Education

Selected Books

Master
Content

Braskamp LA, Ory JC. Assessing Faculty Work: Enhancing Individual and Instructional Performance. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1994: Assessing Faculty Work is a practical resource for fostering and assessing faculty achievements in all aspects of their work including teaching, research, practice, and citizenship. The authors show that the assessment process can and must be tied to faculty development, and they explain how collegial activity, including peer mentoring and review, and continuous improvement are important to strong performance. They identify three major elements of faculty assessment---setting expectations, collecting and organizing evidence, and using evidence—and suggest several key goals for the assessment process. The authors also show how multiple perspectives enhance the credibility of assessment, and they describe sources of evidence, including faculty members themselves, faculty colleagues, students, and experts.

Brookfield, Stephen. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1995: Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher describes what critical reflection is and why it is so important. Brookfield tells how teachers can reframe their teaching by viewing their practice through four distinctive lenses: their autobiographies as teachers and learners, their students’ eyes, their colleagues’ perceptions, and theoretical literature. He also includes specific advice on using practical approaches to critical reflection such as teaching diaries, role model profiles, participant learning portfolios, and structured critical conversation.

Centra J. Reflective Faculty Evaluation: Evaluating Teaching and Determining Faculty Effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1993: Reflective Faculty Evaluation presents the latest findings and approaches to faculty evaluation, including peer mentoring and review, both for formative and summative purposes, and addresses current issues. Centra discusses a need for the following: a definition of scholarship that includes teaching and public service; better use of and guidelines for student evaluations; better ways to involve colleagues in evaluating and improving teaching; proper use of self-reports and portfolios; varieties of effective teaching; and legal considerations in faculty evaluation. Guidelines, general principles, research evidence, and ideas are provided for faculty to consider as they develop assessment systems for faculty members, administrators, and peer reviewers who want to improve teaching and evaluation.

Chism NVN. Peer Review of Teaching: A Sourcebook. Bolton, MA: Anker. 1999: Peer Review of Teaching provides a conceptual framework for the use of peer review, a listing of the tasks involved in setting up a peer review system, and practical suggestions and resources that can be adapted by faculty users. Chism offers resources to move peer review from the rhetoric of stimulating idea to the reality of good practice. She explicates the meaning of peer review and locates it in relevant theory and research. She provides tools for using peer review: guidelines, protocols, checklists, and rating forms for reviewing course materials, classroom performance, and non-course teaching activities. Chism addresses institutional-level issues: policies about peer review; responsibilities of administrators, reviewers, and reviewees; and the components of an effective system for peer review.

Epstein, RM. Mindful Practice. JAMA. 1999, Sep 1: 282(9):833-9: Mindful Practitioners attend in a nonjudgmental way to their own physical and mental processes during ordinary, everyday tasks. This critical self-reflection enables physicians to listen attentively to patients' distress, recognize their own errors, refine their technical skills, make evidence-based decisions, and clarify their values so that they can act with compassion, technical competence, presence, and insight. Mindfulness informs all types of professionally relevant knowledge, including propositional facts, personal experiences, processes, and know-how, each of which may be tacit or explicit. Mindful practitioners use a variety of means to enhance their ability to engage in moment-to-moment self-monitoring, bring to consciousness their tacit personal knowledge and deeply held values, use peripheral vision and subsidiary awareness to become aware of new information and perspectives, and adopt curiosity in both ordinary and novel situations.

Hutchings P. Making Teaching Community Property: A Menu for Peer Collaboration and Peer Review. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1996.: Making Teaching Community Property: Teaching is a matter not simply of method and technique, but of selecting, organizing, and transforming one’s field so that it can be engaged and understood at a deep level by students. Like scholarly research, teaching involves acts of intellectual invention, which acts rightly belong to and require the attention of the "community of scholars." Each chapter in this volume focuses on a particular strategy for peer review or peer collaboration around teaching and learning. Each begins with a brief set of introductory, context-setting remarks, and each concludes with a listing of resources for further work. Many of the chapters also contain tips and suggestions for successfully implementing the strategy in question. At the heart of each chapter are reports by faculty who have actually used the strategies, and who recount exactly what they did, why, how it worked, and what they learned that might assist others.

Hutchings P (ed). From Idea to Prototype: The Peer Review of Teaching: A Project Workbook. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1995: From Idea to Prototype: The peer review of teaching, a project workbook, is a set of materials, tasks, "think pieces," and examples that faculty can duplicate and use to develop their own parallel projects in peer review. The project workbook is intended for faculty who are interested in serving as professional colleagues to each other in the improvement and evaluation of teaching. The materials included are drawn from work currently being done in a national project, a two-year effort involving twelve complex-mission universities, coordinated by the American Association for Higher Education in partnership with Stanford University.

Johns, C. Becoming a Reflective Practitioner: A Reflective and Holistic Approach to Clinical Nursing, Practice Development, and Clinical Supervision. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 2000: Becoming a Reflective Practitioner is a how to handbook for clinical instructors. Although this book is directed toward nurses, chapter 3 examines the essential components of reflection and discusses each one in detail. A model for structured critical reflection appropriate for practitioners in any health discipline is provided.

Schon, Donald. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1987: Educating the Reflective Practitioner argues that professional education should be centered on enhancing the practitioner’s ability for “reflection-in-action” that is, learning by doing and developing the ability for continued learning and problem solving throughout the professional’s career. Building on the concepts of professional competence first introduced in his book, The Reflective Practitioner, Schon offers a new approach to education professionals in all areas.

Westberg, J and Jason, H. Fostering Reflection and Providing Feedback: Helping Others Learn from Experience. New York, NY: Springer, 2001: Fostering Reflection describes two underlying principles of becoming a thoughtful practitioner: reflection and feedback. The authors offer strategies to assist students in developing the attitudes and skills to think about and assess their work, consciously and consistently. This book is especially appropriate for educators of physicians, nurses, psychologists, and social workers.