IDEA: A Tool For Improving Our Teaching - A Message from Mike Fry

How can we use IDEA to improve our teaching?

I have always focused on the comments, contemplating whether to follow their suggestions, encouraged by their kudos, and cut to the quick by each negative comment.  It is a painful process, but one that I have always hoped would inch me toward being a better teacher.

We can do better than that with IDEA.

In addition to the comments, we get these pretty PDF reports[i].  Pages 1 and 2 have numbers that tell us how well students rate us and our courses.  Indeed, page 2 tells us how well they rated us on their progress toward each of the objectives we picked as important or essential.  Can we easily use those numbers to know what we should do next?

Well, with the numbers on page 2, we pick a single objective that we would like to improve on, and read the corresponding article in the “POD[ii]-IDEA Center Notes on Learning” located at http://www.theideacenter.org/podidea/POSNotesLearning.html  .  (If you are reading your PDF report electronically, there is a link to that web page near the top of page 2.)

But we can do even better than that if we use the Diagnostic Form.

Page 3 of our PDF “Diagnostic Form Report” has results from students about each of 20 “methods” or “strategies”, and an indication of which strategies are known[iii] to be relevant to each of the objectives we had ranked as important or essential.  It is this page that converts information about outcomes into information about action.  Students give us feedback here on things we are doing and doing well, and things we are either not doing or not doing well.  We can identify one of these 20 methods that we want to strengthen, and go read the corresponding article in another set of 20 PODs, the POD-IDEA Center Notes on Instruction, at http://www.theideacenter.org/podidea .  (There is a link to this site near the top of page 3 if you are reading your PDF report electronically.)

These PODs are the core of IDEA’s formative feedback on instruction.  Each is exactly two pages long, and has lots of references for further reading.

CETL offers us a place to talk to each other about these methods.  When you find something that you feel really worked well for you, please let Barry know that you want to talk about it.

For more reading about IDEA, go to http://www.lvc.edu/idea  and http://www.theideacenter.org .

I use Diagnostic Form in at least one course per year.  If you want to switch one of your courses to the Diagnostic Form (do it before November 17), email fry@lvc.edu .

[i] There is a link to an Interpretative Guide at the top of each report.
[ii] Written in collaboration with the Professional and Organizational Development Network.in Higher Education (POD).
[iii] IDEA research on things like this can be found in the Knowledge Center at http://www.theideacenter.org .