11.2 Discussion
It’s ironic that assessment now takes up such a significant part of my professional life. I spent my early academic career avoiding anything to do with assessment. My aversion to the topic stemmed from resentment of the ways that assessment had been done to me as a post-secondary student – testing recall of minutiae; poorly crafted multiple-choice questions with no opportunity to explain my thinking; one-size-fits all projects that didn’t fit my interests – I wanted nothing to do with perpetuating that kind of practice. It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Bob Wilson, the originator of the ICE model, that I began to appreciate the potentially transformative effects of learning assessment when it’s purposefully designed for students and their learning. My own transformative learning experience was so complete that now both my teaching and development practices are largely dedicated to improving teaching through improved understanding of assessment.
I use ICE as an educational development tool in that it frames everything I do. The model, comprehensive yet simple without being simplistic is, in fact, a shorthand for an entirely complex conception of teaching and learning. It’s fully congruent with my own conception of learning as a non-hierarchical, non-linear, reiterative learning loop of developing expertise. What’s more, the model distills cognitive-transformative theories of learning into a highly accessible framework that seems to resonate with many instructors’ experiences of what learning looks like, no matter what discipline they work in. In many ways, ICE seems to be intuitive in that many instructors insist that, yes – that’s exactly the way they’ve conceptualized learning all along but hadn’t the ability to articulate. A bonus is that the vocabulary supplied by ICE provides a reliable kind of portable framework that helps instructors organize their thinking about teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that enable them to conceptualize and communicate their expectations and intentions more easily and with greater clarity.
Because Bloom’s Taxonomy is arguably the most well-known model of learning, even instructors without much pedagogical background seem to have at least a passing acquaintance with it. If that’s the case, we start there. Almost invariably instructors report that, initially, they found Bloom’s to be very helpful but, after a while, it didn’t seem to work for them. Probing for specific examples of how and why the model stopped being utilitarian often results in reports that the seven hierarchical levels were perceived as too finely drawn or that the taxonomy is a little unwieldy to expect students to be able to benefit from. What’s more, the hierarchical nature of Bloom’s meant that instructors seemed to spend a lot of time at the lower end of the pyramid. After all, Bloom’s Taxonomy does presuppose that a learner must be proficient at one level of the pyramid before being able to be successful at the next. It’s at this stage that I often initiate a conversation about episodes of learning that seem to defy the notions of learning as linear and single domain-specific and ask the instructors(s) if they can identify any instances from their own experience that help to illustrate either the linearity or recursivity of learning and which makes the most sense in their current context. It’s essential to me that I meet instructors where they are both contextually and epistemologically. The process of development means that my job is to help each individual to grow from their own place of readiness and at their own pace.
My entire educational development practice – workshops, consultations, resource development, and general discussions – is structured in ways that put the focus on students’ learning. Throughout are invitations to educators to articulate, as best they can, what their expectations for learning look like. Typically, only after initial engagement with their own course and assessment practices and perhaps reviewing some examples of students’ work and discussing the ways those samples met and fell short of expectations, will I introduce ICE. It’s then that I might invite instructors to use ICE as a lens through which to revisit those work samples or to use ICE to describe their learning expectations. That simple exercise is an episode of supported practice with using the ICE model. Almost immediately, instructors experience a greater sense of clarity.
In sharing ICE with instructors, either as part of a Departmental, small group, or individual consultation, I rely heavily on storytelling, examples from my own experience, and from across the disciplines that illustrate the conceptual points I’m trying to make. Those stories serve multiple functions. First, they illustrate and concretize the theories and conceptions. Secondly, they serve as a tacit invitation to those present to begin their own process of meaning-making. Lastly, storytelling is a way of modelling how to make Connections. That process, I believe, works to help illustrate the ways in which ICE might become more relevant to their own context. Storytelling and encouraging others to tell their own stories of assessment and conceptions of teaching are also ways of acknowledging and validating the varying instructional contexts of others. It also serves as an effective way for me to ascertain the storyteller’s grasp of the concepts and of ICE itself.
Conversing about the ways ICE (or any other Taxonomy of learning) is congruent with their own conceptions of learning is an essential component of the development process. That said, probing about the ways that ICE is incongruent with their conceptions and instructional context invites a certain criticality that helps draw out tacit assumptions and beliefs about teaching and learning. When consistently encouraged to adopt such a critical stance, instructors are actually being invited to explore the ontologies of their own conceptions, again helping to make the tacit explicit. I repeatedly tell instructors that I’m not trying to sell them on ICE; what I am trying to do is encourage them to find and adopt a conceptual framework of learning that resonates with their values and beliefs and that can reliably serve as a touchstone to inform their practice and, ideally, be shared with their students. The value of frameworks is that they are both rigourous and flexible: They provide structures and parameters that enable naming and framing of practice that help us focus on different schemas for questioning assumptions and understanding learning but they should be flexible enough to be adopted and adapted to suit a wide range of contexts.
Another strategy I use is to invite instructors, with ICE as a reference point, to scrutinize the relative success of one of their final exams in assessing the learning for which it was intended. Typically, instructors report that the intention of the exam was to assess students’ ability to make Connections and Extensions. Also, typically, after question-analysis using ICE as a reference, many discover a heavier-than-intended reliance on Ideas-based questions. Conversations then ensue about the precision of language necessary to evoke intended learning, the value of tables of specification for exam construction, and of blueprinting assessments against learning outcomes—all of which results in awareness of the importance of intentionality in assessment design and instructional decision-making. In addition to that growing awareness, whenever possible, I try to embed activities that result in positive supported practice of new skills. Ensuring even a brief episode of practice means that conceptual development and skill development are occurring in tandem.
I use the term “guided alertness” to refer to the process I use to draw people’s attention to their intentions, whether they’re tacit or explicit, for students’ learning. I have a penchant for prefacing almost all my answers to questions with “that depends”. I suppose it’s a way of drawing attention to the fact that context is everything when it comes to teaching and learning and what might be considered best practice in one context might not be in another. Additionally, if a best practice is incongruent with an instructor’s set of values, it’s highly unlikely to come across as “best”. “That depends” models my resistance to the notion of best practice and guides instructors’ alertness to the importance of intention and context. From that perspective, my Swedish colleagues have dubbed my approach to ICE-informed educational development as “non-normative”. I prefer to think of it as an example of meeting people where they are developmentally and contextually.
ICE also provides me with a framework through which to interact with, interpret and answer instructors’ questions. Using ICE as a filter, I can interpret the language of a question to determine if what is being asked for is a clarification of Ideas, a request for a nudge toward Connections, or that someone is close to a breakthrough Extension. The cues that ICE language provides enable me to be responsive to learning needs and to anticipate and create opportunities for learning or discussion. Using ICE in this way means that my practice is both informed and supported by the framework.
