Our process of ongoing feedback and self-evaluation

Our courses have adapted problem-based learning and competency-based evaluation designed for online learning in small, interactive groups.

Each course begins with a set of learning skills that are defined in advance by the syllabus. In the course of each lesson, you will be responding to a set of exploratory questions that enable you to bring your previous training and life experiences to bear upon issues/problems that are being examined in each lesson. As soon as you post your responses to these exploratory questions online, (a) they become available to all the other participants in your learning circle and (b) you gain access to the explorations of other members of your learning circle.

A rapid give and take then takes place which allows you to discover how participants within different cultures and educational backgrounds define and respond to the shared questions differently. Meanwhile, at the same time as you give feedback to others, you will receive feedback from persons with different backgrounds. Inside this process, the tutor/mentor offers his/her own reflections and words of appreciation. From time to time, you will even receive clarifying questions that will invite you to further examine and clarify the responses that you have offered. This teaching environment, in particular the incorporation of small group learning and collaborative work, fosters self-reliance, problem solving, and the recognition of the limits of one's own knowledge and skills. Thus, each course has it's internal process of ongoing feedback and self-evaluation.

Learning and evaluation in the traditional classroom

In the traditional classroom, formal exams normally serve as the principal means whereby professors grade their students. These exams endeavor to gauge how well a student has assimilated the factual content and theoretical understanding presented by the professor during the time of the course.

Formal exams are only marginally effective when it comes to evaluating skill formation and personal growth. When it comes to training doctors, lawyers, or pastoral ministers, those who gain the highest marks in exams are oftentimes those who are particular inept as practitioners. Formal exams, consequently, tend to skew the formation process in the direction of overemphasizing theoretical understanding that is, to varying degrees, divorced from effective practice and personal growth.

In the best of classrooms, everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn, including the professor. Catherine College provides a safe place wherein women can find their true voices and to express them freely. The bonding that takes place in the virtual classroom must accordingly be joined with a shared sense of respect and mystery in the face of co-learners struggling to become their authentic selves even when they have for so long been beaten down and forced to adapt roles that conceal their true voices.

Evaluation within competency-based learning

Within any given course, there are three ways of evaluating progress in acquiring the performance skills to which the course is devoted:

1. Exploratory Questions

In our typical course, there are repeated opportunities to express oneself in responding to the Exploratory Questions in each Lesson. These Exploratory Questions enable the participant to make use of personal experience, theoretical understanding, and verified judgments. Consider the following questions posed during the first lesson in Pat Pinsent's course, Role Perceptions of Women in Children's Literature:

Exploration 1.2 Consider your own particular experience.
1.2a What fairy tales were dear to you as a child? Among these, what was your favorite?
1.2b What was the most exciting moment in the story? What feelings were evoked?
1.2c How were your imagination carried away into seeing yourself within this story?
1.2d What was happening in your life then or later that might help you account for your own special attachment to this story?

The role of these questions is to allow the participant to begin to see how even fairy tales enable children to enter into a make-believe situation that offers them entertainment and training. Particular ways of acting and thinking are endorsed. Other ways of acting and thinking are discouraged. By beginning with one's own story, one soon discovers the guidance and the ideological presuppositions hidden within every story (e.g., the parables of Jesus, modern films).
After exploring the role of fairy tales in entertaining and training children, the specific case of "Little Red Riding Hood" is considered as a test case. Three different versions are considered in their historical and social settings. Following a hearing and analysis of the Grimm version, these probative questions are considered:

1.5a What appears to you to be the most exciting moment in the Grimm revision of RRH (Red Riding Hood)? What feelings are evoked?
1.5b What does RRH do to save herself? Is this a wise or fooling course of action? Explain.
1.5c Does RRH save herself all by herself or does she necessarily call upon the help of someone more powerful? Is this a calculated part of her action plan or just a happy accident?
1.5d Try to imagine how parents used this narrative to prepare their daughters to face some real dangers that existed. What might these real dangers be? How were their daughters socialized to save themselves from these dangers? What sort of parental messages were being [overtly or covertly] conveyed through this story?
1.5e In view of contemporary circumstances within your own culture, what version would you want to read/tell your own daughter or granddaughter? [Or, alternately, what would you advise parents who asked you?] Explain.

2. Giving and receiving feedback

After posting ones hunches to the Probative Questions, then there is the opportunity to learn from the responses of others. This goes back to the realization that everyone has something to teach in every course. The give and take that follows the posting offers an opportunity to deepen ones understanding and to correct misleading projections.

3. Mid-term and final essays

Half way through the course, you have the opportunity to display your learning skills by doing a short independent analysis. This usually takes a few hours. At the end of the course, each one has the opportunity of doing a more extensive research project. This may require anywhere between six and twelve hours. Details for how to do this are supplied to participants after the mid-term. In each instance, the subjects chosen are from a list provided by the course moderator.

Coordination with local tradition

The final grade assigned in any given course can be adapted to mirror the system already in place within each academic institution. For those who require a final grade, we normally suggest that this process begin with the student's self-evaluation in each of the three areas named above. The facilitator/tutor then responds to the student's self-evaluation and assigns a grade.

For those who prefer that the facilitator/tutor or the institution's coordinator assign a grade, this modality can also be accommodated. In this case, however, it is best to weigh how each component will contribute to the final grade, for example:

25% Exploratory Questions
25% Giving and Receiving Feedback
15% Mid-term Essay
35% Final Essay