both student learning and how the instructor teaches. This includes how an instructor understands their students, assumptions of how they believe learning works, and how they plan to reflect and adapt their teaching in future courses. Thus, teaching effectiveness should not be limited to just the strategies used during a single class session (e.g., active learning techniques); it should be broader and more comprehensive. 

The following resources are a teaching effectiveness framework and/or can be used to add to a framework.

 

Learning-Centered Instruction

CSUN’s history is rooted in a philosophy of learning-centered instruction dating back to 2003 when campus leadership, faculty and students mobilized intentional efforts to shift teaching priorities. In an article written by CSUN’s former president, provost and vice president for student affairs, learning-centered instruction was explicitly defined using a 16-item construct that would be used to measure campus efforts to implement this teaching effectiveness framework (Koester, Hellendbrand & Piper, 2005 Links to an external site.). 

You can learn more about learning-centered pedagogy and the research evidence around this practice from the following resources; 

 

CSU’s Quality Learning & Teaching

All CSUN faculty teaching online should be knowledgeable about this teaching framework as it clearly outlines the standards on how to design a high-quality course. “The CSU Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) evaluation rubric was developed in 2011 and is designed to help support and identify exemplary practices for the design and delivery of online and blended courses. The rubric is composed of 57 objectives across 10 sections, including an optional section on "Mobile Platform Readiness" (CSU Online Course Services website Links to an external site.). This framework will undergo revision during summer 2021.

FacDev includes the QLT rubric on our QLT website. When faculty engage in our eLearning Institute they are required to build a future course, meet with a QLT-trained faculty peer reviewer and demonstrate they’ve met the core QLT standards. The Chancellor’s Office recently created a public-facing Google doc that provides elaborations on how to implement each of the 57 standards (see Formal QLT Rubric with examples Links to an external site. link). 

 

Equity-minded Teaching

We in Faculty Development value integrating equity-mindedness into the base of any effective teaching framework as opposed to standing alone or on the side. The field of faculty development is in the early stages of integrating learning-centered and equity-minded teaching as a framework with empirical evidence. The resources below have attempted to operationalize what it means to teach using an equity-minded lens.

 

STEM Teaching

While the field of STEM Education has developed discipline-specific frameworks, the principles, and the instruments are highly applicable and transferable to all disciplines. 

Academy of Inquiry Based Learning: Links to an external site. AIBL's mission is to improve Mathematics Education.  To achieve our mission, we primarily focus on improving undergraduate math education, by training and supporting math instructors to implement active, student-centered methods of instruction. Stan Yoshinobu, AIBL Director (Department of Mathematics Links to an external site., Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo).

 

How is teaching effectiveness defined in the RTP process?

We are sometimes asked by faculty, “Is there an official campus-wide definition of teaching effectiveness?” While Faculty Development uses its expertise to promote an evidence-based learning-centered, equity-minded and technology enriched approach to teaching, there hasn't been a single entity that has recently defined this for the campus. Thus, when it comes to formal evaluation of teaching, CSUN empowers departments at the ground level to set the standards of how faculty’s teaching will be evaluated. Department’s local definition of teaching effectiveness might appear in the department personnel policies and procedures documents. There is usually an emphasis on the process or the steps as opposed to providing explicit definitions (e.g., what does good teaching look like?).  A list of department and college policies and procedures can be found on the Faculty Affairs policies webpage.

Clear definitions also allow departments to develop more specific guidelines or rubrics for their annual peer class observation visits. With the onset of multiple teaching and learning modalities, namely more online courses, departments have sought out strategies to adapt their peer class observation processes. For instance, in 2020 Faculty Affairs provided guidance on how to adapt peer class visits in the online environment, led by Ken Luna, Quality Assurance Faculty Lead for Blended & Online Courses/ Chair of Linguistics/TESL and Mary Pat, Chair of Personnel Planning & Review Committee/Biology Professor.  

Perhaps now is an opportunity for your department to engage in collective brainstorming and discussion to decide on an updated and agreed-upon definition of teaching effectiveness. This could allow departments to explicitly and clearly communicate to all department faculty, especially new and part-time faculty the evidence-based values that will be systematically valued, evaluated and supported by the department. 

It’s not uncommon for departments to rely on the values of their department, college or university mission statement for explicit guidance on how to define teaching effectiveness. For instance, if one analyzes the CSUN’s Mission Statement and Values statements, there are multiple elements of effective teaching embedded in this public commitment. For instance, the following phrases overlap with evidence-based teaching frameworks:

  • “Commitment to Teaching, Scholarship, and Active Learning”
  • “encourage intellectual curiosity”
  • “highest standards”
  • “inclusive, cooperative community”
  • “environment conducive to innovation, experimentation, and creativity”
  • “take intellectual and creative risks”
  • “embrace changes”

While we in Faculty Development are not involved in the retention, tenure, promotion, and entitlement process, we can be consulted to help facilitate discussions on the various evidence-based teaching frameworks as well as how instructors reflect upon their own personal teaching.

 

How do I develop values for effective teaching? 

While teaching and learning in higher education will continue to evolve over time, it is also typical for instructors to evolve their pedagogical identity over the course of one's career. We can ask these questions to help shape our understanding of ourselves and our department culture with regards to effective teaching: 

What inspires you to be an effective instructor? 

  • Do you follow a framework or stream of evidence to guide your teaching decisions? 
  • What in the past has helped you organize your understanding of good teaching? 
  • How do you stay connected to your student needs, concerns and ways of learning and engaging in your class? 
  • Do you seek out opportunities to reflect and discuss with others what good teaching entails? 
  • Have you written about or presented your teaching approach with others?

How do you know when good teaching is happening?

  • What do you notice when you’re experiencing good teaching?
  • What do your students do and what do they tell you when teaching is done effectively?
  • When is it obvious to you that ineffective teaching is happening? What motivates you to shift your teaching to better support student learning? 
  • What observable behaviors would someone else immediately notice from your effective teaching? 

How might your teaching approach change over time and within your department? 

  • How do you know when you or others have improved?  
  • How do you know when it is time to stop previously successful approaches and try new ones?
  • What supports are needed for faculty to continue evolving and being willing to change their teaching?
  • How is effective teaching honored, celebrated, and recognized in your department?