Rubrics, learning outcomes, and "hidden law," part 1.

I'm going to try to articulate a half-baked germ of an idea here. There are two goals. One is that I actually do think there is something to the idea, and I'd like to keep exploring it. The other is that in my Foundations of Research class, I try to demonstrate the elements of the research process that we discuss in class. I'm not sure how successful I am at this, and it struck me this semester that I should try to chronicle the actual development of a research project. This is the beginning of that. It may crash and burn--ideas often do--but hopefully the end result will be a glimpse into the evolution of a thought from half-baked to fully-baked (or at least slightly more than half-baked.) Here goes...

I think there's an opening for a conservative (think Burke and Oakeshott) critique of learning outcomes and rubrics. (Am I a terrible candidate to mount a conservative critique of anything? Probably. Should that stop me from trying? Maybe. Will it? Doubtful.) The proliferation of learning outcomes and the explosion of ever more detailed rubrics seem to me to be similar to what Jonathan Rauch describes as the replacement of "hidden law" with statutory law. I'm not that old, yet I don't recall ever having learning outcomes spelled out on a syllabus in college, and I don't recall any rubrics. Instead, there were unwritten rules that governed the classroom and grades. (Or at least I think there were. I haven't tried to spell these out, but surely they existed, right?) These rules were, no doubt, imperfect and imperfectly enforced, but they were there.

Then, somewhere along the way, these unwritten rules started to be replaced with explicit, written policies. Our syllabi got longer. Learning outcomes were spelled out in detail. Rubrics were developed for assessment. And now here we are. My hunch is that we are not in a better place than we were before, and are probably worse off as far as actual teaching and learning goes.

My issues with rubrics and learning outcomes are not new or particularly insightful. But there isn't, or at least I haven't found, anyone who is looking at this from a conservative (small 'c') perspective. There seems to me to be something there worth exploring.

So that's the idea. Half-baked.