The Excellence in Teaching Program

Weekly Teaching Tip

Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI)
[Effective for planning small and large classes, including online courses]

Purpose: The Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI) is a self-assessment of instructional goals. Its purpose is threefold: (1) to help college teachers become more aware of what they want to accomplish in individual courses; (2) to help faculty locate Classroom Assessment Techniques they can adapt and use to assess how well they are achieving their teaching and learning goals; and (3) to provide a starting point for discussion of teaching and learning goals among colleagues.
College instructors might find it helpful to complete the TGI when they are:

Developing a new course
Revising a course
Writing or revising their philosophy of teaching
Participating in a curriculum review

Steps: Contact Barbara Millis (millis@unr.edu) or the ETP office for an electronic version of the TGI that you can print, complete, and self-score. Or, take the TGI online at http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach/tgi.

Directions:
Please select ONE course you are currently teaching. Respond to each item on the inventory in relation to that particular course. (Your response might be quite different if you were asked about your overall teaching and learning goals, for example, or the appropriate instructional goals for your discipline.) Rate the importance of each goal to what you aim to have students accomplish in your course.
Please rate the importance of each of the fifty-two goals listed below to the specific course you have selected. Assess each goal's importance to what you deliberately aim to have your students accomplish, rather than the goal's general worthiness or overall importance to your institution's mission. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers; only personally more or less accurate ones. For each goal, choose only one response on the 1- to -5 rating scale. You may want to read quickly through all fifty-two goals before rating their relative importance. In relation to the course you are focusing on, indicate whether each goal you rate is:

(1) Not applicable	a goal you never try to achieve
(2) Unimportant	a goal you rarely try to achieve
(3) Important	a goal you sometimes try to achieve
(4) Very Important	a goal you often try to achieve
(5) Essential	a goal you always/nearly always try to achieve

(Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross. 1993. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. A copy of this book is available in the ETP library.)

Book-of-the-Week
Scholarship Reconsidered
By Ernest L. Boyer

Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered offers a new paradigm that recognizes the full range of scholarly activity by college and university faculty and questions the existence of a reward system that pushed faculty toward research and publication and away from teaching, www.amazon.com

Call ETP at 784-6591 or email Katy (Schleef@unr.edu) to check out a copy.