Removing bias from self-evaluation

Abstract

Self-Evaluation is a crucial tool for developing skills in any field. Teaching can especially benefit from this practice, as teachers are often too caught up in their lesson and classroom management to be able to focus a critical eye on their own methods and behaviors. The advent of technology allows us to record and review our performances so that we may apply that critical eye to our own work. However, people inevitably behave differently when they know they are being watched or recorded even if it is by themselves, and this difference in behavior keeps us from being able to investigate our true behaviors entirely. To solve this problem of behaving differently when being observed, we propose using a variety of new methods to remove this psychological barrier and allow for true unfiltered self-observation. Strategies like having a para in the classroom randomly record without scheduling, or having a constantly running recorder that you randomly pull tape from can give us drastically new insight into how we naturally behave when we aren't "putting on or best face" for the recording. This unfiltered look at our own teaching behaviors can result in bettering ourselves in ways we did not even know we needed, and in ways that could have been previously invisible.