Chapter 11. ICE as an Educational Development Tool
11.1 Instructional Context
Sue Fostaty Young – Queen’s University
I’ve worked as an educational developer for close to 25 years. The focus of my work has always been in finding ways to help post-secondary instructors improve their teaching for the express purpose of improving their students’ learning. Of course, as the literature tells us, meaningful and lasting changes in teaching practice aren’t likely to happen without some kind of change in, or development of, teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning. That being the case, the goal of educational development is to help teachers develop increasingly sophisticated conceptions of teaching and learning while at the same time supporting the acquisition and development of the teaching skills they’ll need to enact those newly developed conceptions. So, in many ways, my practice has been focused on helping instructors think about their teaching in ways that are different from the ways they habitually do. That sounds easy enough except for the fact that very few post-secondary instructors come to their positions with any pedagogical background. That might mean they haven’t yet adopted an overarching conceptual framework or operational theory of learning to rely on to articulate their expectations for students’ learning or to reflect on their teaching. Without that ability to accurately name and frame their beliefs and values or, for that matter, name what it is they do and why they do it, it can be exceedingly difficult to work toward or plan for improvement.
Over the years, I’ve discovered that inviting conversations about their assessment choices enables instructors to express the sometimes tacit system of beliefs and values on which they base their teaching and assessment practices. It gives them a chance, sometimes for the first time, to inquire into the aspects of their practice that are purposeful and quite intentional and the others that might actually be surprisingly inconsistent with their stated intentions.
Conversations about assessment are, at their core, conversations about learning. In causing instructors to shift their attention away from teaching (i.e. what they do) to focusing on learning (i.e. what their students do) we can begin conversations about the ways instructors make decisions to evoke that learning for their students. In making their tacit practice explicit, they then might be able to become more intentional and make a shift from trying to merely adopt “best practices” to a more invested exploration of “best principles” for their own system of values. In this way, my educational development practice has become entirely learning assessment-focused and entirely facilitated through ICE.
