Resources

My last blog was about assessment in immersive classes and outdoor or wild learning. As much as assessment is about how I assess my students in those classes, assessment is also for me. How do I know if my outdoor classes and lessons are working?“Assessment” often feels like a dirty word. Generally, I dread it when I see the word in an email subject or agenda line. At the end of the semester, after I get my grades in, I still have one more set of forms to fill out to “assess” the effectiveness of my courses in order to appease the accrediting gods. I hate that paperwork. It is the opposite of everything wild I am trying to do. But the intent is not wrong. I ought to be assessing the effectiveness of my classes, my assignments, and my learning activities so that I know if they’re helping my students learn. Perhaps I need to make adjustments so students can thrive. The paperwork I fill out for assessment does not usually lead to this thoughtfulness, but it is important that I continually assess throughout the semester. What seems to be helping or hindering student learning?At this point I need to articulate to myself why I take students outdoors. Is it just because I prefer being outdoors, or is there a particular point of learning that is facilitated better outdoors? Just as I assess how well students are meeting the goals I have for them, I have to assess how well my activities and locations meet the goals I have for them. Then I can assess how successful the activity is. Even if the answer is simply, “It’s a beautiful day and I’d rather be outdoors than in a stuffy classroom,” I can assess whether students learn what I hope they will learn that day or if being outdoors hinders their learning in some way. For instance, Was I harder to hear? Do I need to stand closer to them or project better? Do I need to be clearer about what they should be taking notes on? And if I make those changes the next time, do they help, or do I need to take us back inside?In general, though, the question is what outdoor learning is about. As I’ve said before, I hope being outdoors makes students feel more playful and therefore more curious and open to learning. I want being outdoors to ground them more in the present, in their world, with each other. That is, I want being outdoors to make them more human in our AI world. I want it to make them more open to conversation with each other. I want them to feel less anxious because they feel the sun on their skin and the sun makes life feel more possible, especially after a long winter, and being less anxious helps them learn. Or I want them outdoors because a walking role-play is best done outdoors or an art scavenger hunt between multiple buildings. Could I do that lesson as effectively indoors? For my immersive courses, the goal is for students to be more present to one another with fewer distractions.As I consider these goals through a semester, I ask questions like, “Have I introduced or nourished any distractions I didn’t intend to?” “What did location add to the lesson and to their learning?” “Are students engaging with each other and material more or less than they would indoors?” One method to assess this is through my own observations, but answering my own questions, especially when I love being outside, is prone to biased answers. Observations in immersive classes are more reliable because of the sheer amount contact I have with students, but even then I am human and have blind spots.So I ask questions of students on mid-semester written evaluations. I listen when students are in my office hours talking about what’s hard for them. Sometimes when students come early to class I just ask them explicit questions about something I’m curious about: “Can you hear your classmates well enough outside?” “Do you have any suggestions to make this activity more engaging?” I ask colleagues to come observe me teach and give me feedback. And in the end, I look again at student work to see if they are learning what I hope they are learning. A final reflection assignment I give is especially helpful for understanding whether they are being drawn more into themselves, their community, and their world. In immersive classes this is especially true of their final reflection assignment as well as closing rituals for the community of the class.Are any of these assessments scientific? Not really. I’m looking at far too many variables at once. We always are. A classroom is a certain kind of laboratory, but not the kind where we can isolate a single variable to experiment on. So we do our best. We stay open to the wildness of our classroom in all its wild ways and hope to be attentive enough to keep our students learning wildly.

As I head out to teach my off-campus Jan term class, Backpacking with the Saints, I look at my syllabus again and think about how I assess learning in an immersive experience. That is, how can I give a grade for things like hiking and praying and journaling? Am I grading how much the students were transformed? “You experienced a 100 percent transformation on this trip, so you get an A. But you only experienced a 75 percent transformation, so C.” We know that’s not right. So, what is it I’m doing? And how can we think about assessment in any of our immersive experiences, in any outdoor learning?This may also be a question for people who read Dr. Westfield’s recent blog about “running wild” in the classroom. When we make students the primary agents in their learning and get creative in the classroom, letting them “run wild” and have discussions or play as the means of their learning, how do we assess their learning? That is, how do we assess wild learning?First I think about what I want students to learn. What are my objectives? What are the things I want students to walk away with? Any particular content? Particular skills? If I’ve designed a good class, this was the first thing around which I built the structures of my class. If I don’t decide this first, then I can’t create a class with a direction. Each of the readings supports students reaching those objectives. Each assignment needs to be a learning exercise focused on those objectives. Each lesson and classroom or out-of-classroom activity is aimed at ushering students further into their understanding of the target ideas and skills.If I’ve done that well, then the assessment questions are simply, “How well did a student understand that idea?” and “How well does a student demonstrate that skill?” If one of my objectives for Backpacking with the Saints is that students understand the peculiarities of the desert saints and their reasons for searching for God in the desert, and my assignment is a presentation about a particular desert saint’s life and theology, I can assess how well they grasp that group of ideas. I can also assess that from the conversations we’re having. What are students bringing up in “official” discussions and in casual conversations over meals and while hiking?Another objective for Backpacking with the Saints is that students reflect on their own spiritual practices and formation. Will I assess that they have reached a certain level of sanctification? No. But I can assess how thoughtful they are being, how well they are engaging the conversations we have, how willing they are to be self-reflective. Moreover, self-reflection is a skill. I can teach students to be better at it, so I can assess how well they do it now and give good feedback to help them learn the skill.And that, really, is the purpose of assessment for students: Feedback that continues their learning. On my immersive trips I have the space and the luxury (and students who self-selected) to offer them lots of oral and written feedback about their learning without attaching a letter grade. Immersive classes are excellent for moving students away from focus on grades and toward focus on learning. Even indoors in a classroom where students are “running wild,” we can think of assessment as feedback (which sometimes is a grade telling a student, “You understand about 85 percent of this concept”).On the question of hiking, journaling, and praying, of course I am not assessing whether their prayers are “good enough” or whether they are the best hiker. I am giving them feedback about what makes a good hiker or pray-er as understood by various traditions and providing space for them to decide what kind of hiker and pray-er they want to be. For some, the best hiker is the fastest one. I offer that good hiking is about attention to the world and to others, which means that speed is not usually a great metric for assessment. I can assess how much they engage with the ideas. How much do they play with the ideas, even if they land where they were before, versus how much they resist incorporating anything new and think they know the answers already.In the end, the answer to “How will we assess?” is “Like we always do.” We are assessing student learning while they’re having discussion in class to see if we need to redirect and fill in gaps. We are teachers. We can tell when students understand and when they do not. Yes, it’s easier to assess whether they know how to put up a tent (it’s either keeping them dry or it’s not) than whether they can connect wilderness metaphors for spirituality with wilderness traditions, but we do know. The bonus is that when I focus on feedback over grades and force students to focus on it too, they actually tend to learn more. The more they run wild – whether in a classroom or in a canyon – the more they will learn because of the process, because of the structures I’ve set up for them, because of the space and attention and the people they’re with. Perhaps we simply need to think more wildly about assessment.