Aim 6:

Reflection

• Bring together the new ideas from this Section and relate them to your own present position, your current perspective on, or your stance towards the choice of evaluation methods in your discipline or scholarly field;
• Try to come to some interim conclusion, regarding where you stand about the question of how to evaluate within your disciplinary field and the particular setting you are in; and relate this to how you believe your institutional managers and academic leaders would most probably view the issue from their perspectives.

As preamble to the reflection task, we suggest you read pages 166-174 of Prosser & Trigwell.

This is the place where the authors summarise the main challenges of their book. It is significant that the recurring word they use to describe the state of mind of the "good teacher" is the term "awareness". As you read, note this recurring term, and consider its implications, such as:

• What are the different ways by which we can, in a professional practice, "become aware" of things?
• Which of those ways by which people can "become aware" of things include perception - seeing or discovering for oneself what is actually happening?
• In what way might "evaluating teaching" be well-characterised as "a way of becoming aware of things in my own teaching" or of "perceiving what was previously hidden from me"?

To this writer, the closing chapter of Prosser & Trigwell, although not titled such, is in fact a chapter on the conceptual base for evaluating teaching.

Consider that proposal as you read, and choose your own response to it.

Start your reflective work by simply making notes on the evaluation task in general, using these two columns as guide:

Having completed that, scrutinise your intentions and your methods closely from a student learning perspective. Look back over your work in this module and decide upon the key question(s) you need to ask to test whether an evaluation strategy is going to be consistent what that perspective. Then apply that criterion (those criteria) to your answers, and make further adjustments as needed.

On the matter of criteria by which to appraise an evaluation practice, the best approach by far would be to have a discussion with others in your group, pool ideas, criticise them, and come to a personal conclusion about the ones you will use (which may be different from those others decide to use).

Finally, look back at what you wrote in Topic/Task #5 , regarding current views on evaluation in your own disciplinary field, as revealed by some of the literature you have read. Let this reflective task suggest possible extensions, changes, and further developments in the list of points and the arguments you would use to support them in the article you were (hypothetically) planning to write.