CUTL – Certificate of University Teaching and Learning

Life at university… it’s been more than 20 years ago when I had first entered university life at UBC.  I was a Science undergraduate in 1988 living on the second floor of Okanagan House at Vanier Residences.  I remember exploring campus, trying to find my classes, and hanging out at the clock tower with one of my study buddies drinking lattes.  Good times.

Here I am again… at SFU as an Education graduate student working on my doctoral dissertation in Educational Leadership.  I commute from the Sunshine Coast to SFU-Burnaby to reorient myself to the campus lifestyle.  Although I am a site assistant with one of the Master of Education cohorts at SFU-Surrey, I am also going to Burnaby campus to complete a 4 month program called CUTL – Certificate of University Teaching and Learning… an opportunity I could not refuse.  Right now, I am sitting on a bench in Saywell hall to blog, reflect, and eat lunch.  I just finished my third week of CUTL.

CUTL is composed of approximately two dozen graduate students from various faculties.  Many of them are TA’s or TM’s.  Today’s CUTL session was about “Student Assessment.”  The educational consultants presenting the lesson where extremely knowledgeable about the topic and were realistic about what could be accomplished in 3-hours.  I appreciated their willingness to go with the group and balancing what they had intended to cover.  I also liked that we were able to discuss in our groups what student assessment means to us as students, TA’s, and future instructors in addition to dialoguing about an area about student assessment that concerns us.  My group tackled “participation.”  It was an engaging and enlightening conversation.  We did not come up with profound solutions but what was certainly clear… our intentions must align with our learning outcomes and assessment methods.  If it doesn’t, we must ask ourselves why?

My awakening is… concerns about student assessment at the secondary level (i.e. assessment of learning vs. assessment for learning) are similar to the concerns found in higher education.