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Talk given at the 2025 UWTL conference (and also at the FYMSiC one-day conference a week later)
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The Math Prof Teach-Offs began in Winter 2023 as a way to challenge how teaching is evaluated, by bringing together students and willing instructors in an experimental event. Students were given a surprise topic and a short quiz to measure their prior knowledge, and then split randomly into three groups. Each was taught a one-hour lesson by an award-winning instructor, and then students were tested again with a similar but not identical quiz. The "winner" of the Teach-Off was the instructor whose students improved their scores the most.
From the instructor side, the Teach-Off is a collection of uncertainties – instructors receive the topic only a week before, and have no idea who their students are, how many of them there will be, or their level of background knowledge. They need to practice resilience by adapting their approaches to the audience in front of them. From a student perspective, since the competitive aspect of the Teach-Off focuses on student learning outcomes, the shift from teacher-centred to student-centred education can be seen as a disruption to evaluation methods that prioritize student engagement and understanding.
Since the first one in 2023, we have run 5 Teach-Offs, and we would love to share what it has taught us about evaluating teaching in an alternative way, by directly measuring learning. Obviously the learning and teaching in a one-hour lesson is not the same as over a full course, but are there takeaways that can be used in our classrooms as well? Furthermore, can we make people think about how to change the way they might evaluate teaching themselves?