When I was a kid I always looked forward to summer because I attended a camp for Girl Scouts. It was loads of fun. We slept in tents, paddled around in canoes, swam, played games and made s’mores every evening. This past week I attended the assessment version of summer camp in Milwaukee. We didn’t sleep in tents and there were no s’mores, but I had a great experience at the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AAHLE) annual meeting.
I heard great speakers both in the plenary and breakout sessions at the conference. In the breakouts I learned I was not alone, picked up lots of great ideas to implement on my campus, and made connections with other assessment professionals. I have to give a shout out to two plenary sessions in particular, the first plenary speaker was Thomas J. Chapel from the Centers for Disease (CDC). His address “Potholes on the Road to Good Monitoring and Evaluation” was right on the mark and I will be taking his message to heart this fall as I craft a message about assessment and program evaluation that my faculty can embrace.
My other “great job” goes to Kathleen Wise and Charles Blaich from Wabash College and the Center of Inquiry. Their talk on “Leading with Assessment: Ensuring that what Counts for Us Matters for Our Students” very gently, and not so gently, poked fun at us and our institutions, and how we promote ourselves while reminding us that our focus should be on the students.
The only thing that would have made the conference better would have been some s’mores for dessert and maybe a little snipe hunting. I am off for the next two months for some R&R. The blog post will be back starting in the fall – enjoy your summer vacation – and eat a few s’mores for me.
