Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
We talked quite a bit about what capabilities are and the
difference between generic capabilities and professional
capabilities or discipline specific ones so that raised
some very interesting discussion around different peoples
perspectives of those. The other thing that I talked about
quite a lot about with people is that capabilities are not
just one persons job to develop either the graduates or the
academics its also the workplace learning educators and
many people including the professions the government, the
clients, everyone has a role in shaping those
capabilities.
And the conversations we had complimented that very
directly I think as we talk about the various forces at
work that are fragmenting education it really becomes
easier to compartmentalise learning in ways that are
deleterious to desired outcomes that we would all want. So
how do we work together how do we expand our community and
how do we integrate assessment into the designs of the work
that we are doing lifelong learning in ways that are not
more work for faculty but are different work.
Where I begin on this work where I’ve had the most success
and what I was advocating is that we turn it around and I
think the textbooks always say let’s start with our desired
outcomes and that abstracts assessments in ways that makes
it more difficult than it needs to be if we really start by
looking at student work and saying what are the values that
we see expressed or apparent or visible in that work and
how do we characterise that then we begin to discover the
‘do you know what?’ Our assignments are probably not asking
students to do the kinds of things we really want them to
be able to do and then from that you’ll begin to really
articulate criteria I always advocate let’s start with an
existing rubric and then modify it because I think we can
all wear ourselves out by starting from scratch trying to
develop our own rubrics. So the punch line of that is
really let’s focus in on what students are actually doing
and start right there.
I’d really like to endorse that I think the notion of what
is the reality of their job both initially after graduation
and further down the track are we actually assessing the
capability for those things and I’m interested very much in
the role of external accreditation authorities and also
academics who are focused on the measurements of assessment
because often what is measureable is not the most important
thing and so instead of capabilities people are trying to
measure what they can measure which ends up being little
competencies and little bits of knowledge and then it’s
sort of left to the student or the new graduate to sink or
swim and put it all together so if we’re not assessing that
we’re not actually really being able to say these people
are ready for their work or their practice we say they’ve
got bits of knowledge and bits of skills so I think that
reality but also the holism behind what you were saying as
well is important.
Part of that holism that I think is really important is
helping faculty and understand that assessments are not
just about making judgments about student work it’s about
what our responsibilities for helping them do that when
assessments is understood to be something where we can
reflect upon our own role in this performance that it is
again back to our work and not just our judgments of
students then we also expand this community and we
understand that faculty have roles as learners if we can
say instead of ‘how well am I doing’ and we can turn that
into ‘how well can we do or what might we do to be not
better’ because that is dangerous too, ‘what can we do to
be more responsive to the various preparations the various
capabilities that our students are illustrating what can we
do to adapt.’ So it’s really turning assessments upside
down from the textbooks and inside out from the advantage
of who is the assessment for.
And I think following on from that there is a very
important aspect of role modeling the type of graduate
you’re expecting the person to be and I think we expect
every university graduate to be a self assessor and a self
developer so if that doesn’t actually start as part of
their assessment and I’m not just talking about do some
self assessment and give yourself a mark. I’m saying that
they need to be encouraged with the formative evaluation to
be assessing themselves and looking at how they might
improve and not being punished for expressing the
difficulties that they’re having. So again not just to give
them a grade but to say ‘what are you learning from this
how might you extend it what other things can you do to
improve your performances or your knowledge base or your
thinking skills or your decision making.’ All of those
other graduate attributes.
Now that is getting outside of the classroom again it’s
really about we are not educating people to succeed in my
class but what are they going to do when I’m not there no
one else is there are we preparing them to be good at self
assessment, context assessment, independent of all the
training wheels that we like to put on them in our courses.
Exactly so it is also perhaps a notion that how do we
incrementally add other layers of the context other layers
of the complexity of their work into the assessments task
and into the learning task so that they’re progressively
with a greater understanding of what their future role and
their responsibilities are to say where am I at in the
relation to that bigger picture into the for example the
range of clients that I’m going to work with and how might
I continue to develop along that path.