Susanmarie Harrington Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Writing Assessment, Writing Courses, and Writing Programs Susanmarie Harrington is associate professor of English and director of writing at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. She has also been associate director of writing at Texas Tech University, and associate director of assessment at the (now-defunct) English Composition Board at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. from Michigan in 1990. She has written numerous articles on basic writing, assessment, and writing program administration. Most recently, with Linda Adler-Kassner, she has been completing an extended investigation of the conception of basic writing in the contemporary academy and popular culture. How do you explain the role of assessment in your work as a teacher, researcher, and administrator? Assessment is the organizing principle for almost everything I do. Assessment is reflexive; it means participating in a cycle where I establish goals, carry out practices, then look at what happens and evaluate it. And having evaluated it, I change the practice the next time around. Assessment pushes me to look at my own classrooms, the program I shape with my colleagues, and the field more generally, and ask, "what really happens when we teach writing?" So when I plan a new course (as I'm doing right now, teaching professional writing for the first time), I'm careful to lay out explicit goals for the semester and each assignment. I tell students about them; I put them on paper, and on our course Web site. And as I'm framing assignments, I stop to think, "if students did achieve this goal, how would I know it? How might they demonstrate it?" Once students have actually done an assignment, I listen to what students tell me about their work. Often, they'll find ways to demonstrate learning that I never imagined. The assessment cycle urges me to take students' experiences seriously. My goals and my agenda (formed with students' needs in mind, in the case of a course) kicks off the semester, but students' experiences are the heart of the course. So assessment lets students show me ways in which my orchestration of the class didn't quite get us where we needed to be, and places where what I set in motion worked beautifully. I make notes about all that in my teaching journal, and then revise things the next time around. I'm fortunate, too, to have a group of supportive colleagues to share my work with — so I learn from them, and vice versa. That's an informal assessment cycle. More formally, the same cycle can apply to work we do on the program level, and work we do that ends up as published research. The two articles I've published about placement testing (one in WPA, the other in Computers and Composition) describe assessment of placement practices, showing how empirical data about what actually happened during the test affected decisions about how to set up the testing situation. Why does the very term assessment sometimes cause resistance? Assessment has become a big trend in education lately, partly because of the accrediting agencies' interest in it, and partly because of the transfer of TQM practices from business to education. The rise of writing assessment as a bigger subfield has also raised assessment's profile in our discipline. Doing good assessment takes work — and often faculty are asked to do assessment using someone else's agenda, without regard for the whole cycle. I recently completed my faculty annual report, which grows longer every year in order to let the institution carry out its own assessments. Such requests for information seem burdensome when they're not connected back to later improvements. It's important that assessment requests be public, sensible, and relatively easy to implement. If we ask others to participate in an assessment, we need to make clear what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what will be the institutional and personal benefits that should follow. But too often assessment seems a code word for "provide lots of information to other people without any later feedback." And that's not good. But that's badly done assessment, I'd argue. Good assessment is a boon for teachers. It helps us understand our work, and it helps us plan. It's organized reflection. Is assessment just for teachers? Not at all! Portfolios are a wonderful mechanism for inviting students into assessment cycles. Writer's letters, or other reflective pieces in which students write about their work to a supportive audience, are another. Assessment can help make students more aware of their personal goals, and how those goals intersect with institutional goals. It provides students with a way to make their own contributions to grading cycles. And it encourages them to be recursive writers — to look at a text, evaluate it, and go back in. So what's the key to carrying out good assessment? There are several principles to keep in mind. Ed White likes to start assessment workshops with a line from Albert Einstein: everything should be as simple as it needs to be, but no simpler. So the first rule of thumb is to keep it simple, and know what you want to find out before you start. And secondly, as you design the assessment, consider what information you need to answer the questions you have. If you're carrying out assessment informally, looking at only your own practices (say, within a class), you have a real advantage. In fact, most teachers are used to doing assessment, although they may not call it that. Doing assessment with a group gets more complicated. It's important to make it easy for people to participate in an assessment, and to compensate them (with small stipends, with food, with other perks if possible) if the assessment requires them to provide information that's more difficult to come up with. It's crucial to let people know that assessment makes a difference. Assessment makes our jobs better, because it gives us the data we need to move forward. What are your favorite assessment references? I have different favorites for different purposes. Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson's Effective Grading, Patricia Cross and John Bean's Engaging Ideas, and Tom DeAngelo's Classroom Assessment Techniques are packed with practical suggestions for assessment in the classroom. All of them lay out smart theoretical frameworks, and offer techniques for improving grading, responding, and assessing students' writing and critical thinking. For larger assessment projects, Ed White's Teaching and Assessing Writing is a good first read. It is a comprehensive text written by someone who has an incredible range of experiences. Grant Wiggins' Assessing Student Performance and Peter Sacks' Standardized Minds offer some other perspectives on more recent assessment developments (drawing on histories of assessment generally, not just writing assessment). And two books that remind me why I want to teach writing in the first place are Ann Berthoff's The Making of Meaning and Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly's Reason to Believe. Both those books are about how meaning is woven in context. Ronald and Roskelly model how to look at history, teachers, and students to see the connections among theory, practice, and reflection. Reading their work is always an inspiration.

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