Components of the Peer Consultation

            Professors are accustomed to offering intellectual rationale for the content of course to curriculum committees when new courses are proposed, and many units already include some form of class visit by a senior colleague to observe teaching practices as a simple form of peer review. It is much less common for teachers to present examples of student performance and to consider how successfully that student work achieves the stated intellectual goals of the course. To represent student learning, faculty members can present example of the assignments they give to provide students opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, along with examples of completed student work with the feedback provided by the teacher to the student. They also can show a distribution of achievement scores for the whole class on the assignments – typically a frequency count of how many students achieved in each quality category used in grading categories that teachers sometimes derive from class distributions.
            A written reflection on students’ work gives you a chance to comment on the depth of understanding that students demonstrated, noting how well the original goals were met. You also may comment on how many students demonstrated each level of understanding, and consider what could be done to help more students achieve in the higher categories. You might consider these questions as you develop your reflections:

The Nature of Student Understanding

• How solid is learners’ fundamental understanding of the ideas and skills you were teaching?

• Is there evidence of deep understanding in he work sample you received? How does performance on your assignments indicate students have developed an understanding for your field of study that will be retained and that students can apply to new contexts?

• How does the understanding represented by the work samples you present differ among the students? How do these differences relate to the criteria you use in grading the assignment? How do these criteria relate to the intellectual goals you have set for the class?

• What do your assignments and students’ work tell you about how students are constructing the ideas that are central to the course and your teaching goals?

• What misconceptions do they have about these ideas?

Guiding Improvement in Future Offerings

• Overall, how well did student work meet your intellectual goals for the course? Was the distribution of achievement by students up to your expectations? Was it comparable to previous offerings of the same course?

• Were there particular parts of the course in which achievement was especially high or low as compared with the rest of the general course goals?

• What changes could be made to help more students achieve in the higher categories of learning? Are there particular features of the course that you would redesign? How do you think those changes would improve student understanding?