38 Alignment

Alignment is a way of ensuring that your course coherently connects goals, teaching, learning and assessment. This means that your course starts with clear goals, and matches those goals with activities with opportunities for feedback, and then offers assessments that are designed to determine the progress students have made towards realizing the goals of the course. Alignment means that the pieces work together to be mutually reinforcing. 

Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (2016) outlines a three-part, inerconnected Learning Assessment Technique (LAT) that mirrors the phases and employs the elements of effective teching by helping teachers to:

1. Identify Significant Learning Goals
2. Implement Effective Learning Activities
3. Analyze and Report upon outcomes

We use the trefoil knot…to illustate a LAT’s nature, which is the intertwining of these elements of effective teaching. The three elements combine to make a unified whole; one cannot be separated from the other, and it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell, 2016

 

Here is a short video by David Boud that introduces the principle of alignment in more detail:

^{Video: ” Principle 1: Aligned” by Teaching Development UOW can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbtXxDkgsZ4}