PE in Practice: I’m setting criteria to strengthen self-assessment and decrease self-evaluation

As Process Educators, we think a lot about assessment and self-assessment. And hopefully we don’t just think about them, but we do them, too!

And what I’ve learned lately about being a self-evaluator-who’s-working-to-become-a-self-assessor is that skipping setting criteria is really holding me back. So I’ve been working on this skill during my weekly self-growth work. And this practice is really helping me shift out of my self-evaluative thinking!

Here’s what I’ve been working on. Each week I select a performance I’ll be working on during that week, especially one where I might be likely to self-evaluate my performance. Then I’m using the framework from Mohamed El-Sayed et al.’s 2020 IJPE article to help me identify quality characteristics in that performance.

Here’s an example. I’m not teaching in a classroom right now, so my performances are a little different than those of most faculty. But one that’s becoming important to me is making cold contacts. In my case I’m trying to connect with foundations.

For faculty, though, your cold contact might be to an administrator, or the author of an article you read and have questions about. Or to that student who registered for your class but never showed up!

Here are the five criteria I created for making cold contacts:

• Connects: aligns with their personal and organization values and mission discovered through research
• Confident: shows my passion for the powerful outcomes of our mission
• Creates opportunities: for them and us to advance our aligned missions together
• Concise: tells the story, has an ask, and validates my expertise in a succinct note
• Challenge self: Enjoying the productive struggle of refining the message and analyzing risks because there is virtually no downside to reaching out

The bold labels are probably universal to most cold calling, but the one-line descriptions could be refined for a specific performance. So reaching out to that student, perhaps “creates opportunities” could be “invites student to connect for success.”

Making cold contacts is way outside my comfort zone, and that discomfort can cause anxiety about doing it effectively. But now that I’ve clarified what makes quality in that performance, I can create a fair standard for myself and devise my strategy to meet that standard.

For my cold calls, here are my current strategies for achieving an acceptable performance:

• Focus research on finding the connecting values (and then stop researching, or it becomes Google stalking)
• Use the Communication Methodology to draft and revise the message (I like the process for clarifying my thinking)
• Analyze risks and opportunities (I have a little table that I use)
• Plan the send / follow-up / stop pursing system before sending (so that I know I’ve done enough and don’t wait forever on a response)

Now instead of cold calling feeling impossible, I see that it’s something I’m totally capable of!

And now I can use those criteria to assess my performance. For the message, did I customize it for the contact? Did I demonstrate my confidence and invite them for opportunities while being concise? How did I do with challenging my introverted discomfort?

So now I know what it means for me to do my best, and how to do that. And assessment will give me ways to make that best even better.

Thanks, Steve Beyerlein and Tris Utschig, for recent feedback on my criteria development!

P.S. I’m happy to share more details about my process, such as what I’d recorded for the 18 items from the framework that I used to make the short list of criteria. Drop me a line at president@processeducation.org if you’d like to see them, chat more, or share feedback on my criteria!