Tag Archives: professionals

AERA: Frontiers in the Assessment of Entrustment and Competence across the Professions

Dear Colleagues,
As you plan your travels for the upcoming AERA meeting in Toronto, please also make note of the following Invited Panel Session (scheduled for Sunday morning, April 7) which includes presentations from three distinguished colleagues:

Invited Speaker Session: Frontiers in the Assessment of Entrustment and Competence across the Professions 

Session Date: Sunday morning, April 7, 2019 (exact time/location to be released this Friday, 2/15)

Invited Speakers: 

  • Olle ten Cate (Utrecht University): “Valuing what trainees are ready to do, rather than what they have done: entrustment as assessment”
  • Shiphra Ginsburg (University of Toronto): “How can qualitative assessment data inform entrustment decisions?”
  • Trudie Roberts (University of Leeds): “Machines rush in where humans fear to tread: the place of AI in assessment and entrustment”

Invited Session Overview: Concepts of entrustment and competence have resonated across the professions, with innovative and emerging methods to assess trainees. Recent advances in the literature have provided insights on the designs and frameworks to assess learners, including approaches that are beyond traditional forms of assessment. Yet, there are still challenges that remain as we struggle to refine assessments and understand how entrustment and competence can be operationalized and measured. This session will provide insights across the professions on current trends in the field, challenges, and frontier ideas, as they relate to entrustment and competence. 

Olle ten Cate: “Valuing what trainees are ready to do, rather than what they have done: entrustment as assessment”

Graduating trainees in the health professions means entrusting them with critical activities of the profession. An assessment system with that goal in mind should not be limited to observing and judging what can be seen, and has been seen, but should anticipate that learners will perform activities that have not been observed and even may have never been encountered. Trust and entrustment includes the willingness of educators and educational programs to accept risks when making entrustment decisions and consequently urge them to look into a learner’s capability to cope with unfamiliar challenges

Shiphra Ginsburg: “How can qualitative assessment data inform entrustment decisions?”

Assessment decisions have historically relied nearly exclusively on numeric scores and quantitative data. Narrative, qualitative assessment comments have often been ignored, despite offering a richer, more nuanced perspective on learners’ performance. These comments also shed light on how supervisors conceptualize feedback, performance and competence. How can we optimize the use of qualitative data when making entrustment decisions and other judgments about our learners?

Trudie Roberts: “Machines rush in where humans fear to tread: the place of AI in assessment and entrustment”

The fourth industrial revolution will mean major changes to the practice of many professions. In surgery the use of robots or co-bots is likely to be an increasing feature. Improved computing power will mean that in depth performance analytics will be available on all doctors. The machine will increasingly be part of the healthcare team. How much say then could a computer algorithm or a robot have on assessing a doctor’s competence and will trainees ever need a robot’s entrustment to progress. 

Thanks,
Yoon Soo
Vice President, AERA Division I
Education in the Professions

NYT: Teacher Morale Sinks, Survey Results

Students in history class, Tuskegee Institute

Tuskegee Institute History Class, 1902

All professional groups maintain complex and dynamic interactions with the wider public sphere. Among other things, society entrusts to each professional group specific rights and responsibilities.  Teachers in the United States have long had to live without some of the benefits other professional groups have enjoyed, and budget cuts have made it necessary for them to accomplish more with fewer resources. Little wonder that a recent survey found teacher morale continues to decline.  See link to the New York Times article below. EdProf

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/education/teacher-morale-sinks-survey-results-show.xml

Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston – American Memory, Library of Congress

An Exercise in Gratitude

Adult urgent care entranceGratitude is one of the pillars of happiness — “the parent of all virtues” (Wood, Joseph and Linley, 2007). Here is a way to begin the New Year on a positive note.  I created this task for professionals-in-training and their teachers, but others might want to try it as well.

Take some time to think about how professionals have contributed to your own well being during the course of your life. Imagining who belongs within the abstract category of workers we call “professionals” raises many issues, and you might want to think about this at a later time. For now, just go with your own sense of the matter.  In general, professionals are people who have high levels of technical expertise, practices grounded in a shared, empirically grounded knowledge-base, control over their own certification process, a comparatively high level of autonomy, a code of ethics. There are many points of view on the matter, so just see where your thoughts take you. With no pretense or hope of comprehensiveness, here are a few of my own reflections:

There were the nurses and physicians who helped my mother “deliver” me into the world, and who saw to my health in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Dr. Wright, the general practitioner, came to the house when someone was sick, examining us, and perhaps writing a prescription for the pharmacist (another professional) to fill.  There were the teachers who taught me to read, write, develop new skills, solve problems and adapt (more or less) to the demands of life in post-industrial society. Mrs. Gephart, the school nurse at Edina Elementary School, took me under her wing.  She let me help in the nurse’s office after lunch, when all the other kids went out for recess.  I much preferred the company of a caring adult to braving the frigid Minnesota cold on the playground after lunch every day! Mr. Jambeck, my 11th grade English teacher, taught me to appreciate how, in order to really understand the literature and the visual arts of each era, one needed to consider the contexts in which they were produced. In many respects, this insight made me who I am: inspired my interests and my life’s work. Architects and contractors designed and built the dwellings that gave my family and me shelter from the elements. When I was 9 or 10 years old, my Dad showed me the blueprint of our suburban home.  What a wonder!  Decades later, a wise and competent lawyer helped set me free of an unfortunate relationship that no amount of time, effort, love or forgiveness could repair…

If all this suggests an embrace of an old-style functionalist and “celebrationist” mindset — well, so be it! The experience and expression of gratitude can have personal and societal benefits (Seligman, Steen, Park and Peterson, 2005). We tend to take professionals and their contributions for granted. So every once in awhile, we ought to drop our critical lances (yes, lances, not lenses) on the ground and recalibrate, taking into consideration the benefits we derive from the professionals whose work contributes in so many ways to our health and well-being. The system as a whole is flawed, but essential to our diverse ways of life and amenable to improvement.  — Ed Prof

Further Reading

Encyclopedia of Gratitude (A free source of things for which to be grateful compiled by Erich Origen.  Print version available in February, 2012)

Gratitude (Wikipedia.Org entry provides a useful overview as well as citations of empirical studies on the nature and consequences of gratitude.)

Leo Babauta (2007). Why Living a Life of Gratitude Can Make You Happy .  Posted on Zenhabits.net .

References

Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N.,& Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60, 410-421

Wood, A., Joseph, S. and Linley, A. (2007).  Gratitude — Parent of all virtuesThe Psychologist, 20, 1:  18 – 20.

 All rights reserved, 2012

Fallibility: Why It’s So Easy To Be Dumb

One of the important lessons professionals need to learn is how to reconcile the need for confidence in one’s expertise with the need to be mindful about human fallibility.  This is a life skill we cultivate throughout our careers.  In my view, learning to think “contextually” about professional life, calls upon learners to accept the inevitability of both human wisdom, and human fallibility, while avoiding the twin hazards of cynicism and hopelessness.

A decade or so ago, I talked by phone with a man who had served in many university leadership roles, including being the dean of three distinguished schools of education.  At the time, I was recovering from the stress and strain of a big structural  reorganization in my own College.  It was all over — all but the pain and loss that some of our faculty members felt, including me. We had helped to achieve the administrators’ goals while losing a lot of time that should have gone to promoting our own careers.  As a relatively new professor of education, I was troubled by what had happened, and bewildered by some of the questionable decisions administrators had made.

My distinguished colleague listened patiently, and then said something that proved to be something of a gift.

He said, “Well, I don’t know Jan. All I can say is that it’s just so easy to be dumb.”  He went on to give a couple of examples of decisions he had made in his role as a college dean that turned out badly because he just hadn’t seen the whole picture, or made faulty assumptions.

Here was someone whom I greatly admired, one of the brightest people I knew summing things up in a way that helped me accept my professional calamity and move on to higher ground.  It’s so easy to be dumb — an insight from someone who drew on his own wisdom to help a novice see things from a different point of view.  Useful insights are gifts, and anthropologically speaking, gifts circulate — they are passed along from one person to another, perhaps also from one field to another.   –Edprof

Welcome!

Welcome to the Ed Prof  – Educating Professionals Blog! I am not sure this is the ideal title, but must start somewhere.  It is the week before classes and faculty emails are flying. I am still “somewhere else” but will be back on campus soon. One of the things I hope to achieve is to alert visitors to resources of interest to people who are concerned about how we prepare professionals for work in complex organizations. Although there is always debate about which occupational groups are to be considered  professional, it seems to me that teachers, counselors, healthcare workers, social service providers all belong in this group.  Each group is a distinct cultural community with its own language, rules of conduct, standards, and fetishes. Yet, the task of “educating professionals” may well have common themes across fields.

A group of us met at the American Educational Studies Association Annual Meeting last fall to present papers on life in academe, focusing especially on how life in the academy affects intimate relationships. I was stunned by the depth of emotion, as well as the powerful insights shared at that session. Being a professor (or aspiring to become one)  is a good thing, but many of us have paid a price for the privilege.  Our families, partners and friends have paid a price as well.  Our group is exploring venues for publishing this work. More on this as things develop.

Enough said in this first entry.  Time for this professor to get back to “real” work.