Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi! I am Gideon Eduah, a doctoral student from Tennessee Tech University, and I work with a group of interdisciplinary collaborators affiliated with the Center for Assessment & Improvement of Learning at Tennessee Tech and the Office of Institutional Effectiveness at Tallahassee Community College (TCC).
Together, we have facilitated ten professional development critical thinking workshops with three two-year and two four-year universities centered on assessment practices in higher education. Leveraging either the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT) or the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Critical Thinking VALUE rubric, these workshops intended to help guide and support faculty as they navigate instructional pivots relating to student assessment and evaluation. These workshops have been in face-to-face, virtual, and hybrid settings, with faculty from multiple disciplines.
In implementing these workshops, we wanted to better understand transformative moments in faculty experiences. The integration of best practices in faculty development workshops is important to ensure that the quality and content of the material are shared in a way that leads to the largest gains in critical thinking in their disciplines. Additionally, identifying how these practices are interpreted by faculty is beneficial to developing a stronger partnership between facilitators and future opportunities.
Lessons Learned
From these experiences, we have learned several key lessons, including:
- Metacognitive processes that were helpful: In the workshops, it became clear that conceptualizing critical thinking – that is, incorporating critical thinking skills when thinking about thinking—allowed faculty to make connections to evaluation and assessment in assignment or curricula design.
- Excitement about transforming student experiences: When faculty were encouraged to use the workshops as a transformative space, we saw them start to bring genuine experiences into their assignments that immersed students in authentic real-world opportunities (e.g., biology picnic).
- Direct changes of teaching practices: Using the workshop space as a learner-centered opportunity allowed faculty to focus on specific deliverables, like updating assignments and student learning opportunities, that could be implemented in the same semester. From these direct assignment upgrades, we saw classes demonstrate significant increases in pre- and post-assessments in CAT.
Hot Tips
Faculty who engaged in the professional development opportunities often wanted to continue the conversations across classrooms and disciplines outside the experience. To help facilitate these types of conversations, it may be helpful to establish formal teaching and learning communities as part of the continuation of faculty development for a more longitudinal experience.
Another way to continue the conversation outside the workshop is to establish departmental and interdisciplinary collaborations that look at common strategies to enhance critical thinking. For example, creating a shared library or shared online platform for faculty to upload newly designed assignments or assignments in need of updates allows for participants to actively exchange assignment ideas on an ongoing basis.
Cool Tricks
To make the professional development opportunity engaging and to help facilitate future classroom implementation, encourage faculty to bring existing assignments or assignment ideas to the workshop. Doing this as part of the workshop is a great opportunity to help transform existing assignments into ones that assess both students’ technical and critical thinking skills when used in their classes. This also helps to reduce faculty’s time burden while also making it easier to implement the skill learned in the workshops.
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