Education By Design
The Education by Design podcast explores the architecture of learning environments—how schools are designed, not just operated—how culture is disrupted to make way for innovation and reaching potential.
Your host, Phil Evans is a career educator and creative. His guests bring inspirational and practical ideas into classrooms, all over the world. Join him as he engages with innovators who untangle the complexity of educational systems to align with shared values, common practices, and a common language to create powerful, human-centered learning experiences.
For any formal schooling system to have an impact, the central focus must be on learning. Let's learn together.
Dive deeper on the EduByDesign Blog: https://edubydesign.com/blog
Education By Design
S1:E6 "Measuring What Matters: Empowering Students Through Creative Assessment" with Dr. Andy Scahill
In this episode of Education by Design, we explore how innovative assessment can transform learning engagement and outcomes. Join me as I chat with my friend Andy Scahill, a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, as he shares his radical approach to assessment that moves beyond traditional tests and term papers. In an effort to disrupt behaviors cultivated by compliance, Andy empowers students to demonstrate their creativity, critical thinking, and real-world application of knowledge through immersive projects. The result? Students going further than expected with the agency to bring their own meaning and purpose to their final projects.
With the support of his institution, Andy’s approach challenges the rigid systems often found in higher education, affirming the innovative values of the University of Colorado. As he shares how he conducts community centered scholarship as the founder and Artistic Director of Rainbow Cult, we dive into how his assessments can be a tool for growth, modelling for students the ways they can engage deeply and apply their learning in authentic contexts.
This conversation is a must-listen for educators in both K-12 and higher education. Discover how shifting what we measure can inspire students to take ownership of their education, activate their agency, and prepare for the complexities of the modern world. This is what learning and teaching informed by assessment, looks like.
Tune in to rethink what we measure, how we measure it, and why it matters.
Catch Andy's play at the Denver Fringe Festival (2025), info here
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And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.
Welcome to Education by Design, the podcast that explores how schools are shaping the future of education by centering on values, embracing community voices, and building systems that work for every student. I'm your host, Phil Evans. In many educational settings, assessment often centers on preparing students for tests, measuring what they know in a way that doesn't always reflect the full range of their skills or creativity. And how many of us have felt this pressure? For some of our students, we wish that they would take more interest in school and therefore care a little bit more about their grades. For other students, grades are such a focus that learning takes a back burner. And yet what we need to remember is that our objectives inform behaviors. What are your high school grades worth to you now? Yes, for some, they provided a stepping stone, but for many students, their outcomes did not measure up to the end of this chapter in their lives, and they've had to keep moving forward without this currency. I, for one, did not go directly from high school to university. I didn't know what I wanted to do or what I wanted to become, but do you know what? I do now. And I've got to tell you that my high school grades had absolutely nothing to do with it. But what I learned absolutely did. So today I'm talking to Andy Scahill, a professor at the University of Colorado in Denver. Andy's been a mate of mine for many years, but he's a creative that inspires me both personally and professionally. When I visited Denver recently, we got talking about assessment. In his classroom, students no longer write term papers. Instead, they create immersive projects that require them to synthesize complex ideas, collaborate and engage in real-world applications of their knowledge. And his approach doesn't just measure what students know. It measures their ability to apply that knowledge in authentic, meaningful ways. While this conversation centers on higher education, it's equally relevant for K-12 educators too. Not only is Andy going to talk to us about assessment, but he's going to talk to us about deep learning.
SPEAKER_01:I teach film at the University of Colorado Denver in the English department. My pedagogy has changed a lot over the last two years, and it's been kind of running parallel with... my belief that i would get tenure you know because there's there's a certain way in which until that happens until i get that that job security my only job security in my field you have to perform professor in a very traditional dictated sort of way so when i first started teaching i was bow tie, blazer in class. If you weren't here, two points off. If you were late, one point off. I was checking your works cited page in terms of formatting. In the past, I'd have them do a term paper at the end of the class. A term paper, 10 pages, five research sources that you must have found on your own. cited properly within the text. And here's the thing. The more I thought about this, I was like, when in my life has someone asked me to write a 10-page paper? Never. It's not a transferable skill unless you're going to academia. But everyone has asked me to create a PowerPoint. to talk about something. So why aren't we teaching that? And so now I have my students do like a pitch deck for their cult cinema class. I want them to take a film that they love, that they think is a cult movie, and argue why on one of those slides, and then create an immersive experience around that film. How would you encourage audience participation through the different modes of fandom that we've discussed throughout the class? How do you encourage people to quote along with the film to create a different type of experience. And so that's what they'll be submitting for their final assignment.
SPEAKER_00:So it's very project-based.
SPEAKER_01:Very project-based. And I mean, I've even had a student ask me, one of my students is creating an immersive experience around the movie Grease. So, of course, she wants to do it in a high school auditorium. And it was like, it should be like a pep rally. And she's like, maybe I'll have like an ear piecing station over here for the good girls and a tattooing station over here for the bad girls. I'm like, I would go to that. And she goes, hey, can I can I send this to someplace, you know, after I'm done with it? Can I actually send it to a business or a venue? And I was like, that's amazing. Yeah, that's like the ideal, right? That's exactly what this should be.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Andy, this is such a shift. I love it.
SPEAKER_01:The start of my career. Like I was teaching composition primarily in English departments. And now I teach more film history, film theory. My specialization is in genre, specifically representations of children. But the classes that I teach, one would be like a sort of like intro to film. How do we break down the medium? How do we talk about how film manipulates us and how we can derive meaning or how it's embedded in the text? And so I think I'm teaching visual literature How do we understand how to read film as a text? And given that our students get 99% of their information through visual media these days, Do they have the skills to analyze? And then I also do a project kind of on the side, which is to create immersive cinema events around cult movies that queer people love and very much inspired by Rocky Horror. So how do we take something like Bring It On or Death Becomes Her and make it an experience? And so a lot of that informs my teaching as well. I really want students to think about the emotional experience of How does identification work? How do two people of different backgrounds go to the same movie and literally see a different film? So those are more the questions I ask rather than what did Christopher Nolan intend when he did XYZ? I'm more interested in how did the audiences respond?
SPEAKER_00:Such an interesting kind of relationship to culture and conditioning as well. I think about the cinema that's, you know, of late, The Brutalist was an interesting film because it felt like, why would you ever watch that at home? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:the algorithm says they will probably change the channel. Whereas you go to the brutalist, if you're not having a good time within the first 23 minutes, you are not going to pick up and leave, right? Like generally speaking, you are there for the duration of a cinematic experience. And so, yeah, sometimes we say TV is a medium of distraction, whereas film is a medium of like depth of like introspection that you are focused on that thing. But even that's changing. You know, and the new Megan sequel is petitioning to have content be put on your phone during the
SPEAKER_00:film screening. in sort of a more natural, consistent way. They're sort of coming to an examination room and sitting down and doing that. You know
SPEAKER_01:what they're really good at, those students? They're very good at taking tests, but that's
SPEAKER_02:it.
SPEAKER_01:You become really good at faking it, but then that doesn't serve you when you get outside of school, unless your job is simply to comply. You know what I mean? It makes you a good cog in a wheel, but it doesn't make you an innovator.
SPEAKER_00:Well said, well said. Andy, do you have any reference points from your own childhood? Do you have memories of a classroom or a teacher where you got to do very project-based or very application-based learning?
SPEAKER_01:So when I was in fourth grade, I got moved into an accelerated program, like SCOPE is what we called it. And there was a cohort of four of us, myself and three girls. And we went to the special class and kind of heard or noticed through grapevine that all four of us became professors, which is really fascinating. Yeah. And so Shannon, this girl, suggested that why don't we... Why don't we all get together? Because I wanted to see what they remember about this teacher's class with Mrs. Dagy. I remember that we went in every time and we played chess for an hour. And then we did word games. And then we did sort of like theatrical simulations. Like I remember us doing a civil war debate. where we took different roles of representatives from different states. We did a ceremony where we represented a nation in this sort of walk of nations. I still have an obsessive amount of knowledge about Singapore, which was my country that I represented.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing. In the last episode, I was talking to John Spencer about learning that sticks. And man, talk about learning that sticks.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I remember building dioramas. And for a kid like me, who was... I would spend months on the project that if you did it, you got a hundred and it was, you know, a creative thing. I would spend months on it and I wouldn't turn in my homework, you know, like I, I hated the, the drudgery part of it. Anything that felt like it was just busy work. I just wouldn't do it, but I would spend months creating these like elaborate. I created an elaborate shoebox diorama of white Fang by Jack London. I still remember that. Um, I have one, Weirdly obsessive details that I remember about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, because I did a project on that during a unit on the Vietnam War.
UNKNOWN:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:all of us now we get together and it was very like losers club from it
SPEAKER_00:doesn't sound like it to me
SPEAKER_01:or stand by me you know what i mean it was like really like what do you remember about our childhood because it was different like we were different right and we realize now that we're all neurodivergent you know that's why we were good at at these things um but to your point like Teaching students to take a test, it creates a certain set of life skills, of coping skills that don't last. But teaching students to innovate, I'm sure you've seen that pyramid of cognition where it's like rote memorization is the bottom rung, and I think psychologists say you remember that stuff about three months, and then you go up to analysis.
SPEAKER_00:And evaluation? Yeah, evaluation. Yeah, I think you're talking about the Bloom's taxonomy. And I think the revised one is really cool because it actually puts creativity and creation at the top of the taxonomy. Like that's the most, you know, you know, the most advanced application of learning that you can actually do.
SPEAKER_01:And how long that lasts in your cognition versus a regurgitation model.
SPEAKER_00:And so it's just so much more engaging and sticky.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I wanted to like ask you who the students are, because obviously you'd have some students that want to, you know, that want to pursue film or they're interested in the arts aspect of it, but you must be attracting students that are taking this course as maybe even a requirement or an elective.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'll get a smattering of film production students. For our university, film production happens over in a different department, but largely it is for English students who typically they only thought about using these methods for literature. And we're asking them to, okay, what happens if you apply apply psychoanalytic theory to film? What happens if you apply those close reading techniques that we use in literature and transfer them over to film? So instead of word choice, you're looking at symbology, you're looking at tempo of editing, you're looking at soundtrack. So it's really good to kind of get them to see that it all falls under the umbrella of different forms of literacy. And a lot of the same schools apply. I
SPEAKER_00:also really love the appropriation of text because of the way you're bringing all these different influences into the genre and into the representation. I really also like the way that you've sort of articulated the way that learning is connected, transdisciplinary, and just how this kind of learning also helps to paint a picture of what kind of learner we are ourselves.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, it became really clear to me early on that... I was not a math kid. And I think one of the habits I learned was that I could write something, I could half-ass something that would be better than most of the kids in class. And so I kind of learned how to fake it. And then when I got into college, I learned how to pad a paper, to take two pages worth of ideas and expand it into eight pages. And those are, I think, the coping strategies I leaned on. When I got to grad school, that doesn't work anymore. So that was a reckoning for me, quite honestly. And I remember one of the most difficult assignments I had, and I've reproduced this in my own classes, is I was taking a grad class and we read Heart of Darkness, and it was a theory course. And so every week we encountered a different body of theory, Marxism, feminist theory, post-structuralism, post-modernism, what have you. And we had to write a paper about Heart of Darkness through that critical frame. The challenging part, though, is that he limited how many words we could use. And I think that's fascinating. I think when you get to that level of graduate school, if they say, write 5,000 words on this, you know how to do it. You can pad that out. If you say, do this complex idea in less than 250 words, that was hard. And my first time, I handed in, I think, 500 words, and he was like, no. half of this. And so that's still an assignment I do today, where I say, respond to the film inception through this framework that we just discussed. And so I said, I want you to think about this film as a metaphor for Hollywood, and that the different characters in this film are the different sort of roles and productions, like the director, the scene setter, the audience, the screenwriter. And then I want you to tell me how that metaphor works in only 250 words. And it's a
SPEAKER_00:different
SPEAKER_01:skill. They start to use real words like it challenges, it reinforces. Right. And so part of like forcing their hand and conciseness is forces them to use those more direct language.
SPEAKER_00:And it also strikes me that this short, concise writing activity not only has meaning for the writing skills development. but it also opens opportunity for you to be able to have real rich conversations about matter, right? About meaning. And so what kind of feedback do you provide students?
SPEAKER_01:The feedback that I can give one-on-one is so different than the handwritten comments that I like. But usually I will ask them, I mean, the big term that I go for is like the so what question, you know, like why are you pointing this out? Let's move from observation. Okay, great, you found something, right?
SPEAKER_00:Why does it matter?
SPEAKER_01:Why does it matter, right? Okay, great, you found a lot of red in this movie. Like the why now question, I think is really important to ask in film. And I'm trained as a historian, so I'm always asking that. Like, A, is it a trend, right? Is this a representative of something larger in the 1960s or is it an anomaly? And that's cool. We can talk about anomalies as response to dominant discourse. But if it's a trend, if you see other films other directors. Also, what was it we were talking about yesterday? Oh, like the heist genre is so obsessed with stardom, right? Whereas some genres, it doesn't matter if there's a stardom, like a horror genre. It doesn't matter. But the heist genre is so dependent on stardom and glamour and that sort of thing. And so why? What do we get out of that? What does it do for the audience? Why is it this genre about fighting back against the corporate man has to have actors who we consider I'm
SPEAKER_00:thinking of George Clooney and Brad
SPEAKER_01:Pitt and the oceans kind of thing. translate to anything else other than adulation within the arts? Can it translate into real social change?
SPEAKER_00:Andy, you do such a good job of articulating the connection or the relationship between what you're teaching and the relevance of it all. And more so the students that you're working with.
SPEAKER_01:These days, I'm teaching towards the student that I was and the student who felt kind of underserved by education. And I really think about like, what projects would I have liked to have done when I was a student or what would have been useful for me? So transferable skills is a big one for me, that whatever they're doing, it should, I hope, mirror the real world as much as possible. So one assignment I do is a film pitch assignment where, say, I'm teaching a course on Frankenstein in cinema, which is a class I teach a lot, or Wizard of Oz narratives in cinema, or Hitchcock. I have them pitch, let's say, a Hitchcockian thriller at the end of my Hitchcock as a tour class. By doing that, they're demonstrating that they know what Hitchcockian is, right? That they've been paying attention. They know what are the types of stories he tells? What are the camera angles he tends to use? How does he tend to market his films? What Ultimately, how are your position as an audience? So by the end, by doing the assignment, they show me they know what Hitchcock's style narrative and whatever by pitching one in his style, and then I assign them a studio. And so then they have to pitch it to a specific audience, right? It's like rhetorical triangle kind of stuff. And so they have to research that studio. Well, what is A24? What types of films do they tend to make? What have been their hits? And so in the pitch assignment, here's the concept. Here's potential casting that I might do or director that I would choose. And here's why it's a fit for the studio's brand. Here are my marketing materials. Here are my financials. Here's my audience demographic that I'm going after, right? And so they put that together in, I think, like a 10-slide pitch aimed at that studio. And then myself and two colleagues of mine, we are the studio heads, and we ask questions of them.
SPEAKER_00:So it's interactive. It's not just about the delivery and the production of a product. It's that once you bring that product into the world, And that space of what it would really be like to pitch it. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:And I love the challenge of them. You know, if I see a film that's really traditional casting, I was like, why aren't there any people of color in this film? What if there are an early review of this film that says that it's a politically regressive revenge fantasy? How would you respond to that?
SPEAKER_00:Wow. The college setting is not what it was like when we were there anymore. Like there are, you know, progressive experiences where students are collaborating and building prototypes and creating something. Because as you were talking, I was also thinking about you raised the Bloom's taxonomy, right? Like, I mean, all of the knowledge and synthesis and analysis and evaluation stuff is there, but you're actually functioning at the very top of that taxonomy in the creative space.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and the projects that I've gotten, you know, if I have a student in class who is like me, you know, when I was a kid, I've had students create full trailers for these films, you know, and they've been incredible. Yeah. Social media accounts I've had students create, having students bring in like bound dossiers, you know, they really, they dress up, they get into it, they come dressed as the characters.
SPEAKER_00:So that's an aspect of the assessment that's not sort of unspoken. It's like, here's the task, you're coming to a pitch event. If you have the skills to put together a trailer and to shoot it and to create this sort of theatrical trailer using the technologies that you have, do it. If you're going to bring together a portfolio, a dossier, do it. I love that.
SPEAKER_01:And there is the kind of immediate application of the act of researching a studio and understanding what their brand is. That is something you'll have to do in the job market. But humanities classes are unique. I mean, one of the things that I say in my classes is that the process is the product. And so if the skill we want you to leave with is... how to deconstruct something and how to look at its parts and make an argument, then engaging in discussion in class is like prima facia. And so as my pedagogy is involved, I've more and more really understood the value of just creating an environment where students feel safe to express half-baked ideas or ideas they're not sure are good. You know what the greater skill is, is taking a complex idea and distilling it down to something understandable. I think it's harder to take something complex and like, let's, how does this apply to Twilight? And that was always me, like when I was in English literature classes, maybe one of my problems with the way that that lit crit is taught is I was always the guy in the back of the class going, okay, can you play this to real life? You know what I mean? Like, it's all great to talk about the architectonics of knowing, but what does that mean? Like, apply it to something real. So with my events that I'm doing with Rainbow Cult, that is me trying to take complex theory about queer spectatorship and our relationship to cinema and thinking about different modes of participation rather than passive consumption of media. And let me try and turn that into praxis into what does an event of that look like? Or to take... an academic critique of the superhero genre. And I could write a paper about that. Or I wrote a play that got into Denver Fringe Festival that is a deconstruction of Batman and the American Vigilante fantasy. That's more the stuff I want to do. To do the same critical work, but to do it in a creative form. That I don't have to necessarily jump through the hoop of the academic book like I had felt before.
SPEAKER_00:And your university is supportive of that.
SPEAKER_01:They are. They are. And a lot of universities talk about the value of public scholarship. And I'm happy to say my universities actually put their money where their mouth is on that.
SPEAKER_00:Andy, what would you say would be your sort of underpinning philosophy of approaching assessment, learning and teaching in this kind of integrated way?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so like working with the building blocks makes you able to understand how to take the blocks apart. I mean, for me, if half of their grade is being here, being present, talking in class, engaging, so I am waiting their attendance and their precipitation pretty high, actually, which I think more humanities courses should do, quite honestly, to really think about the in-class time as the end product. And then I have them do weekly response papers to the text in which they have to incorporate that week's reading in their response. And again, do a lot of work in a short amount of space. And then their midterm and their finals are more kind of creative projects. But I still have a rubric. I still am grading concept, their ability to apply theory. I am grading the labor that goes into, not like how snappy the graphics are, but how much work does it look like you put into this, right? And so that is kind of like the assessment of it, I would say. And the same sort of unconscious rubric that would probably happen in the real world as they're presenting. You know, if I see a presentation with typos in it, I said, you did this last minute, right? Or you didn't take the time, you didn't take the labor to really invest in this project. I think to encourage people to still be imaginative and to... apply frameworks rather than think about the multiplicity of meanings rather than capital M meaning. Just like teach to the student that you were, you know what I mean? Like what would you have needed or wanted at that stage in your life? What would have actually been inspiring to you?
SPEAKER_00:You've been listening to the Education by Design podcast. I've been your host Phil Evans. If you like this episode, please hit subscribe or follow and join us for our next episode. And until next time, stay curious.
