Today I attended a course on testing and feedback. We started off with a lecture on testing. I’m sorry to say that the person, who was giving this lecture, Gerard Ruijs, came across as a teacher who thinks he’s finally able to tell other teachers what to do and what not to do. His talk wasn’t inspirational in any way, shape or form. At my first degree course in Amsterdam, we had already discussed testing and backwash effects. This subject or discussion is way more interesting in my opinion and could potentially lead to improved ways of thinking about testing and, as backwash effect, improve the quality of our education. To make matters worse, his PowerPoint presentation was riddled with spelling mistakes.
The thing that struck me as most interesting was Bloom’s taxonomy of questions. This could be a good instrument to use to question yourself what you want to accomplish with the questions you pose your students.
After this lecture, we had to divide up into groups so you had to choose one of the workshops. I chose feedback, because this is something that interests me, especially looking at peer feedback. However, this workshop turned out to be some sort of sales pitch to get us to go to a course. The man presenting at this workshop, André Koffeman, started talking about research bij Van de Grift in which he demonstrated that the development of most teachers stagnates once they’ve been teaching between 5 and 7 years and often even starts to fall. It’s the task of a professional teacher to keep up with new developments in the field, to keep the mind fresh, to always try to better yourself as a teaching professional. However, there are plenty of examples of teachers that don’t mind a little bit of stagnation, and are perfectly happy at 75%. I asked Mr. Koffeman if we could ask those people to keep growing and learning professionally, and – much to my disappointment – he said “no.”
This was coming from the same man who was trying to talk us into participating in one of the courses he and his colleagues are promoting. I walked away disillusioned. Come on! You are teaching at university level! Raise that bar! If we no longer express any expectations, people will stop to try and live up to them.
