By Samah Sabra
For those who don’t teach Spring/Summer courses, exams may be a distant memory by this time of year. Students wrote them in April and you already graded them, submitted final grades, and are possibly taking a break from thinking about teaching before planning courses for the Fall and Winter terms. Indeed, I often think that as my seasonal allergies take residence in my head at the beginning of May, thoughts of exams make their way out.
Last week, though, as I entered one of the washrooms on campus, I saw the writing on the wall – or in the stall, as it were – and it reminded me that exams are not simply end of semester (or mid-term) events never to be thought of again. At least, they shouldn’t be, not if we want to design courses with effective assessment tools. While I sadly can’t find the person who scribbled this statement in the bathroom stall (and took time to add two exclamation marks for emphasis) to ask if this is intended as a categorical statement, refers to a specific exam, and/or emerged out of a pedagogical commitment to other forms of assessment, I want to use this statement as a point of reflection in this blog entry.
In a well-designed course, exams should not seem altogether useless either to students or to instructors. This is not to say that we should interpret every situation where a student finishes a course feeling that an exam was useless as a matter of poor planning or poor design on the part of the instructor. My point, instead, is that we can learn a lot as instructors by taking some time to reflect on our failed and successful assessment strategies, including exams. Such reflection can be a good, even great, starting point for redesigning a course and a reminder that it is not simply content we need to update, but sometimes also our lesson plans, teaching techniques, and assessment tools can use a little – or more than a little – work.
For academics, who often feel stretched, it is difficult to find time to update courses from one year to the next. Chances are, if you do not teach over the Spring/Summer term, it is one of the few times of year when you can dedicate a (relatively) considerable amount of time to your research and writing. Perhaps as you read the latest research in your area, you come across new content you can incorporate into courses. In this way, time spent on research is definitely valuable to you in your role as educator and helps you develop your practice of scholarly teaching; brought into your undergraduate and graduate courses, new content in your discipline or field allows you to bridge your scholarship and teaching and offers one avenue for updating classes. What may be more difficult to imagine, however, is how to find time to become familiar with the scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL) – a body of literature that is constantly growing and changing – when you sometimes feel you have little time to read in your already established field of research and may not even know where to enter into this scholarship.
I first learned about this scholarly literature when I took one of the EDC’s Certificate Programs as a graduate student and contract instructor at Carleton University and quickly discovered that I was – and continue to be – completely enthralled by the research on teaching and learning. There were two reasons I was immediately drawn to this body of scholarship and both of those reasons have to do with my passion for teaching – which is, indeed, the very reason I decided to pursue graduate studies. Perhaps reflecting my naiveté as an undergraduate student, I did not understand at the time that being a professor meant research along with teaching.
Returning to my interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning, what I loved about it was discovering some of theories which explained why some practices I have attempted in classes have succeeded, failed, or had varied effects among students enrolled in a course. Reading some of the theoretical debates about the usefulness of the notion of learning styles, for example, continues to set metaphorical light bulbs off in my head. I was just as amazed, however, at the amazing levels of creativity that educators can and do bring to implementing theories of learning and teaching. I consistently find reading the SoTL to be inspirational and consider myself extremely lucky to be working in a field that allows me to continue to draw on the SoTL in my undergraduate teaching as well as in developing programs at the EDC through which Teaching Assistants, Contract Instructors, and Faculty can be introduced to some of the newest ideas in the field. Indeed, familiarizing educators at Carleton University – who may not have time to do this research themselves – with the SoTL and offering ideas for how best to implement the findings from this scholarship into instructional design is central to the work we do at the EDC. Some of these findings and practices will be shared by instructors and EDC staff at our upcoming Teaching and Learning Symposium on June 13th, 2012. I hope to see some of you there, but if you can’t make it that day, you can stay tuned for more blog posts about the event.