To Assessment Reports

Explain what your students will know when they are finished with your program.

They will know that communication is context-specific and highly variable. I hope to God they have finally figured out there is really no such thing as “proper English” and that grammar rules depend a great deal on what you want to mean and not what words you put on the page. They will have refined arguments with an understanding of their audience, their credibility, and their evidence. They will take risks with their writing and are willing to fail. They will learn to ask questions and they will learn to seek answers. They will wrestle with the indignities of the large and unwieldy, and they will orchestrate the nuances of the particulars. They sure as hell better have a sense of humor.

 Explain how you will measure these outcomes.

We have a radical process called “writing” in which students work to express their ideas. Students will be challenged in several different ways--Socratic Method, tests of recall and critical thinking, impromptu debates, personal reflection, political discourse--to refine their thinking until either they have exhausted all possibilities or the paper is due. We then, as part of the radical process, read the papers. We evaluate according to criteria which, as a whole, are greater than the sum of the parts. Measuring this is not like baking a cake. Or having them bake a cake. It is about trying to get them to envision a cake before they have seen a cake. It’s about trying to understand what they mean when they say “cake,” and if they have revolutionized the idea of cake enough to have created something new or if they have completely misunderstood the concept of cake and we are all given sandwiches. Delicious as they may be, they are not cake. Therefore, delicious cannot be a measurement criteria. If you eat cake and sandwiches, this is clear.

Explain what you will do with this data.

We will give it to you. I know we are supposed to use it to improve the program, but honestly, by then, it’s too late. Our students email on Friday and say they don’t understand the assignment. We email back and ask them to be more specific. They say they think they are doing it wrong. We say wrong is fine. Wrong is normal. You can’t learn if you don’t do it wrong, so go ahead and do it wrong and then you will also know what you’re doing right. We undo years and years of standardized testing and regurgitation.

If we waited for a year to figure out what’s working and what isn’t, we wouldn’t actually be teaching. We would not be sitting with the student who doesn’t understand today what a comma splice is, pointing it out again and again. We would slap a grade on a paper and let it go. We would never reward the risk.

Because you ask me to, I will apply numbers to all of the above. 1-5. Fives accept each and every challenge with a hunger and humor we admire. Threes get the job done. Ones need to refocus, early and often.

What do you conclude from this data?

We conclude it tells us something, but not the something you want us to tell you. You want to know if they will be successful, qualified, professional. Yes. But that’s beside the point.

We conclude our students are human beings and struggle with the complexities of maintaining an identity when chaos and flux undermine the structures of their day. We know the data tell us they are thinking and that for some, what they are thinking is so contrary to what they have always believed, they cannot say it. We believe sometimes quiet is best. We believe the spaces between the data points carry the most relevant information.