Real Things Change
Wisdom From the Field #13
What do we risk when we constantly seek certainty?
It was a question that Alan Watts, a philosopher known for introducing Eastern philosophies to Western culture, explored deeply. In his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, Watts used the example of money to explain our need to name the present and predict the future.
“…thoughts, ideas, and words are ‘coins’ for real things. They are not those things, and though they represent them, there are many ways in which they do not correspond at all. As with money and wealth, so with thoughts and things: ideas and words are more or less fixed, whereas real things change.” (p. 45)
The relevance to education here is our assessment system. That goes for both students (standardized tests) and faculty (formal evaluations).
We are trained to pin down a person’s performance to a single number so we can better understand it. However, the trade off is that grade or that level or that rating is incomplete and never changes. Maybe a learner shows improvement on a future assessment compared to the previous one. But that prior score is always there, in their records. What does it show other than a previous version of themselves?
Real things, especially people, change. If an assessment system is unable to represent the complex and dynamic nature of a person, we might want to remind ourselves of how limited these systems really are.
As you think about the people in your organization who are evaluated,
How are they inadequately represented in our quest for certainty?
Where, specifically?
Could you change one aspect of the assessment plan or system for the better?
How soon can this happen?
Wisdom From the Field is also a feature in my upcoming book for Corwin.
