This is the first year since 2008 that I haven’t taught a class in winter, and I miss it. When I became dean of the School of Health & Community Services in July 2022, I quickly realized I would need to give up teaching, which is too bad, because teaching is what got me excited about the mysterious dynamics of teaching and learning with technology, why I enjoyed being a director of a teaching and learning centre for 8 years, why I pursued my doctoral degree, and ultimately why I am a dean.
It’s also why I was thrilled to be invited to be the keynote speaker at the Manitoba Academic Integrity Network at Brandon University in May 2023. I had the opportunity to share some thoughts and facilitate a conversation with a group of educators struggling to deal with a rapidly changing environment.
For about 8 years, I taught Leadership and Management Principles at MacEwan University’s School of Business and then 5 years as part of the University of Alberta’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science. The most popular reading in every offering of the course has been In Praise of the Imperfect Leader. It strikes a chord with students who often don’t think they have what it takes to be a leader.
As the authors write:
We’ve come to expect a lot of our leaders, but no single person can possibly live up to those standards. It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be. No one person could possibly stay on top of everything.
For many of the students I have taught, this frees them to think about leadership differently, to think about themselves differently, and to embrace shared and distributed leadership models. Being hopelessly incomplete takes the pressure off.
And I think this pressure for perfection exists for assessments, as well. To paraphrase:
We have come to expect a lot from our assessments, but no single assessment can live up to our highest pedagogical standards. It’s time to end the myth of the perfect assessment that can fix all problems – the holy grail of assessments that can achieve technical and essential student learning outcomes in meaningful and engaging ways at the same time they prevent academic integrity in a world with increasingly powerful technological tools.
Then, when I was reading Justin Reich’s Failure to Disrupt, this sentence jumped out at me.
“All assessments are imperfectly designed.”
All assessments are imperfectly designed. Your assessments may be pretty good; they are all probably above average. But they are all imperfect, and they always will be. Breathe a sigh of relief and embrace this imperfection (especially you perfectionists). But because all assessments are imperfectly designed, it is important for us to come to understand their flaws. How are they imperfect, where are they imperfect, and why are they imperfect? Then and only then can we identify ways to improve them. That’s what this workshop was all about.