Slide 14 of 24
Notes:
Just knowing the bits and pieces of any highly skilled profession is
insufficient to promote high quality judgement, decision and action.
It is always a process of selection and combination to produce courses
of exploration, reflection, inquiry and evaluation to generate rationales
to inform judgement, decision making and action. I have long defined
the development of a ‘curriculum’ in just this way. I do not see
it as definable in a text book but rather as the historical definition
of courses of inquiry, reflection and action undertaken by individuals
and communities as they mutually enhance their collective intelligence.
Hence assessment in the form of being a structured process of evaluation
is essential to the production of curricula in the education of individuals
and communities. It is essential to the process of theorisation through
which high quality action is generated. Without theorisation there
is no action. Without the means to test theory no one can have confidence
in the action it underwrites. I am not talking only about experimental
forms of test here where the context can be strictly controlled.
I am talking about the dynamic, highly complex and very messy contexts
in which everyday professional decision making have to be take. Here
the problem is rather like the well known gestalt phenomenon of the same
thing being seen in mutually exclusive ways: either as duck or rabbit.
What is it really?
