Phil Seder's Assessment Angst

I come from the world of business marketing. In that world, we plan, we produce and we measure success in order to refine programs and improve outcomes. I believe this to be a valid approach. I teach my students that it is an essential approach in the business world.


I thus find myself perplexed by my internal resistance to the idea of assessment that is being pushed down from the highest levels of government and has now come to roost at the community college level. There is no doubt in my mind that we can improve delivery and there is no doubt in my mind that assessment can lead to refinements in course content or delivery that results in better outcomes. So why my angst?


I think it is because in the business world, there is a fundamental difference from the world of classroom education (well, a bunch actually, but I’m going to deal with just one here). In business, marketers work with researchers to determine consumer or business needs. Those marketers pass requirements on to designers and engineers who develop the products or services. The engineers pass the designs to manufacturing and sales to create and deliver the products. And finally, the marketers (often with the aid of accountants or analyst) assess the results before another round of the same is initiated.


Now let's look at who performs these tasks in the education world. Basic research and determination of customer needs? At the classroom level at least, the teacher. Product design? The teacher. Product development? The teacher. Product delivery? The teacher. Product assessment? The teacher.


This is not to say that administrators do nothing. There are monumental issues of overall program development (e.g. Should we offer a nursing program), new program implementation, facilities construction and maintenance, marketing, budgeting, negotiation, discipline and, ah yes, even employee supervision. I thank my stars that trained professionals stand ready to perform these essential duties.


But the bottom line is that the classroom teacher is responsible for every aspect of the development and delivery of the product in the classroom. In other words, they perform tasks that are the responsibly of numerous differently trained professionals in the business world. I know this because I've managed products in both worlds and, frankly, it is one of the things that excites me about the daily challenge of teaching.


But therein lies a conundrum. To teach better, we are being told, we need to assess more. We need to be more like the measurement driven business world. The teacher though, is not like the business professional. They are responsible for the entire life cycle of product development and delivery in the classroom. To assess more means that they either have to 1) work more or 2) spend less time on planning, development and delivery.


Now we all know that there are those who can work more. But for many teachers I see around me, their waking hours during the academic year are filled with the activities of course development and delivery. I doubt if many would look kindly at giving up the few moments of personal time they have during the week. As to the old saw "work smarter, not harder," well, it's a trite and meaningless age-old piece of business wisdom, custom canned for delivery to the survivors of corporate layoffs as they contemplate a future of 24/7 employment. At the very least, when I have been in those situations, I had the comfort of higher compensation to balance the loss of personal and family time.


Today's reality of an assessment-driven education system though, is that the classroom teacher will have to cut back on planning and delivery activities to respond to the assessment demands. And the more dedicated the teacher, the more they will need to cut back, since they are the ones who already spend their entire waking time engaged in better delivery. The result: we know what we're getting, but what we know we're getting is worse than what we were producing before when we didn't know what we were getting. Read that twice, if need be, then, especially if you have been teaching for a decade or more, contemplate whether this does not seem to precisely speak to the ultimate results of modern educational policy at the high school level.


I see it in my own work. Even in the past five years, I have seen a creeping slide towards more meetings, more time discussing the nuances of outcomes language (e.g. our graduates don't communicate with coworkers, they interact with coworkers), and more time discussing assessment. Where I have cut back was first, in my personal life where I spend limited time on my once thriving second life as a sculptor, and second, in my course preparation and delivery. It's not like I drop professionalism; it's just that I make one course improvement per term where previously I made three or four or five. Or the extensive paper markups that I used to do, and for which I was often thanked by more serious students, have become rare and often replaced by a mere letter grade. It's not what I want. But the fact is the time spent responding to federal officials and accreditation committees must come from somewhere.


Ultimately, the question that I can imagine being thrown back at me is this: "Then would you just say to give up on assessment, even knowing that better assessment can create a better product?" in a nutshell, yes. Taking this back to my original business analogy, if a shortage of resources forced me to make a choice between building a better product or measuring consumer acceptance of that product, I would err on the side of building the best product I could. In a world of unlimited resources, I would do it all. In our real world of limited resources, trade offs will be made.


Of course, I do assess. In many ways and on many dimensions. I assess writing skills in business classes (which doesn't make one very popular, I might add), I assess math skills, I force students to present, I make them work in teams. Do I know scientifically whether my assessments are creating the best students, or whether I'm doing a better job teaching than I was five years ago? No. Intuitively I believe so. But I know I am putting the most I can into my product and I am comfortable that in a world of scarce resources, I am allocating my time in an ethical and professional manner.

Steve Smith's Assessment Journey

I started teaching in a volunteer ESL Program for a local church that was next to the University of Washington which I was attending as an undergraduate. I spent the first week doing a lot of exercises I had found in an ESL instructional book of which many were written. I was working with a group of Hmong. It wasn't until the second week that I realized that many of the students were illiterate in their own language. Much of what I had been doing had been worthless. I realized there was more to this teaching and learning business then I had realized.

After graduating, I moved to Ecuador, South America. I taught English and eventually became the director of a language and cultural center. I was responsible for 30 Spanish and English instructors many of whom had no teaching experience. I began to research teaching and learning strategies. I started to wonder if there were a systematic way to approach teaching and learning.

After 5 years we returned to the US. I started teaching computers. I also started a master’s program in adult education. Instructional design, Knowles’ principles of Andragogy, Gagne’s 9 Instructional Events, Constructionist theories of teaching and learning opened my eyes to a whole new vision of teaching and learning. I also was introduced to assessment through Kilpatrick's 4 levels of evaluation. While now outdated, it transformed how I viewed evaluation. Can the student do the learning task in class was only the beginning. Can they perform it outside the class without classroom support and finally the most important and hardest to assess; did the learning solve the original problem? I realized that what I did inside the classroom needed to be assessed at least in part on what the student could do outside the classroom. This was a monumental shift in how I viewed teaching and learning. I started to believe that if it could be measured, it could be learned and that instead of a Bell curve of grading my expectations were that everyone could succeed if I applied the appropriate instructional design principles.

I taught off and on in various formats including distance learning for the next 10 years. Recently, I finished the coursework for a PhD in Community College Leadership. In this program I was introduced to the concepts of Chaos Theory, Freire’s Transformational and Social Critical theories of learning, Qualitative vs. Quantitative research, living systems and Wheatley’s application to organizations. I realized that I had become too reductionist in my teaching and learning. I needed a more holistic approach. Some things are hard to measure and when you try to measure them, they change.

These experiences have shaped my view of assessment. I believe in the concept of assessing learning based on what the students can do “out there”. I believe that we need to measure not only what goes on in our classroom but also the larger core outcomes. This process is messy and we may not always be able to cleanly assess some of the critical learning components which happen in our classrooms such as the student is more confident, more engaged in their own learning, open to new ideas, more excited about continuing with their education and more willing to take emotional and intellectual risks. These are the mana from heaven that we seek out as teachers but may not be able to necessarily assess. I believe we owe it to our students to keep struggling to find the right balance of assessing with realizing that learning is not necessarily the sum total of its parts. Assessment is not an either or but rather an and/and focus. We need to assess to continue to grow and improve as an institution while allowing room and time for those things which are difficult to assess to flourish.

Steve Smith is the director of Curriculum Support Services

What does PCC get from being accredited, anyway?

From Laura Massey, Director of Institutional Effectiveness

I don’t know about you, but I am not motivated by scare tactics. A sentence beginning “Without accreditation” followed by frightening statistics does nothing more than bring forth my inner twelve year-old who mentally shuts down while rebelling in full voice. Instead, here are a few facts.

Because PCC is an accredited college . . .

• 
  Almost 40% of our students are able to receive Federal Financial Aid dollars.
• 
  The credits earned by 5,100 students who transfer to another college or university (each year) are accepted at the transfer institution.
• 
  Last year’s 3,400+ graduates have credentials that are valued by other institutions, employers and licensing agencies.
• 
  Almost $14 million in recently awarded grants will provide improved student services, new equipment, expanded curriculum and so much more.

But wait. This is supposed to be an assessment blog. Why the emphasis on accreditation?

Because to maintain our accreditation, PCC is required to “hasten its progress in demonstrating, through regular and systematic assessment, that students who complete their programs have achieved the intended learning outcomes of degrees and certificates. Further, the college must begin to demonstrate, in a regular and systematic fashion, how the assessment of student learning leads to the improvement of teaching and learning” from the visiting team response on behalf of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, Spring 2010.

Scare tactic? Hardly - although it is certainly an important statement requiring action. Let’s first put this in context at PCC.

We care deeply that our students are learning. Period. It is our professional responsibility to understand what is working well and make improvements when needed. This is nothing new or different from what hundreds and hundreds of PCC faculty do in classrooms each day.
However, Northwest is also asking we demonstrate (in their language that means document) that we regularly and systematically assess graduates to have achieved the College defined outcomes. Furthermore, that we link how we used what is learned through assessment to make changes where needed to improve teaching and learning.

The faculty-driven Learning Assessment Council developed an assessment model which was initially implemented in 2009-10. As support staff to that work, I could see how institutional learning is both energized and realized through faculty creativity, insight and on-going commitment to excellence - the same qualities that support student learning.

As we ‘”hasten” our progress and fully implement the model this year, I believe we are on the path to fulfilling Northwest’s recommendation.

From Cynthia Killingsworth, Accounting Instructor

I enrolled in Sylvia and Shirlee’s assessments class last spring with a narrow objective of improving testing in my accounting courses. This class ended up being a major teaching style alignment and I learned to appreciate the unavoidable bottom-line of the assessment movement. We talk a lot about measuring student performance, but it is really a matter of facing our own teaching effectiveness head-on. The harsh line “It’s the teaching, stupid!” comes to mind from a 2006 article about retooling math education. Here are some of my thoughts from this experience:

Do I understand what should be assessed? I discovered that I was assessing concepts easiest to measure, such as preparing a financial statement in proper format, but may have failed to fully consider those concepts harder to measure, but equally relevant for student success, such as interpreting financial information. This led to a rapid detour away from testing as my focus and towards reconsidering what I was teaching.

Do I understand what is most relevant for course content? In this detour I had to invest some time finding actual research in my discipline regarding the concepts or skills important for accounting student success. Ironically, the PCC assessment focus last year was critical thinking and problem solving, and when I researched my discipline, I rediscovered that the Accounting Education Change Commission had completed an extensive study in the 1990’s determining that critical thinking skills were being ignored in college accounting education. Accounting educators’ subsequent response was to include one mildly unstructured critical thinking problem at the end of each accounting textbook chapter, still preceded by dozens of highly structured procedural questions. Guided by this inference of relevance, it is not surprising that most accounting instructors still lean towards procedural content and not much has changed.

I learned that it pays to reexamine our discipline to determine if our focus is supported by research. I found that this might not be true in accounting education. Another interesting irony of the Accounting Education Change Commission study is that many of the commission’s recommendations aligned perfectly with the PCC core outcomes. I now have even more confidence in the wearability of PCC’s overall vision!

Do I understand the level of my students’ academic development? I reviewed the research subsequent to the Accounting Education Change Commission’s findings and learned more about student cognitive development. After this report was released, some college professors started introducing complex financial analysis projects at all levels of accounting courses. The problem with this quick fix was that most students cannot handle complex financial analysis until their senior year or graduate level studies. A tiered approach of first introducing students to concepts involving uncertainty, followed by increasing analytical tasks, was found to be more effective.

Do students need to know about all this? Students are the most significant stakeholders in the assessment movement, so it makes sense that they should be aware of what is happening. I was teaching a non-accounting general education (Introduction to Nonprofits) class at the same time I was taking the assessments class and spent some time discussing these concepts with my students. I was pleased and relieved to find that students were very interested in PCC’s core outcomes and wanted to understand meaningful ways to measure the quality and progress of their education. This desire confirmed a key assessments’ concept discussed in Sylvia and Shirlee’s class. Letter grades may stay around, but more of our effort needs to be focused on an assessment system that gives feedback and advice to students throughout the term. It should be just as much of a learning tool as their textbooks.

I have to admit that the above experiences unsettled my relatively peaceful teaching bubble, but my perspective has been broadened along with my courage to face the inevitable changes on the horizon. I remember when the Accounting Education Change Commission’s report was released about the poor quality of accounting education. I had just graduated from college and was facing the reality of paying my student loans. The thought occurred to me that I deserved a refund! As I face the future ramifications of “value-added” education, I hope I never forget my perspective as a primary stakeholder in education from 20 years ago.

Assessment: a blog post

by Andy Simon
September 2010



I haven’t been involved in the discussion of assessment for more than a year. I apologize if the issues I raise have already been heard and discussed. I confess that I am skeptical about the whole enterprise, and yet I know that many intelligent, aware, hard-working people–some of them my friends–have put in a great deal of time and effort examining proposals and strategies. I am not completely comfortable saying, in effect, to these folks, “your efforts are for naught, the project is inherently flawed.” For one thing, I may be wrong. Just on the other side of the next committee meeting a beautiful, effective, and efficient approach may be discovered or created. Yet, I was asked to write about my objections–qualms might be a better term. And so I shall.

The point of the project, I remember being told, is that taxpayers, politicians, and business leaders want to know that they are getting a good return for the money they invest in higher education. What they want to know–and what we must be able to show them–is that we are indeed enhancing students’ lives–adding value to them–by educating them.

My first observation about the project so described (and perhaps inaccurately so) is that we should be very careful about how we think about the relationship between those who sign the paychecks of teachers and those who receive the checks. John Dewey, a century ago, in defending the concept of academic freedom, offered a similar warning. He said, in effect, that although the trustees of a university are in an economic sense the employers of professors, the job of teaching is primarily to serve the public.

Nowadays, I see the idea of “the public” as a bit more problematic than Dewey did, and besides it might seem plausible (though I would say mistaken) to equate “the public” with the taxpayers. I would say that though we are employed by the taxpayers (in public education) we are responsible primarily to the generation we are educating and beyond that to future generations as well. For if we do not educate the current generation, who will there be to educate the generation that follows, and the generation after that?

This observation points to one of the problems with the very model the concept of adding value to students lives depends on. It is, after all, a rather industrial model–students’ lives are the raw material we work our magic on. They pass through our educational factories and, like raw steel turned into automobiles, their value is enhanced. But processing students’ lives can at best be only part of the function of our institutions of higher education. Another function–and a vital one–is to preserve some important things: ways of thinking, intellectual skills, bodies of knowledge, bodies of literature and the keys that unlock their meaning, bodies of art and the keys that unlock their meaning, historically significant works that inform our own culture and literature, and much, much more. How much value is added to our civilization because we can understand that the piles of stones that are scattered across Europe are the remains of a once vast empire, and because we can study the ideas that enabled that empire to rise and that caused it eventually to fall? Having that kind of knowledge adds at best a pittance of value to any one student’s life, but does that exhaust its value to our civilization?

It is important to note that higher education is one of the few extant institutions that predate the industrial revolution. It would be a grave mistake to force it into a industrial model merely because that is the only model we can think of. And yet, that is precisely what assessing education in terms of processing and credentializing students does. The success of the industrial model in many spheres of our lives has made us forget that there were–and hence are–other ways of thinking about education. One of them involves seeing education as a process of preparing and inducting students into a community–a community of scholars.

Clearly, there are problems with this model, too. One of them is that a closed community can perpetuate an unfair exclusivity. I was tempted to say that a pre-industrial approach to education saw the point as inducting students into a brotherhood, which would have been historically accurate as it reflects the way the “community of scholars” model has in the past excluded people who had a legitimate claim to be admitted. But the solution to such problems is not to throw out the model altogether but to try to ensure that there is open access to the community of the educated.

I can say quite explicitly what I think we must protect our institutions of higher education from: market forces. The threat to education that has existed at least as long as the advent of Capitalism has been enormously amplified by the computerization of our culture. Education has become a commodity–something to be bought and sold. That might not be so bad, but in our society, the only commodities that can be successfully bought and sold are ones that can be mass produced. In order to be mass produced, education must be standardized and homogenized. When I go to the store for, say, a pair of socks, the characteristics that make the socks I come home with unique an individual entities in the world are unimportant. What is important is that the socks I come home with are interchangeable with any of several dozen in the store I shopped in, any of tens of thousands in the stores the sock manufacturer supplies. That’s the way
it is with mass-produced commodities.

We are already well on our way to commodifying higher education. When we discuss the question whether college credits earned on-line are equivalent to credit earned in face-to-face classrooms we are addressing the interchangeability of our product. Of course, the answer to our question is obvious: if earning the credits in the two venues add equivalent value to our students’ lives, then they are clearly equivalent.

But if that is the approach to education that we want, why stop there? Why have professional teachers at all, with all their quirks and personalities? Why not have Harvard or Stanford develop the most effective on-line curricula (since massifying the classroom is impractical, though not impossible) as measured by value added to students’ lives, and then hire educational technicians to administer them? I’m being a bit facetious, but I really do fear that something like what I’ve described is the future for higher education: most students will enroll in institutions (note I didn’t say “attend”) where they will be offered the best on-line curricula the school system can afford. Only the elite, that is, the wealthy, will be able to afford colleges that offer face-to-face instruction from actual professors.

That poses a serious question: is there any real value in the uniqueness of face-to-face instruction by professional instructors? Maybe the answer is no. Maybe the individuality of instructors, their quirkiness, their personalities are irrelevant, or worse, impediments to the educational process. Obviously, I don’t think so. And I don’t think so because what I remember most about my undergraduate education is not the content of the classes but the inspiration I took away from many professors–and some of the quirkiest were the most inspiring. It may be just me, but I think inspiration is best transmitted face-to-face. I don’t think it comes across all that well through a computer screen. (I’m pretty old fashioned, but I believe that the immediate experience of presence is qualitatively different from any technology-mediated experience, no matter how life-like.)

Now that I’ve struck a personal note, let me pursue it a bit longer and then bring this long post to a close. I have no doubt that my education added a great deal of value to my life. Probably the most valuable contribution was never explicitly stated but implicit in everything I studied. My professors revealed to me the vast world of ideas–not specifically philosophical ideas, but the world of thought and knowledge. At some point I caught onto the notion that, if I played my cards right, I could spend the rest of my life studying anything at all that interested me, whether it be the sex lives of the Greeks (the revelation came to me while I was barely post-adolescent) or the musical traditions of the former Portuguese colonies, or anything else.

What a valuable lesson–to be shown to the vast continent of human knowledge and to be led to some of the points of entry to it. We have so many opportunities to enhance and enrich our students’ lives. We give students literature to read and insist on discussing it, and by so doing reveal to them the inner lives of other people, and by implication revealing their own inner lives, too. I feel some regret that throughout my teaching career I didn’t emphasize nearly enough to my students the importance of finding and creating beauty in their lives. I don’t think the intangible enhancements we have to offer are any less real because they are intangible, nor are they any less real because they are unmeasurable. I’m probably just tilting at windmills, but I think we have a responsibility to the future to do our best to protect education from the market forces that would industrialize it, and by so doing would destroy its humaneness and its ineffable value.

We are all in this together

From Sylvia Gray, out-going chair of the Faculty Learning Assessment Council

I’ve always wanted to get things in order and have them stay in order – but that just doesn’t seem to happen, no matter how hard I try. I don’t know how it works for the rest of you – but here we are – two years into this Learning Assessment project, and, shall we say, “enhanced” directives from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) (our accrediting agency) have come down to us. My first feeling (I admit – I’m not proud of it) was one of dismay – can’t they see what a big job it is to move an institution like PCC in a direction of this sort? And can’t they see what we’ve already accomplished? We were feeling pretty good about the progress we were making and the plan we had agreed on for future learning assessment.

Distancing myself, I do realize they are not asking for something different than what the Learning Assessment Council has been working toward – simply that we move things more intensely and more quickly. What the heck? Let’s be efficient. Maybe we can come up with rubrics for various core outcomes that we can use on the same set of student papers, for instance.

One thing this kick from the NWCCU forces us to do is to talk with each other about what we’re doing and to share ideas among ourselves – maybe more than we have in the past. When I think of some of my favorite things about being at PCC –apart from the absolute love of the classroom dynamic - it really is conversing with my colleagues about what and how we teach. I’ve been exposed to so many ideas as a result of similar conversations, and my own teaching is a blend of many ideas from my colleagues, all mixed together in my own particular way. It’s actually not just a luxury – it’s important that we continue this kind of cross-fertilization of ideas – and it’s a side benefit to the demands for accountability.

We are all in this together.

Sylvia Gray

Instructor of History

Posted by Shirlee Geiger

Did you hear about the letter PCC got this past August from our accrediting agency, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities? The letter was shared at many in-service activities at the outset of fall term. In part it reads:

[T]he evaluators recommend that the College hasten its progress in demonstrating, through regular and systematic assessments, that students who complete their programs have achieved the intended learning outcomes…

This letter came with a carefully worded, polite and collegial, “or else.” It has gotten a lot of attention since it was received. (If you want to see the full copy, email me at sgeiger@pcc.edu, or talk to your SAC chair or division dean.)

Some people have seen something like this coming for a while --though not this strong or this fast --because they’ve been tuned in to trends in the politics and economics of higher education. For me, I had just been happily teaching my classes, joyfully oblivious to these trends and pressures…. That is, until I joined the learning Assessment Council in 2008.

Now I watch for news of the tsunami of change headed our way. If you listened in on any of the debates around reforming access to health insurance, you already are familiar with the components of the controversy over higher education.

· Just like health care, costs associated with higher education have been sky-rocketing.

· Also like health care, the negative consequences to individuals shut out of access to higher education are ever more drastic over the course of a life-time.

· Like Health Care, the current higher ed “system” is composed of a mix of publicly funded and private, for-profit institutions. Lots and lots of money changes hands….

· Some schools seem to get very good educational outcomes, at lower costs, than others. This makes it look ever more likely there are some “best practices” that could (if adopted widely) make the whole system more effective and efficient. But it is difficult to get access to statistics that allow a meaningful comparison of schools with one another, just like it is hard to get records that help us pinpoint the best and the worst of doctors, hospitals, or treatment types.

· Having access to medical insurance, or being shut out of it, creates obvious and glaring scenarios of social injustice. These tragic comparisons have contributed to the widespread belief that the current situation is just morally wrong – horribly and undeniably unfair. Yet it is very hard to find our way through to consensus on how to make things better. And this is true in education, too.

The Obama administration has made it clear that access to quality education, including college, for all citizens is a top priority. But the administration has also shown -- as with the controversy over health insurance -- it is willing to shake up the status quo. The demand for evidence-based medicine is paired with a demand for evidence-based education.

And that means you.

Here at PCC, we have been lucky. We have administrators, in the form of Chris Chairsell and Preston Pulliams, who have been willing to trust faculty to take the lead in crafting a response to this new demand for accountability and evidence-based educational practice. The Faculty Learning Assessment Council was formed by Sylvia Gray (Instructor in History at Sylvania) in Fall 2008. Last year was the initial implementation of our recommended plan. This year is the full implementation. You can see what we came up with, as well as some excellent assessment projects created by your colleagues, at http://pcc.edu/assessment

The Council has set in place a process where members of each SAC collaboratively devise an assessment practice that will be useful and meaningful to them in figuring out how to improve their program. The interest is in assessing the program, and ultimately the institution, not individual classes, learners, or educators. The focus on program or discipline level assessment requires (among other things) a new level of communication and collaboration among teachers, both full- and part-time. Many people who have made a start at creating and implementing program level assessment of core outcomes gave feedback to the Council that the collaboration was a wonderful and unexpected bonus of their work….

With this blog, we hope to continue the process of communicating across campus locations, discipline boundaries, and the isolating walls of our individual classrooms. Each week, a guest blogger will take center stage, bringing expertise or perplexities, perhaps highlighting best-practices, maybe pointing out what we stand to gain, or lose, as we work together to meet these new demands for evidence… You are welcome to comment on the blogs. If you would like a turn as Guest Blogger, just let me know, and we’ll schedule a time for you.

And who am I? I am the new and in-coming chair of the Learning Assessment Council. I am starting my 28^th year as a part time instructor in philosophy. I first came to PCC as a student. I was 17 years old, already a cynical and bitter high school drop-out. I thought education was simply the polite way to refer to the main propaganda machine for the “system.” I wanted no part of it… except to study a little bit of literature, get exposed to a dab of history, and (quick!) learn another language so I could go out and travel the world – getting far, far away from anything resembling a classroom. So I did a year at PCC. Then I did some traveling – I lived on different continents, saw what life can look like outside the Pacific Northwest. I left pieces of my youthful cynicism in cheap hotels, and in exposure to the hardships and sorrows that are normal outside the US. I gradually lost that desire to get as far away from Portland as possible. But I have never lost the desire I acquired in my travels to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem….

I returned to Portland, and have stayed rooted here. I continued at PSU, eventually went to graduate school... I have done lots of different kinds of work, in addition to teaching here at PCC. But I have continued to be drawn back to the very classrooms I was so hot to leave behind when I was young.

Teaching here for me has always been one small way I have tried to “pay it forward.” Some of those teachers I had at PCC, in my 17^th year on this earth, changed the trajectory of my life. I was a sullen and angry young woman. But they saw a potential thinker, with some good ideas -- but much to learn. And they began the process of transforming me.

I am deeply, deeply grateful to them.

I am interested in providing good evidence of the good work we do here to interested parties in the world at large. And I am interested in looking out for ways we can do our good work even better.

So…What is your reaction to this letter from our accreditors? What is your experience with assessment of learning? What are your hopes and fears as we lean in to the changing winds?

Please join the conversation and let your colleagues know what you are thinking. Share your concerns, ideas, expertise, and peaks-around-the-corner at what education will be like in the coming decades….

After all, we are all in this together….There may well be a sullen 17-year-old waiting right now in your classroom. Waiting for you to see the possibilities in her she can’t yet see herself. Waiting for you to see her into her best possible self…

Let us share how we do this magic, so that we can touch ever more lives.

Certainly, we know this: There is no shortage of need…