Constructive alignment sounds fancy, but what is it?

This is one of a series of posts aimed at teachers, and any others, who are interested in learning design.

In my last post, I wrote about some new vocabulary that I've learnt since working as a learning designer in a University. There was one term that I missed out, but I want to focus on it now - constructive alignment.

Before we get to that though, let's think about the idea of learning outcomes.

If you're a teacher you probably know what these are - statements about what a student should be able to do by the end of the lesson or subject. They usually start with a verb, like ‘calculate’ or ‘write’ or ‘analyse’.

In a primary or secondary school the learning outcomes for a subject come from a predetermined curriculum, for example, the Australian Curriculum or SACE. For example, students in Year 9 Mathematics should be able to ‘Calculate the surface area and volume of cylinders and solve related problems’.

Conversely, in tertiary education, teaching staff write their own learning outcomes for both programs and courses. They may need to meet certain requirements (driven by regulatory bodies) but for the most part, it's up to them.

Constructive alignment sounds fancy, but what it means is relatively simple - the course learning outcomes, assessments, and learning activities should all line up, i.e. be in alignment. So if you say students are going to learn something, you should teach it and assess it too. Conversely, and perhaps more controversially, you shouldn’t teach or assess anything that you didn’t say you would.

Photo by Edz Norton on Unsplash

Going back to our Year 9 Mathematics learning outcome above, here’s a fairly typical example of how you’d ensure constructive alignment:

1. Learning outcome: Calculate the surface area and volume of cylinders and solve related problems.

2. Assessment: An investigation where students design cylindrical packaging and try to optimise the volume and surface area.

3. Learning activities: Practice finding the surface area and volume of various cylinders with teacher guidance.

It seems kind of obvious in this example. It gets more complex when we think about an entire course. Consider these situations where course learning outcomes, assessments, and learning, are not in alignment:

• Students doing assignments that have nothing to do with the course learning outcomes.

• Students going to lectures and learning content that is not assessed in any of the assignments or exams.

• Something is written in the course learning outcomes, but students never learn anything about it.

• Students being assessed on content they've never learned in the course.

You can imagine all of these would feel like confusing and frustrating experiences for a student. You very likely have even experienced some of these when you were a student yourself.

So, constructive alignment is important to get right. If something is important to learn, it should be captured in the course learning outcomes - then assessed and taught. Likewise, if something is not important enough to be captured in the learning outcomes then time and cognitive effort should not be spent on teaching and assessing it - focus on what matters instead.

Of course, there should always be room in teaching for spontaneity and responding to students’ interests. However, a five-minute digression on an interesting topic is very different to writing entire blocks of learning that don’t align with the promised outcomes.

When I think back to my time as a teacher this was something I tried to get right. But like many others, I often ended up making mistakes like:

• Deciding what to teach by looking at textbook chapters, not at the learning objectives.

• Trying to cover the same volume of content as other teachers, even if it wasn’t strictly in the curriculum. This came at the expense of focusing on the key ideas that really mattered (and that were in the curriculum).

• Using assessments that others had written, that didn’t quite line up with the way I’d taught the content.

• Setting an assignment and then realising I hadn’t taught all the required skills and knowledge to complete it - so teaching them ‘just in time’ - i.e. as students were doing the assessment.

Of course, we all make mistakes, especially in the incredibly time-poor world of the school teacher or teaching academic. However looking back at these mistakes through the lens of constructive alignment, it becomes clear why they didn’t work.

Constructive alignment is in some ways more important for tertiary education because of the way learning outcomes and content are largely up to the person teaching it. For any educator though, it’s a useful model to figure out what you should be teaching, what students should be doing, and how to best focus your efforts.