Designing a Program, Not a Series of Gates

My central revelation is deceptively simple: I had been designing isolated assessment gates and calling it a program. The truth I will take away from this course is that assessment should be designed as a connected, coherent whole in which many sources of evidence accumulate toward meaningful, defensible conclusions about competence, the programmatic vision Schuwirth and van der Vleuten (2019) describe.

That transformation is no longer purely prospective. This term, in my high-fidelity simulation debriefs, I stopped leading with the verdict. Where I once opened by telling students whether they had passed the scenario and then explained why, I now withhold the judgment and begin with their reasoning, asking what they saw, what they decided, and where they think the call went sideways before I offer my own read. The change is recent and still early, but I have already noticed something I did not engineer: students start naming their own errors before I do.

The reflex I spent this course unlearning was the impulse to hand down a single verdict, and interrupting it in my own debriefs has begun to surface exactly the self-directed judgment that Loeng (2020) and Akyıldız (2019) argue must be developed rather than assumed. A small procedural change turned a moment that used to be a verdict into a moment of evidence the learner acts on (Schuwirth & van der Vleuten, 2019).

That single change is the seed of the larger redesign. If withholding one verdict in one debrief can move a student from receiving a judgment to producing one, the same logic applied across a program is what assessment for learning looks like at scale. I will map the assessments across my courses to see how they triangulate rather than treating each as a standalone verdict; reposition self and peer assessment from optional extras to scaffolded practices that build the self-directed judgment my adult learners need (Akyıldız, 2019; Loeng, 2020); hold the fixed floor and the rising floor distinct, so summative certainty attaches to critical-action standards and the certifying judgment rather than to every gate by default; and keep interrogating each gate, asking whether it serves learning or merely habit (Hong & Moloney, 2020).

This redesign is not a separate project from my three big ideas; it enacts them. Building a connected assessment program is programmatic assessment in practice, grounded in respect for adult learners and pursued through a first-principles culture of inquiry. Two further truths follow. The value of an assessment program rests as much on the expertise of the people running it as on the instruments themselves (Schuwirth & van der Vleuten, 2019), so my development as an assessor is part of the work rather than a precondition for it. And culture will not shift by exhortation; following Grannan and Calkins (2018), I will treat change as a series of evidence-based conversations rather than a memo.

Culture change is also not a solo act, and the charge to share my learning is one I take seriously. Building on the peer-led, evidence-based conversation Grannan and Calkins (2018) describe, I will bring these ideas to my faculty colleagues, piloting changes in my own courses first, documenting what the evidence shows, and using those results to open a wider conversation about how our program assesses, so that we rebuild our practice from foundational truths rather than inherited scripts.