A wise faculty member once told me, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to lead.” For me, this underscores the importance of making time to stay current in the field of higher education–specifically, reading what others are writing about teaching and learning, and writing about it to reflect on its potential to improve my own teaching and learning practice. (Sometimes I have to remind myself to do this, and my reminder shows up in a navel-gazing blog paragraph.)
I just read a best-practices article from Liberal Education, published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in which Joseph Incandela (2011), associate dean of faculty at Saint Mary’s College, reflected on “Seven lessons learned from general education reform at Saint Mary’s College.” Incandela described the legacy of years of effort to reform general education that had failed because the task was so big. Incandela and his faculty managed to successfully finish the task, however, and his lessons learned seem to apply to the three main projects on my plate: supporting faculty designing online courses, supporting assessment of the new general education curriculum that starts at Davis in Fall 2011, and supporting departmental faculties who are writing student learning outcomes and assessment plans in response to WASC reaccreditation requirements. You can read more about this use of student learning outcomes on our Resources page.
The lesson that stood out to me most was, as Incandela phrased it, to start with the end. Specifically, he and his committees found that establishing learning outcomes was not only good for students but was good for the faculty working on the huge project of curricular reform. It gave them “a vehicle for achieving commensurability” (p. 43) that had been missing when prior models, viable but hard to evaluate because they were so different, had been proposed. Not everyone is used to this way of thinking about teaching and learning. As he said, “I’m sure some wondered what flavor of Kool-Aid they served” at the conference where he and his staff learned to use learning outcomes. However, they persevered in presenting benefits of learning outcomes, and their patient colleagues eventually not only understood but began to use the language of learning outcomes as well.
This is what struck me most: Writing learning outcomes for one assignment or lab is something many faculty do already. It can be difficult for one faculty member to write effective learning outcomes for one course, learning outcomes that can guide plans for student activities and assessment. (I know because I go through this process for my own courses and I watch faculty struggle to do it when I’m consulting with them about their courses.) It’s even harder for a team of faculty to write them for an entire major’s worth of classes. But Incandela and his team successfully used learning outcomes to guide reform for an entire general education curriculum. If they can do it, we can do it, at the course level, the major level, and the general education level. All three levels are worth the investment of Aristotelian teleology, as Incandela identified it: to start with the end in mind. This approach to education can be scaled up.
I can’t wait to read, think, and write about the next article in the same issue: a liberal arts professor reflects on learning about learning outcomes.