Reflections on Dr. Millis' Workshop

I just gassed up at Walmart -- and I noticed that there was an offer from Walmart to enter me into a drawing to receive a $100 gift card if I would provide feedback to them on-line using the information on the back of the receipt to access their survey. It occurred to me that 'assessment' is pretty standard practice in the business world these days...
Dr. Millis' workshop to kick off our assessment focus this summer provided me with plenty to think about -- here are some ideas she that I believe relate to our assessment work:

• She shared the Assessment Process -- formulate outcomes, develop or select assessment measures, create experiences to promote learning of the outcomes, assess and use results to improve learning
• She tied this cycle to Wiggins and McTighe's Backward Design -- identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, plan learning experiences and instruction
• She shared Fink's Key Components of Curricular Design (a Backward Design approach) and Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning. One of the elements in particular in the Taxonomy resonates with me: "Learning how to learn" -- this is the ultimate goal and involves students learning how to assess their own learning.
• She shared Ron Carriveau's three tiered model for writing student learning outcomes -- Communication Skills, Teamwork, and Social Responsibility are our general goals. We need to develop general outcomes and specific outcomes (these may be aspects of our rubric or test item blue prints that we may choose to develop as a part of our plan).
• She advised us to share our student learning outcomes in our syllabus (I ordered her Syllabus book today!) to create a learning-centered approach -- we should consider this advice once we develop our outcomes for our three goals.
• She explained the difference between summative and formative assessment and she emphasized the importance of formative assessment to motivate learning - both learning for the student and learning for the teacher. This ties back to Fink's "learning how to learn". It also connects to the Three Key Learning Principles from "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School". The idea that "people construct new knowledge and understandings based on what they already know and believe" and the "metacognitive approach to instructions to help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring progress in achieving them" particularly connect with our work on assessment.
• She shared with us information on Rubrics

What I really enjoyed about Dr. Millis' workshop was the skillful way she connected Backward Design, Fink's Course Design principles, models, and tools, Ron Carriveau's information on writing student learning outcomes, the learning principles from "How People Learn", Angelo and Cross' CATS, and information on creating rubrics -- all using collaborative learning techniques!

So how does all this connect to our work this summer? As a community college math professor, I routinely assessed my students. I firmly believe that "if you want students to learn it, you have to assess it'. We assess students to help them improve and deepen their learning -- with the hope that students will eventually self assess to monitor and improve learning. All this assessment practice should also apply to us -- if assessment is a powerful way to help students learn how to learn, then the same learning principle should apply to all of us as well as we attempt to improve and learn as educators. The assessment movement is alive and well at the Walmart gas pumps, Target, Kolhs, etc. because these businesses desire to use feedback to improve. That is the power of assessment. We will also harness the power of assessment to learn and improve too as we work to help our students become better learners.