Embedded Files
A 90-minute workshop for leading faculty through assessment redesign with Edna
This page is written for you — the facilitator. Thank you for your dedication to our student learning.
Below is the overview of the session. The full facilitator script — including exact language for each segment, the complete midpoint check-in, and the unpacking question bank — is available as a downloadable guide. Print it. Bring it into the room.
One non-negotiable before you begin: go through Edna yourself first with a real assignment. Not a hypothetical. Not a practice run. A real one. You cannot facilitate productive friction you have not felt yourself.
One practical note to share with faculty: don't close a session mid-assessment. Edna works on one assessment at a time, so stay in the conversation until that redesign is complete. Once you're done, you can close the window — then come back whenever you're ready to start your next one.
Faculty who have gone through this process before walk away with something that lasts far beyond one redesigned assignment. They gain a skill: designing assessments that actually measure learning, and catching the barriers we sometimes build in without meaning to — barriers we inherited because our own teachers weren't learning scientists either. None of us were taught this. We're learning it together, one assessment at a time.
Session Overview
Session Overview
Session Overview — 90 Minutes
Opening: What Are We Measuring? — 10 minutes
A short framing on why assessments sometimes drift from what they're supposed to measure.Friction by Design Setup — 10 minutes
What to expect from the process, and why the discomfort is intentional.Edna Session, First Half — 20 minutes
Faculty work independently through Phases 1 and 2 — grounding their assignment and beginning the Friction Audit.Midpoint Check-In — 10 minutes
The room stops. A moment of honesty about the pull toward AI shortcuts, followed by tools for staying in the process.Edna Session, Second Half — 20 minutes
Faculty continue into redesign, drafting, and reflection.Unpacking Session — 15 minutes
A guided debrief on discomfort, power, and what needs to change.Gift of Time — 5 minutes
If the session runs on schedule, this time belongs to the room.
Facilitators Reminders
Facilitators Reminders
Your skeptics are your most valuable participants. Engage them, don't manage them.
The faculty in your room are already carrying a heavy load. Teaching, grading, advising, committee work, and now this — one more ask on top of everything else. Name that at the start if you sense the room needs it. Acknowledging their labor is not a delay before the real work. It is part of the real work.
Most of us were never trained in learning science. We are discipline experts — historians, biologists, nurses, mathematicians — not measurement specialists. It is normal, not a deficiency, to need support figuring out whether an assessment is actually measuring learning. That is exactly what this session is for. You do not need to have the answers. You need to hold space for the questions.
Remember AB 705 together. It is a promise this state made to students — that they belong in transfer-level coursework from day one. That promise is only real if the assessments we design actually build transfer-level skills. Keep that promise visible in the room. It is the reason this work matters.
You are not the expert on their discipline. Edna is not either. That is the point.
And one more boundary worth naming: none of us are experts on our students' whole lives. We cannot measure resilience, home responsibilities, or how much a student overcame to be in the room. We are experts in our field, and we can only fairly measure what the SLO is actually assessing. That boundary protects students as much as it protects faculty — it keeps the assessment honest about what it can and cannot see.
Frustration is a human emotion. It is not a sign that something is wrong. Your faculty will feel it today — and it is the same frustration their students feel when a hard assignment pushes back. Let them feel it. Unlike a room full of eyes, Edna is a personalized designer faculty can return to on their own time — to pause, to take a break, to sit with a hard question without an audience. Remind them that the process does not end when the session does. Edna is there for the deeper dive into the purpose of their teaching, whenever they are ready to go back in.
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