First a bit of stage setting: Several years ago, my institution, Fayetteville State University, deliberately became involved with a powerful and flexible assessment and teaching/learning tool, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Over the last two years, through faculty development, ongoing course redesign by individual faculty, a variety of faculty-driven efforts, administrative support and leadership, and deliberate shifts in assessment, the CLA has quickly burrowed many deep roots into the soil of FSU.
When I first arrived at FSU two years ago, transitioning from six years of teaching for Ball State University in a maximum security prison to a small southern historically black college where we Philosophy profs teach 3-4 Critical Thinking classes per semester, I had never heard of the CLA. Nor had nearly all of the other professors, staff, and administrators. A few professors had been shipped off to a CLA Academy, and were ready to lead a workshop on it that Fall. Our new Provost glimpsed the potentials of this new mode of assessment based on performance tasks, rubrics, and involving "authentic assessment" of Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Writing skills, He decided not only to support but to invest his long-earned institutional capital into advocacy for adopting the CLA at FSU.
