Fred,

 

Oh great, now I feel guilty. The irony of this exchange is that you put so much effort into this, and one of the points of my rant is that someone of your talents should be spending time on something more productive.

 

Fred: First, where does the SLO movement come from and why is our accrediting agency requiring us to write them for our courses, programs, and institution?

 

Mark: I don’t care where it came from…just please make it go away.

 

Fred: Second, what does our accrediting agency really want and what value do we see in this? Our SLO Articulation Committee, as well as our president Doug Garrison, has taken the stance that the most important thing is the dialog. One characteristic of a vibrant academic institution is faculty members talking to each other about teaching.

 

Mark: Fine…let’s just talk about something productive, which SLOs can’t possibly be. Because of their ephemeral nature, the discussion of SLOs just gets in the way.

 

Fred: Third, is there a difference between a SLO and an objective?... Surely we need not list 353 different things that students are able to do when they exit your Chem 1A class.

 

Mark: I wouldn’t, of course, give my students the list if I didn’t think doing so would be useful to them.

 

Fred: I would think that these 353 different things all build towards things that could in fact be articulated in a few different statements. These things that the 353 objectives build towards are the SLOs. The objectives are your list of 353. The SLOs are what students ought to be able to “do” with those 353 objectives.

 

Mark: I’ve heard this before. It’s a sort of mantra, but I have no idea how this can be done in a meaningful way. Do you mean that the students should be able to successfully complete other chemistry courses?...work as an efficient chemist?...pass standardized exams? What did you or anyone else have in mind?

 

Fred: Is it useful? In my classes the shift from “stuff” to “skills” or “doing” has been useful. Do you already do many of these things? Probably. I think many of us already do. It is now just a matter of explaining what we do.

 

Mark: You’ll get no argument from me here, but it’s an argument for action-oriented objectives, not SLOs. That’s another of the points of my message. Justifying learning objectives does not justify SLOs. When you distill useful objectives down to two or three useless SLOs, those SLOs become something different and should be justified in a different way.

 

There’s no need to reply. Thanks for your time.

 

Mark

 

 

Mark,

 

Thanks for your note. Comments are always welcome, and well written comments like yours are especially welcome. I think you presented some thoughts that many faculty have had, but have not taken the time to articulate.

 

Robynn and I share many of the concerns you do, particularly the notion that we can distill our college courses down to two or three SLOs. We too find it insulting and belittling. But all of us also agree that accreditation is good and that doing anything (or not doing something) to hinder our accreditation would be a bad thing.

 

First, where does the SLO movement come from and why is our accrediting agency requiring us to write them for our courses, programs, and institution? Since the 1980’s governments at all levels have been under pressure to be accountable for what they do with tax money. At our division meetings, we often wonder what those administrators are doing and why they aren’t doing something more useful. In other words, we want them to administrate and let us teach. We want them to be accountable. More recently, the Bush administration, with Margaret Spellings as the Education Secretary, has pushed for assessment-based funding, national standardization, and claimed that the regional peer-based accreditation agencies have not been able to hold higher education institutions accountable for what exiting students are able to do.

 

Their answer has been to federalize the accreditation process. It would be a nightmare, I’m sure.

 

In response, our accrediting agency, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC, the community college branch of WASC), has promoted SLOs as the best way to subvert national efforts at standardization. The SLOs are a way for each institution to decide for themselves what students that exit courses, programs, and the institution ought to be able to “do”. It leaves it up to the individual institution to assess how well it is accomplishing its self-defined mission. SLOs then remain the exclusive right of the faculty. As a result, there are no SLO “guidelines” out there. MPC needs to decide what SLOs will mean for us. There is nobody but you to decide what the SLOs should look like.

 

This information is nicely explained in the first two articles of the September 2007 issue of the ASCCC Rostrum. It is a short, highly worthwhile read:

http://www.asccc.org/Publications/Rostrums/Rostrum09_07.pdf

 

Second, what does our accrediting agency really want and what value do we see in this? Our SLO Articulation Committee, as well as our president Doug Garrison, has taken the stance that the most important thing is the dialog. One characteristic of a vibrant academic institution is faculty members talking to each other about teaching. The conversation should include what it means to graduate with a degree, what constitutes a college course, how do we know what the students are learning. It is not emphasizing one teaching method over another. It is emphasizing the conversation. We view SLOs as the framework to have this conversation. It is the content and results of this conversation that will enable us to define ourselves as an institution.

 

I think the other part of the SLO initiative probably does come from the instructor community. It emphasizes a shift from what might be called the “designed” or “taught” curriculum to the “learned” curriculum. The following is from training materials that WASC gives to accreditation site-visit teams:

 

“As team evaluators look for evidence that the institution is evaluating student learning outcomes, they will want to think about the designed curriculum, the taught curriculum, and the learned curriculum, bearing in mind that grades are not the best evidence of student learning. The designed curriculum is what is in the college catalog and in official course outlines of record. The taught curriculum can be found in the course syllabi. The learned curriculum is what assessment is all about—what have the students learned?” SLOs describe the learned curriculum.

 

It shifts the concept of our teaching from “we’re going to cover xyz material in class today” to “the students will do abc in class today to improve their ability to xyz”. I can tell you that this shift has helped my teaching. In fact, I think science teachers are leaders in this concept. After all, many of our classes are designed around labs, which teach skills, whether they be analytical, critical thinking, or lab skills. I do see value in this shift.

 

Third, is there a difference between a SLO and an objective? Yes, but it’s not the crux of the conversation. It is much less important than the conversation about teaching.

 

I think of SLOs also as a way to articulate to others what successful students should be able to do when they exit our courses in concise yet useful ways. Surely we need not list 353 different things that students are able to do when they exit your Chem 1A class. I would think that these 353 different things all build towards things that could in fact be articulated in a few different statements. These things that the 353 objectives build towards are the SLOs.

 

The objectives are your list of 353. The SLOs are what students ought to be able to “do” with those 353 objectives. Surely they’re related in some way.

 

Is it useful? In my classes the shift from “stuff” to “skills” or “doing” has been useful. Do you already do many of these things? Probably. I think many of us already do. It is now just a matter of explaining what we do.

 

Do SLOs wind up being so vague they’re useless? Sometimes, yes. It’s not a perfect system, but neither is anything else.

 

Do SLOs encapsulate everything our students learn in our classes? Of course not. Many of the things we hope students learn from our courses do not manifest for several years. I think of a pie chart that represents all the things I hope our students gain from our classes. The SLOs, and our tests, represent just a slice of that pie. In my Oceanography course, for example, I hope students gain an appreciation for how scientists investigate questions about our natural world.

 

Fourth, what should we do now that we’re in this mess?  Here is where opinions may differ. You and Robynn may suggest that we devise a plan that is as painless as possible, whether or not it jives with the spirit of what our accrediting agency is asking for. My take is that if we have to do something, we might as well try to do it in good faith, make it into something as good as possible, and reap whatever benefits may be available.

 

Fifth, why should we do this again? The strongest reason remains for accreditation. They’re asking us to do it and we believe in this peer-reviewed system. Another reason is that SLOs provide a framework for recording the results of teachers talking to each other about teaching. I remain convinced that this is a hallmark of a vibrant academic institution. Additional reasons involve the shift from the “designed” or “taught” curriculum to the “learned” curriculum, and what students ought to be able to “do” when they exit our courses, programs, and institution. But the resulting usefulness of this will depend on the effort that individual instructors put into it.

 

Mark, I may not have answered your questions to your satisfaction, but I hope I have illustrated our current thinking on this subject.

 

I hope you remain active in the conversation.

 

-Fred

 

 

 

Fred and Robynn,

 

I don’t know whether you are interested in comments about SLOs at this point, but I thought I’d pass on a more complete version of the thoughts I expressed in the last PS division meeting.

 

I can’t believe how much attention is being given to student learning outcomes (SLOs). It seems to me that some of the best minds at MPC and across the nation are spending a huge amount of their valuable time and energy just trying to figure out what they are, how they might be useful, and how other folks (who, I suspect, also don’t really know what they are and how they might be useful) can be convinced that the guidelines for writing SLOs have been met.

 

I agree with the core idea of SLOs. I’m a huge fan of learning objectives. I think that it’s important to tell our students what we expect them to do and how we are going to test them to see if they can do it. I also believe that the act of attempting to come up with a list of learning objectives is useful in helping instructors to organize their classes. For these reasons, I provide my students with a complete list of specific learning objectives, and I assure them that I use these objectives as a guide to writing my exams. For example, I provide my Chemistry 1A students with a list of 353 learning objectives for the semester. If they can meet a large percentage of these objectives, they will do well on the exams written from these objectives.

 

Where I part ways with the SLO movement is in the bizarre (and somewhat insulting) assumption that we can distill our college courses down to two or three SLOs. Nobody has been successful in explaining to me what an SLO is and how it differs from my objectives in any other way than brevity, but I assume that to create SLOs for my classes, I would try to find more general objectives that somehow summarize the more specific objectives. Because this would, by necessity, make the objectives more vague, I can’t imagine how this could be useful to either my students or myself.  It couldn’t possibly help students to know how they are going to be evaluated, and it’s bound to be worthless for helping me plan my classes.

 

I assume that the SLO movement began because the core idea of learning objectives is a sound one. I also assume that because the folks behind this movement didn’t think it was practical to evaluate hundreds of specific learning objectives for each course, so they decided to limit the number of SLOs to a very few…more for bureaucratic reasons than anything else. It seems to me that the proponents of SLOs don’t realize that this makes SLOs something different than specific learning objectives, so they use the justifications for specific learning objectives in their arguments for SLOs. I don’t think that’s playing fairly. The justifications for SLOs should explain why it is useful to write two or three very general objectives for each course, and the only justification that I’ve heard that makes sense to me is that it’s necessary for accreditation.

 

Whatever the motivations behind the movement are, it’s clear we need to play the game and write SLOs…accreditation is good…but please, let’s not spend any more time on this sham than necessary. Let’s try to find out what the accreditation folks want and give it to them. Let’s not pretend that the process is anything other than busy work. Let’s get the best minds on campus and across the nation back to doing useful work.

 

Mark

 

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Mark Bishop

Monterey Peninsula College

www.preparatorychemistry.com

www.mpcfaculty.net/mark_bishop/

mbishop@mpc.edu

markbishop@preparatorychemistry.com