Lesson 2 – Strengths-Based Education
A strengths-based approach operates from the assumption that “every individual has resources that can be mobilized toward success in many areas of life” (Lopez and Louis, 2009).
When individuals come from a variety of linguistic, cultural, racial, ethnic and other backgrounds, their resources are vast and diverse. However, often, the classroom environments attempt to “mould students who are not like us to be more like us” (Lambert et al., 2022). Or, in the context of assessments:
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“Our assessments and their grading criteria often ask students to think like us, speak like us, and write like us (where the majority of ‘us’ in Western higher education are White) and be rewarded with good marks and university success.” (Lambert et al., 2022)
With this approach, the variety of strengths that students may bring to the classroom is overlooked as attention is instead placed on their perceived deficits. For example, this might stem from one or more of the following facts:
- that they are the first in the family to go to college
- that they cannot focus in class because they need to work to support themselves and their families
- that they must leave earlier because they have care responsibilities;
- that they have learning disabilities, or
- that they speak English as an additional language.
On the other hand, as college instructors, one of your tasks is to equip students with the industry-specific competencies and amplify the future-ready skills that they need to succeed beyond the classroom. Some workplaces may still operate on the assumptions that we try to challenge here: that if your students do not “think like us, speak like us, and write like us,” to use Lambert’s quote in a different context, one is less “rigorous,” “serious,” or “devoted.”
So how do you balance both – designing assessments that would prepare students to thrive in their future workplaces and in their present-day classroom?
Assessment Examples
Here are two examples of assessments that can address these tensions. As you explore them, think about how these assessments could work in your courses, your discipline, and build on your and your students’ strengths.
If you believe these will not work in your courses, think of what will and how could you revise your assessment types that could honour diversity and equity while preparing students for real-world professional expectations.
| Original Assessment Type | Revised Assessment Type(s) | Principle(s) in Practice | Workplace Skills |
|---|---|---|---|
| Written report | Written report, Podcast, Video, Poster, Infographic, Photo essay. | Offering multiple means of expression. Providing choice and supporting student autonomy. Recognizing and valuing students’ unique strengths and ways of engaging with learning. |
Communication Digital Literacy Initiative Critical Thinking. |
| Oral presentation (in class) | Pre-recorded video Voice-over slides. One-on-one interview. Team presentation (one peer presents). |
Reducing performance anxiety. Allowing students to express their knowledge in multiple ways as they recognize diverse strengths and abilities, including those shaped by disability. |
Public Speaking Teamwork Leadership Intercultural Skills. |
Reflective Questions
If you already provide assessments that reflect and leverage students’ cultural, linguistic, and cognitive assets and offer the differentiated support they need to succeed, use the following questions to reflect on the ways in which you can further support your students:
- Are your rubrics and grading scheme clear?
- Are your expectations transparent and high of every student?
- Do you provide opportunities for practice, feedback, and revision?
Then, press each title below to explore suggestions from Hogan and Sathy (2022) that you can implement in your classrooms:
Grading Scheme
“Embed a growth mind-set into the grading scheme. Some ideas include dropping the lowest grade, weighting earlier assessments less than those later in the semester, allowing exam corrections, replacing a semester exam with the cumulative final exam score, and allowing a less than perfect score to count as full credit.” (Hogan and Sathy, 2022, p. 84)
Transparent and High Expectations
“Can you email or post the directions ahead of time? In a rush to maximize time, students may not carefully attune to your test instructions. Sending the instructions portion of your assessment to students in the days before the exam helps orient them to the task.” (Hogan and Sathy, 2022, p. 182)
“Are you letting them know that you want them to do well on the exam? There are many ways we can say or convey in a message that we, too, hope that they do well on an exam. Kelly has had students copy a sentence on the top of the exam that says, ‘I can do this!’ Viji tells her students: ‘These exams tell us as much about how well I have taught as they will tell you about what you have learned.’ This notion of shared success helps communicate that we are part of the same team working toward a common goal of understanding the material and gaining skills.” (Hogan and Sathy, 2022, p. 183)
Practice, Feedback and Revision
“Are you aligning your formative assessment question types to those on higher-stakes exams? For example, don’t use all open-ended formative assessment questions and then only multiple-choice questions for exams. Thinking about the principles of backward design, how can you best prepare students for your summative assessment? Practice. Practice. Practice.” (Hogan and Sathy, 2022, p. 178)
Summary
The above encouragement to reflect reveals that the design of inclusive and rigorous assessments that center learners’ strengths begins not only with a focus on students, but also with self-awareness. In order to be able to create the conditions where every student feels seen, respected and safe to engage in interactions with peers, instructors, and content, educators need to begin with an intentional and systematic analysis of their own approaches, preferences, values, and biases:
“Strengths-based education begins with educators discovering what they do best and developing and applying their strengths as they help students identify and apply their strengths in the learning process so that they can reach previously unattained levels of personal excellence.” (Lopez and Louis, 2009)
Therefore, begin your assessment design with a self-reflection exercise. Ask yourself:
- How do my own beliefs, values, and biases influence the way I assess?
- Am I unintentionally privileging certain types of knowledge, communication, or expression? “Knowledges produced in North America and Europe tend to be considered more authoritative than knowledge produced elsewhere”—is this the case in your teaching? (Lambert et al., 2022)
- Do my assessments recognize, or inadvertently overlook, students’ cultural and personal strengths?
Instead of focusing on what students lack, the shift towards strengths-based education emphasizes recognizing and building upon the diverse strengths, experiences, and knowledge that students bring to their learning. In other words, it means being rigorously intentional in your reflection about your own strengths as you design assessments that center the students.
In the next section, we will unpack the notion of rigour in assessments.