Overview - Teaching Optimization Rubric & Choice (TORC) System:
TORC Up: Starting with What Works!
The TORC is a teacher sensitive instrument for making an orderly inquiry and categorization of an instructional means and methods as ‘good,’ ‘better,’ ‘best’ and hence optimizing learning outcomes. The key term in the TORC search and identify system is Optimization. The term is an extension of cutting edge movement across many other fields meant to identify the critical factors, information and principles that can be converted into reliable and dependable guidelines that would objectively get things done in the most efficient and effective way. Typically these now are being coded into computer-based algorithms for quick and comparable results. Education is not quite ready to create algorithms, however the process of weighing, evaluating, and categorizing teaching methods will elevate the search for best methods to the level necessary to soon build such algorithms. Metaphorically, the goal is that the public policy and special interest group lions will work with the pedagogically oriented lambs and frankly that this primary mission - as opposed to mere interest group - will hold sway, but not monopolize the many other stake holders in educational and public policy making process. In a word, the proposed system is designed to assist teachers in rebuilding a legacy of knowledge and evidentiary supported practices that could once again showcase our wisdom and experience in the science and art of pedagogy. This may be more possible in Education than in any other field since most everything published is put in the public domain; few have ever filed for a patent on a particularly effective means/method of teaching. There currently is no such thing as one’s Intellectual Property in Education.
Currently K-12 schooling is in truth running a bit ahead of universities in pioneering practices. For example, the Blackboard.com option that first was the technological edge at universities now reaches into every classroom. In even a more advanced phase while Literacy programs at universities continue to teach standards like the very complex Informal Reading Inventory on tear-out sheets schools are moving toward the efficiencies and interpretative power of computer-based diagnostic assessment. One of the goals of TORC is to create and elevate "professional communities of learners" made up largely of teachers and professors working with computers and new algorithms to put a sharper point on how to teach more effectively and comprehensively, though beginning with the most fundamental of questions: what are the best practices? TORC will act as an aggregator of science, field reports and a continuous interactive dialog on this site where anyone can respond with alternate perspectives by indicating both their selections and choices of instructional methods and options, and with any additional input they deem relevant.
TORC is designed to open dialogues and inform instructional decision making, not to compel it. Teacher Choices and ongoing input as well as fresh thoughts, new evidence and ongoing critique are built-into this nascent and evolving system. However, there is a bias; it is that quality information and student outcomes are weighted above all other considerations simply because the history of prior missteps suggests that we all are prone to a higher rate of poor decision making when we have relied too heavily on ideologies, personal preferences and anecdotes. TORC is a reality check clearly intended to set a new agenda that stresses pragmatic pedagogy of result-based findings as first and foremost among other considerations. Users will also be able to openly suggest modifications and redesign of the items and weightings in the evaluation system itself. Ideally this approach will incite questions that doctoral students and professors will attempt to address in various forms of scholarship, from analytical essays to tightly knit empirical studies.
