On the road again…in my head I always hear that Willie Nelson song as I start for the airport. This fall I think I will be hearing that tune a lot as my travel schedule got a little crowded somehow. My first trip was to the CREATE conference in Louisville, KY. It was my first time to this conference and I really enjoyed sessions. One of my favorites was a keynote speaker, Dr. John Fischetti, Professor and Dean of the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Dr. Fischetti spoke about the challenges higher education faces in the future. He gave a great analogy about approaching complex problems from a different perspective. The analogy was about the race to the moon in the 1960’s and the problem that NASA was having with finding rocket boosters strong enough to push the capsule out of orbit. They never did come up with a rocket booster that could accomplish that task, but instead they used the centrifugal force of circling the earth to ricochet the capsule toward the moon. The scientist also included little thrusters that could give small course corrections as the capsule headed toward the moon.
As a kid that grew up on the Space Coast, I loved that analogy. It reminds me that sometimes the direct approach to a problem is not the best approach! Sometimes we need to come at problems from a different perspective. I know that is certainly true in assessment. Sometimes we are so focused on trying to blast assessment straight toward our institutional goals that we don’t use the processes and opportunities around us to help move assessment forward. For my institution, that additional opportunity was in the form of Academic Program Review. Using program review to help capture what departments and programs are doing with student learning has been very helpful in gaining traction on campus.
Now I just need to figure out how to attach little thruster rockets…
