Strategic Planning

Lessons in social entrepreneurship from Year Up’s founder

Yesterday Gerald Chertavian flew into New York City to give a very inspirational talk about how he started Year Up. He had really solid advice about filling the gaps in your knowledge by hiring a diverse team of people and being very selective when it comes to assembling a board, but all those things are a bit farther down the line for me. What occupies me now are networking and creating a sustainable business model, neither of which come naturally or easily to me, so I’m still wrestling with what Gerald had to say about all that. I see how his approach has worked out tremendously for him, but am very ambivalent about applying all of it to my life. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Sowing the seeds of self-actualization

One way of articulating what it is that I’m trying to build into a PYA curriculum is the “seeds of self-actualization,” a term I take from “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow. (Now, I have a terrible blogging habit of burying the lede, so skip down to the jump if you’re already familiar with this.) In brief, Maslow argues that human beings have a progressive hierarchy of needs, beginning with the most basic of physiological drives, moving up to concerns about safety, love/belonging, esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization. Later on, Maslow would sandwich cognitive and aesthetic needs—the pursuits of knowledge and beauty—in between esteem and self-actualization, and top off the pyramid with the search for self-transcendence, or spiritual fulfillment.

Credit

These needs are hierarchical in the sense that the higher needs only typically emerge as each preceding need is adequately satisfied. The higher needs either do not exist or recede into the background for someone who lacks food, safety, love, and esteem. If I am hungry, homeless, and unemployed, I will be preoccupied with securing stable housing and any means of income, long before I might entertain the pursuit of creative expression. And above all, I seek nourishment. Once my most basic needs are met to reasonable degrees, there emerges my thirst for understanding, for beauty, for the meaning of life. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Modest proposals

I’ve found that the surest way to paralysis at the beginning of a project is to get caught up with concerns of assessment and scalability. This isn’t to say that we can conduct programs willy-nilly. Rather, I think a case can be made for tabling those issues in favor of designing innovative programs that seek to address the immediate concerns of a specific population. Let me explain.  (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Conversation with Karen Freedman

Yesterday I met with the executive director of Lawyers for Children, Karen Freedman, who has decades of experience working with children and youth in foster care. She said that the most important factor determining the success of an individual’s transition to adulthood is the presence of a strong and positive Read more…

By Ysette, ago

Why and how, pt. 2

Continuing the thought process from this post, in talking with more and more people about my curriculum, it occurs to me that launching my program ideas is not so unlike getting a dissertation project off the ground. Here are some of the questions I asked myself then, which I am again asking myself as I develop and pitch my curriculum: (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Sensible assessment advice from Barbara Walvoord

The value of Barbara Walvoord‘s contribution to Heiland and Rosenthal’s anthology on academic assessment is spelled out in its title: “How to Construct a Simple, Sensible, Useful Departmental Assessment Process.” Before she gets on to that task, however, she clears up a few misconceptions about assessment. One is that assessment can in fact be consonant with both the values of academic departments and the requirements of external evaluators. Another is that assessment is not a tool to evaluate faculty, but rather a “systematic collection of information about student learning for the purpose of improving that learning” (336). The formula she gives is stunningly simple: set your learning goals; decide on at least one direct measure (eg, faculty evaluation of student work using detailed rubrics) and one indirect measure (eg, student surveys); and use the information to improve curricula and teaching.

What makes her article especially compelling is that she departs from that rather benign definition and pushes us to think broadly about what counts as student learning. Echoing Donna Heiland’s language, Walvoord asks, “How we might assess our most ineffable goals—qualities of mind and heart that we most want the study of literature to nurture in our students?” (336) (more…)

By Ysette, ago

How Donna Heiland approaches “the ineffable”

I began discussing Donna Heiland‘s views on assessment in yesterday’s post and today I wanted to take a closer look at her article, “Approaching the Ineffable: Flow, Sublimity, and Student Learning,” which is part of the volume of essays she edits, along with Laura Rosenthal, on the topic of accountability and assessment in the humanities. Heiland brings a unique perspective to the problem as a former literature professor who now works in grantmaking. She inhabits the world outside the ivory tower while very much remaining a member of the tribe, which positions her to be a wonderful interpreter for the assessment and the educator camps alike. Having been trained in literary study, she is someone who speaks our language and sympathizes with many of our concerns. During the MLA panel discussion on assessment I found myself much more drawn to her sensible, and yes, pragmatic approach to assessment than I was to those of the professor who unequivocally rejected assessment on the grounds that it was a practice that privileged the visible and representable (I am paraphrasing, but the key terms are hers). (more…)

By Ysette, ago

A ray of light on the problem of assessment

The term assessment has been on my mind these past couple of months, in no small part due to the fact that New Yorkers have been debating how to evaluate teacher impact, the degree to which teaching can be assessed relative to student performance, and even the reliability of test scores as predictors of future success and learning. I’ve especially enjoyed the perspective brought in by the Finnish school system, which is very unlike the U.S. model in its rejection of standardized testing in preference for classroom-based tests created by individual teachers.

We’re talking the NYC public school system here, not academia, so hardly anyone is debating whether or not teachers should be evaluated and student performance should be assessed. (I’ll get to the much more ambivalent feeling on assessment within higher ed below.) And although the media like to present the matter of teacher assessment as a battle between the politicians (who blame teachers for poor student scores) and teachers’ unions (which point to larger systemic issues affecting learning), I believe most reasonable people would agree that teachers, parents, and neighborhood life all have an impact on how well children learn.

The central difficulty of assessment stems from the how: How can we manage to boil down the complex activities of teaching and learning to something quantifiable? (more…)

By Ysette, ago