Dispatches from the Interface: Assessment Professionals in the CTL

Abstract

Assessment and educational development are often constructed as separate and even conflicting fields in higher education, despite shared institutional goals. This phenomenon reflects a broader tendency toward institutional siloing of different professional fields in education. In this reflective essay, we draw on our experience as assessment professionals who work within Centers for Teaching and Learning to advocate for meaningful integration of these professional fields through a learning systems paradigm. From our positions at the interface of assessment and educational development, we explore ways these fields overlap, occasions where siloing logics impede institutional efforts, as well as opportunities for the fields to be more fully integrated. Based on our personal experiences in these roles, we present three of the most salient ways that we encounter and work against barriers that divide the work of assessment and educational development: (a) reframing assessment and pedagogy as interrelated and mutually reinforcing; (b) navigating alignment between course- and program-level assessment; and (c) advocating for synergistic access to both data and faculty. We conclude by offering possible next steps to further unify these two fields, specifically focusing on putting a learning systems paradigm into practice and collectively championing a culture of institutional accountability to center students, equity, and mission-driven institutional change.