How do we know what we do makes a difference?

I’ve been following Senator Durbin’s public crusade against private and for-profit higher education. I have to say that I am disturbed by the comments I read, especially when phrase like “subprime goes to college” or “mortgaging their futures for worthless diplomas” are used to describe degree programs. I am, however, reassured by the fact that I have intimate knowledge of the processes we use at Parkland College to evaluate the quality of our courses and programs on a regular basis.

Today in higher education, there are a collection of gauges and monitors from which we take periodic readings with the expectation that we will gain some insight in to the teaching and learning process -- or at the very least won’t disprove the value and validity of what we have been doing on the campus and in the classroom.

The culture of American higher education encourages a high degree of individual autonomy: we design our own courses, do our own teaching, set our own standards, and construct and grade our own exams. And we try to do all of these things with an efficiency that still leaves us time for service to the college and our departments, not to mention our own work and lives.

The teaching is a given…but learning….is not.

We are asked hard questions. We are asked to measure and prove our impact on things that are hard to measure, like critical thinking. We are encouraged to demonstrate that our students understand the necessity of core values in helping them make ethical personal, social, and professional decisions. This is hard stuff. It requires us to work together, to do unfamiliar things like setting common goals and standards, to devise methods of assessment that are reliable and valid, to interpret the results, and to use them to improve and coordinate our teaching and service to students. We call it assessment.

So assessment, then, possesses all the appeal and efficiency of committee work; in particular the kind visited upon us by politicians or blue-ribbon commissions. So why in the world do we spend our precious time engaged in this effort to prove to others what we as professional educators know when we see it or when we create it?

Those we serve have a right to expect that we will be interested in this sort of assessment. We, as a college and a faculty, have rightly insisted on the usual rights of a profession to set our own standards and ensure the quality our work. We present our profession as one of integrity, committed to honesty, fairness, and objectivity in the pursuit of truth, as represented by our mission and core values.

So what we have created is a legitimate expectation that we are committed to achieving our stated educational aims, our mission, and that we are anxious to improve our collective efforts to do so and ready and willing to give account of our efforts and results.  This responsibility is deeper that just public accountability. We have an obligation to ourselves and to our students to improve.

The teaching is a given, but learning is not. The process of assessment is important, but in my opinion, the purpose behind the process is everything. It represents who we say we are: educators.

Thanks and keep up the good work, on behalf of our students and the community we serve.

Congratulations to Pam Lau on earning her 10-year service pin.


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