ResEdChat Ep 180: What Holds Us Back From Good Assessment – And How To Break Through

In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, Host Paul Brown sits down with 2026 Roompact Fellow, Amanda Knerr to talk about assessment in residence life. Assessment can be scary. It can be difficult. But it doesn’t have to be. Amanda and Paul talk about tangible and tangible steps departments can take to make assessment infused in all departmental practices from formative to summative.

Guest: Amanda Knerr

Host: Paul Gordon Brown

---

Listen to the Podcast:

Watch the Video:

Show Notes:

Transcript:

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat, our podcast where we talk about all things related to residence life and education with a dab of college student housing. I’m your host for today, Paul Brown. I’m pretty excited about our guest today. So if you’ve been watching the podcast, listening to the podcast, you know we’ve been having a number of our Roompact fellows on with us and our Roompact fellows kind of act as our scholar and residents throughout the year helping out with some of our content. So you’ll see them obviously here, but also with webinars and blog posts. They’ll also be at our R2 conference coming up in October. And so they’re here to share their expertise. And so I’m excited today to have our guest, Amanda Knerr, who I’ve known for quite a few years. We’ve rolled in a lot of the same circles.
I’ve come to value about really her strong expertise in assessment, in student learning, in looking at outcomes. We worked for a number of years actually it feels like and was on the most recent edition of the ACUHO-I competencies together as well. And so Amanda has a broad breadth of experience in college student housing, residence life, residential education, all of those kinds of things. And so I’m really excited to have you here with us, Amanda. How are you doing? How has your day been so far? Any residence life crises that you’ve had?

Amanda Knerr:
No crises today, thank goodness.

Paul Brown:
Okay.

Amanda Knerr:
But no, it’s good to be here, Paul. Appreciate the opportunity to chat assessment and to chat Res Ed.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, can you give us maybe a little bit of your more formal background? I mean, I could probably do it, but obviously you’ll do it better than me. Just so folks know your experiences, where you work, things of that sort.

Amanda Knerr:
Absolutely. So I started out as a grad student at Ball State University a few years ago, just a few. And when I finished my master’s degree program, I ended up at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska for a couple years. It was one of those things where my husband and I didn’t have family yet. And so we’re like, “We don’t have to put down roots anywhere yet. Let’s go and do something very different.” Ended up in Alaska, had a great experience there, learned a lot about who I was as a professional and a lot about a different student than I’ve experienced in Indiana. We had our first child and I said, “Grandpa, grandma are too far away.” And so I ended up moving back and took a job at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. It was like working at Disney World. I say all the time, great experience, great people.
Was able to do Res Ed, alcohol and tobacco programming, freshman interest groups, assessment, senior year experience programming there. I was there for a number of years and had an opportunity then to move to University Park. And so I worked at Penn State University Park campus for about seven years doing housing and residential education, student conduct, kind of crisis management. And then also worked with the nine residential campuses away from University Park. So did a lot of traveling. While I was there, I was able to implement a curricular approach at all eight of our residential campuses. So did my PhD work while I was at Penn State and got to the point where I was ready for a director position. And so I left Penn State and went to Indiana State University as executive director there for several years. And then about four years ago was able to move back to my graduate institution as the associate vice president for student affairs and director of housing and residence life.
So in my current portfolio, I oversee Res Ed. Up until a week ago, the student center, our facilities and custodial maintenance operations, and then all of our business operations and IT and housing and residence life.

Paul Brown:
So a small job.

Amanda Knerr:
Just a little.

Paul Brown:
Just a little. Just a little. And it’s surprising that you haven’t had a crisis yet today with that kind of work.

Amanda Knerr:
Right, right.

Paul Brown:
Maybe just one you don’t know about yet.

Amanda Knerr:
That’s right.

Paul Brown:
I won’t jinx it. I won’t jinx it. It’s horrible to say. I take it back. I take it back. I think one of the things, you also work as our webinar coordinator for the webinars that come out once a month. And as we’ve developed that, because it’s still relatively new, I think we’ve kind of found that one of the topics that seems to resonate, gets a lot of registrations, things like that, focuses around assessment. That seems to be something that people want to know about, want new knowledge about. Where do you think that comes from? Why is that one of the things that you think resonates with so many people or has so much energy behind it? What’s the motivation there?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Well, I think the first thing is people tend to be afraid of assessment. It’s not something we teach in our graduate preparation programs. And so I think people are like, “Ooh, I should be doing this,” because they hear, “I need to know if people liked what I’m doing. I need to know if people are learning. I need to show our value as a department.” But there’s also a lot of fear in, “I don’t know how to do this well.” I also think growing up, so many of us are terrified of math and we hear assessment, we hear numbers and we think math. And so it’s like, “Ooh, I can’t do this. I can’t do this well.” So I think that combination of, I’m afraid of this, I don’t know how to do this well, and I should be able to find out if we’re making any impact on our students.
I should or I need to tell the story of the work we’re doing to the broader campus community, I think captures people’s attention. Like, how do I do this? Can I do this? And then how is it going to help demonstrate for my department, for my team that the work that we’re doing matters?

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I think one of the things, in working with a lot of different campuses, occasionally I’ll get messages from folks. And one of the things I think I’ve kind of come to realize, think, or this is what’s currently in my brain space is a lot of folks will not think about assessment until afterwards, meaning we collect data, but now we’re at a point where we’re like, “Oh, we have collected all this data. What do we do with it?” Either someone asked me a question or it’s end of the year report and what did it… Which to me, I was like, “Oh, well, how do you collect it? What questions do you ask?” Because they’ll say, “How do I assess this?” And I’ll be like, “Well, you need to back up a little bit,” and things like that. And so I often find that I feel like sometimes schools, and I would be guilty of this as well, I wouldn’t put it on a school.
I feel like I did this in my professional career of not thinking through the full assessment process. If you agree with that, how do we interrupt that? How do we get better at that? Because it feels like we can collect data and we do, but then we don’t use it or we get stuck in a place where we’re just reporting it out and then it repeats year after year.

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, I can think of a couple different things. Of course, I’m a curriculum campus and so curriculum is really important to me. And one of the things I ask our team is, what do we want students to learn in this particular activity? So at the beginning planning stages, what do we want students to learn? And then my second question is, what is the best way to teach it? And then my third question is, how will we know if they’ve learned it? So I try to start our planning process with that. How are we going to know if we’re successful? And that has really helped us move from, “Oh gosh, we have to do an assessment report for the end of the year report, which is due in three weeks. What do we do?” It helps us shift that to the very, very beginning so that as we’re planning our events and activities, we’re planning it in a very intentional way and we already know how we’re going to know if students get what we want them to get.
So I think that’s the first point. And the planning, what do we want them to learn? How do we know if they’ve achieved it? And that helps us develop a lesson plan, an activity, an initiative that’s really powerful, that’s intentional and gets exactly what we want students to learn and then we can see if it works. So I think that’s the first thing when we’re talking about student learning. But I think the other piece is many of us grew up in housing or residence life with quality of life surveys, which tend to be very satisfaction-oriented. And I know when I did quality of life as a grad student, there were 500 questions about every aspect of housing of residence life and this whole book got done at the end that was about three inches thick. I’d hand it off to my director, it would sit on their desk, collect dust, and never get open because it was just so much data.
And so I think the other thing when you’re asking, how do we do this intentionally? How do we make sure it makes sense is to also ask the question, how am I going to use this? And if I’m not going to use it, then why are we asking the questions? So instead of at the end, how are we going to assess this? What questions do I want to ask and how am I going to use it? If I’m not going to use it, why am I wasting my time? Why am I wasting students’ time? So a primary example of this is years ago when I was at a campus at the end of every conduct meeting, we would hand the students a survey that was like, how satisfied were you with your conduct meeting today? Because we had to do that assessment report at the end of the year, right?

Paul Brown:
If I’m found responsible, I would probably say not very satisfied.

Amanda Knerr:
I just got kicked out of housing or I just had to pay a fine. I just had to do an ed sanction. I am not happy. And so then I’m putting this assessment report because I was responsible for the end of year assessment report together and I’m like, “Ooh, I don’t want to even turn in any of this data. This is bad. It makes us look bad.” And so I started looking at the questions, I’m like, “We’re asking the wrong questions.” What are we doing with this? We’re not going to use this and nobody is going to be satisfied with a conduct meeting if we’re truly just looking at, are you happy that you’re here today? No. So we were able to flip the questions when we were talking about it upfront. Well, what do we really want to get from students? Well, I really want to know, did they feel like they were heard, that somebody listened to their story?
We want them to feel like we were asking them about whether or not they understood how to make good decisions or what their decision making process was. Do we want them to know what the policies are that they might have allegedly broke and how to make things different or do things differently?
Do we want them to know did our team follow the process? Did their meetings start on time or were they stuck waiting for 30 minutes past their meeting’s start time? So when we started asking, what do we really want to know about this experience? We were able to craft an assessment that got us data that helps us improve our practice. So we just tweaked our questions a little bit. Did your meeting start within five minutes of the appointment time? Were you able to read the incident report? Were you able to provide your side of this experience? Did you feel like you were heard? Did you feel like the decision was explained to you and that the sanction was directly related to the behavior that you demonstrated? And so when we got done with that, we could very quickly look at that data and we were able to see, oh my goodness, oftentimes our meetings were starting 15 or 20 minutes late.
What is that? Well, we need to go back to our coordinators and reset expectations. This is about respecting our students. You need to start within five minutes. If we had an area where students, we had a coordinator that never let the students read the incident report, but I could very quickly see what building that was at and then I could go directly back to that coordinator and retrain them on our process and why we did it that way. And so it went from having an assessment be an afterthought that was to check a box and do a report to something that was helping us improve our practice to train our team and then also just helping students to feel like we valued their time, we valued their experience and that they mattered and what they said, their word mattered. So I think about that with learning, I think about that with satisfaction, I think about that with needs assessment. How are we going to use it?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, I think it goes back to, for me, some aspect of leadership and defining goals. I think residence life is such that when things get busy and you need to prioritize, certain things are naturally going to come to the top and certain things are going to flow to the bottom. I think what happens too often is that really defining those goals ends up floating to the bottom, or not floating, but syncing, I guess, to the bottom.

Amanda Knerr:
Sinking, yeah.

Paul Brown:
So we just released a book on care, one of the 3Cs that we’ve talked about with residence life, which includes using intentional conversations as a form of connecting students into care networks. And so, one of the things that I was thinking about because a lot of schools do intentional conversations, collect some data out of intentional conversations. And so very much when I was discussing that with folks and thinking about it, it’s like, well, what are you trying to get out of the data that you collect from intentional conversations? I work with some schools that get to the end and they’re like, “Someone wants a report.”
And then it’s numbers of conversations, which is a fine metric, only tells you one thing, but what are those other things? What are you trying to collect? When does it kind of, I think what you kind of got into become too much of a burden on staff because we can make a super long form, but our student staff might come at us with pitchforks because they’re probably the ones that are collecting that. What’s the balance in that? Do you have thoughts, especially as it relates to intentional conversations? Because I feel like that’s such a common universal thing that people fall into.

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Well, and I think intentional conversations are hard because I think there’s a lot of value in them, but we’ve all kind of struggled with, how do I assess learning in this? And so we collect all this data, but what do we do with it? But I think the first thing is there’s value in having the conversation itself. And so sometimes we want to just assess, assess, assess, but sometimes the conversation itself is important. So just getting our student staff in having that conversation with students is really critical and important.
But then having them do some summaries, do some keynotes, what did we talk about? Where did I see growth from one point to the other? And I think how you can use intentional conversations in a larger scale, I guess some of the ways I think about it is as our student staff are submitting their summaries for their intentional conversations, they’re putting it like, “Here’s the first conversation with student A, here’s the second conversation with student B. Here’s a third.” And so they can go back and as a student say, “Wow, look at how much my relationship has changed with the student over the course of the year.” Or, “Wow, there’s a couple points that keep coming up. I need to bring this up to my supervisor.”
So it really provides some structure for the student staff member to see the growth, to see some high level, “Ooh, these are some points that keep coming up on my floor.” And then we have in staff meetings, they talk about some of the highlights from those intentional conversations as a staff. “This is what’s coming up on my floor, what’s coming up in your floor?” And they very quickly say, “Well, here’s some themes we’re seeing. Here’s some areas where we’re just not hitting the learning goal. Well, what are we going to do about that, team?” So having those conversations and assessment doesn’t always have to be a 20-page executive summary. Assessment is really like, “All right, staff, let’s have a quick conversation. What are we learning about our floor? What are we learning about our community? What are we going to do about it? What’s the next step?”
And I think sometimes we don’t value that, that informal use of assessment. But then as a department or division level, what do you do? So if you input all of those summaries into whatever platform you’re using, Roompact or whatever, what do you do with the data? Hundreds of pages. I think, I can’t even remember how many thousands of intentional conversations we had at my campus last year. We did a couple different things. One is for every intentional conversation, we throw it in and just do a generic word cloud and people are like, “Well, what does that do?” Well, word clouds help us see what are those themes, those words that keep coming up in the conversation. So it very quickly helps us to see what are those big things, those big themes that are important for a building or community or across campus.
Homesickness was one that came up for us. Students started talking about homesickness. Great. We know homesickness is an area, so how do we go back and address that need and then how are we going to assess whether we’ve met that need, whether they’ve learned some tools around homesickness? So what are the big terms? What are the big themes that come up? I think the other thing is doing some thematic analysis and then we do a report back to each building. Here are the key themes in your buildings. Here’s a couple areas where students needed some significant resources and here are the resources that you can push back out to your community based on the themes that came up and then here’s some additional questions that you can ask. So here are some additional things to talk about with your team about how to reinforce learning or reinfill gaps in learning.
So those things help us continue to improve our practice. So it’s not just did the student meet their learning goal, but what are the continuing needs and then how do we push resources back to those students to reinforce the learning that we want to see happening? Does that make sense?

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s very multilayered.

Amanda Knerr:
It is.

Paul Brown:
And is the student getting the support, learning things, succeeding in the ways that we want? Is the student staff member, who’s typically the one doing that conversation, doing them well, getting better at developing rapport, identifying issues and things like that.

Amanda Knerr:
Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
Is it the supervisor that’s helping make sense of that, looking for students that are maybe falling through the cracks, escalating them as they need to, but also what are the things going on in my space and are there other things that we can do to help with that if it seems like it’s a trend that’s emerging or things like that. And then it’s a departmental level of how is this helping us in terms of student retention, things that are important to the institution?

Amanda Knerr:
Student success.

Paul Brown:
Are we training our staff well for that? Are we making it easy? Are we making the pathways simple to navigate and not maybe making them overcomplex? So I feel like it’s those layers and I think sometimes when it gets lost, it’s the in the practice of it.

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. Well, and I think we try to make it big, right?

Paul Brown:
That where it loses a little bit, right?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah. And I think sometimes with assessment, we think it has to be this huge project. And so I often talk about assessment like a photo album, right? You’re taking snapshots of learning over time and then you’re putting that snapshots together for a student into your honeymoon, into the Disney World trip, into the cruise in July and then you’re putting a photo album together of assessment of learning over the course of the entire year. And sometimes we want to go straight to the big photo album, but we forget about the little snapshot. So how can I use this little piece of information to improve my practice? And then taking all those little, “Oh, this worked. Oh, this learning happened. Oh, this learning…” And we’re going to put it together to tell the whole story.
So again, not starting so big. I think the other thing, when you were talking about leadership, to jump back for a second, when I’ve moved into an AVP role, I can’t go to my boss ever and say, “Well, I want to do this initiative,” without her saying, “Well, how do you know that that’s worthwhile? How do you know that’s a good investment? How do you know that’s a good investment in time or finances or resources or how does that align with the institution?”
And so as you move up through the field, you continue to have these, you’ve got to have evidence-based decision-making, you have to have data-driven and data-informed decisions. And so I think part of that, why do we collect data? It’s to improve our practices to help us make good decisions. And so when we give information back to our RAs and our student staff member, it gives them tools to help them make better decisions about their community. When we feed that data back to our coordinators at the building level, it helps them do better at building a sense of belonging in their community. So when we think about that assessment, what do we do with intentional conversations?
We feed the information right back to the communities so that they can use it to make evidence-based decisions so they can use that to improve their communities. And so I try to think about that anytime we’re getting data and collecting it, whose hands do I need to get into and how can they use this and how can I package it in a way so they get it and be like, “Oh, duh, this is how I use it.” And that has been helpful for us in guiding our conversations.

Paul Brown:
I think you’ve just identified the thing that I spend in my day job working with software is my biggest, I don’t know, challenge, I guess, which is so people can buy our software, they can buy specialized software tools like that and sometimes it only becomes an information input repository and it just sits there. And so when I go to train a campus, I can show you how the software works and you can collect information, but then what do you do with it? How do you integrate it with a practice? And it’s always difficult for me because if you collect this information, well, in a one-on-one meeting, if I’m meeting with an RA, here’s how I can use these tools to help inform how we have our conversations. And it’s me giving suggestions, but it also depends on where is the campus and what do they think is important.
So I always get into this rub of, I don’t want to overstep and just do this or I don’t want to say do this and then you just do that, but you don’t know the why. How can I help get people get past the information collection stage and really do the more process-oriented things? Because software alone really usually won’t solve the problem. It’s how do you use it? How are you integrating it into your practice? If you’re just collecting information, it might be slightly better in a specialized software program that you pay for, but if you’re not doing something interesting with it or using it for improvement or things like that, well then why not just throw in a spreadsheet? You could use it for free.

Amanda Knerr:
Right, right. So you’re really talking about how do you build that culture of assessment in a department because we can collect and put data in, but that isn’t a culture of assessment. It’s a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the only puzzle. And so what I’ve found over time is you build a culture of assessment through a few different ways. The first is you’ve got to train your people. They have to feel comfortable doing assessment. And we talked earlier about that fear of assessment. I’m worried. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do it wrong. What if I stand up and somebody’s like, “You didn’t do this right.” Or what if I don’t know how to do averages and now I’ve done math and it’s wrong and then what do I do? So the first part is just training people, how do you do assessment?
What is the frequency? What are the basics? And not only how to do assessment, but give them a project and I have found giving them a very small project where they can have a win really early on. And I’ll give an example of that before I go on, and I’ve used this example a lot, but when I was at Penn State, we had first year EcoReps in our residence hall. We brought first year students back there, brand new to the institution and they were supposed to be environmental stewards for all of on campus housing and it was supposed to be a first-year leadership program. We brought them in and they said, “Teach them how to do assessment.” And I’m like, “How do I do assessment with first year students before they even start the semester in an hour?” So I brought the classroom assessment techniques book, handed it to them and said, “Do a program and figure out how you’re going to assess it.”
Well, these first year students decided in the first week of the semester to do an ice cream social in the lounge for all first year students in that area of campus and they basically did a progressive ice cream social. They had ice cream and Sunday toppings and each station was a different part of environmental sustainability. You got your ice cream, you talked about composting, you got your Sunday toppings, you talked about taking the stairs instead of the elevator. This one was using refillable water bottle stations and you get all the way to the end and they decided that before you could get your spoon, they would have to write a note card that said, “What is one way I can apply this in my residence hall room tonight?” They had hundreds of students show up. They were so excited. They have all these note cards.
They come back to training. They’re like, “Okay, ma’am, we did this assessment.” I was like, “Great, so what did you learn?” And they just kind of looked at me like, “Well, we collected the assessment. What do you mean?” And I’m like, “No, now you got to do something with it.” And they’re like, “Well, what do we do?” I said, “Figure it out.” So they took the note cards, they decided to put them into piles and they looked up and they’re like, “Wow, people talked about using the stairs instead of the elevator. They talked about turning lights off. They talked about water stations. They didn’t talk about composting.” I’m like, “Great, you’ll learn something. So what are you going to do?” And so they decided for one week, the first week of the fall semester for every meal in the dining hall, they were going to volunteer, have a volunteer stand next to the compost to say to students, “Do you know you can compost that? Do you know you can compost that?”
And so they did that just in the first year building on campus. They had the environmental office come and weigh it before they started and then weigh it at the end of that week. And the tons of composting went up significantly, I mean hundreds of pounds more composting as a result of students did. Three months later, the amount of composting was still significantly higher in the first year communities than everywhere else on campus because of what they did for that one week. A year later when those first year students moved to other areas of campus, all of campus saw an increase in the pounds of composting every month in the other dining areas of campus because of one event. So what does that have to do with training people and starting a small project? That was one event with first year students who knew nothing about an assessment and yet it had a multi-year impact in the behavior and culture of the entire campus community.
And they saw that win because they saw that the number of pounds of composting got up and they were locked in. Everything after that was, “How are we going to assess it? What are we going to do? What have we learned?” But it took that little win. So when you’re building a culture of assessment, you got to do the activity, do the training, have them have a win so that they reinvest in it. Then the other piece of that is assessment can’t be one person’s responsibility, it’s everybody’s responsibility. And one of the ways you do that is at every meeting at every PD, “Here’s a little piece of data. Team, what does this mean? What does that mean for us? What are we learning about our students? What are we learning about our department? What do we need to do differently?” And so that has to be a piece.
And then the third level I think is leadership is setting the expectation, how do we know this to be true? How do we know this is what students are learning? Well, how satisfied are students with this experience? How do we know that? So they not only need to see me asking the questions, but then when I get that data, they need to see me say, “Well, based on the data, our data shows this and this is the new decision or the new direction we’re going and the new decision I’m making as the leader because of this data.” So if you have it at those three levels, I think the whole culture shifts. And so again, it becomes just a part of what we do other than this afterthought like, “Here, this assessment is…” at the end.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, I mean, I think it can also just be… I think there’s sometimes too, you have me thinking things that we do that are assessment that people wouldn’t label assessment, meaning let’s say I’m, again, a supervisor of student staff, student staff complete a weekly report, says, “Here’s what happened this week,” things like that. I could be very intentional in designing of that of what questions or where are you struggling, things like that. I think that is a form of assessment that when we have our one-on-one, we could dig into those topics and yet some people wouldn’t necessarily label that, “Oh, that’s assessment.” “No, that’s the weekly report, that’s reporting on what you did.” But there’s an opportunity there to use that tool. And again, it goes back to, okay, our staff do a weekly report. What happens with that information? Why are we collecting it?
Are we putting them through a hoop that they don’t need to go through if we’re not going to use it? If there’s already methods of keeping me up to date, do we have to do that? But there are certain things that you can build in that wouldn’t on its surface… I think the example you gave, we have a program, that makes it very clear. I would label that very assessment without, but there’s also feedback points I think that we sometimes miss that we’re like, this is kind of a form of assessment.

Amanda Knerr:
Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
Formative, summative, all the kinds of different ways that you can collect that and do with that.

Amanda Knerr:
Absolutely. And we talked a lot in student affairs about our gut and say, “Well, what is your gut telling you? How do you feel about this?” Those things are almost always guided by information you’ve collected. So it’s almost always guided by assessment, but is it formal assessment or is it informal assessment? And so a lot of times we just have to take that gut reaction, that informal feedback you’re getting and just formalize it a little bit to share it out. But yeah, absolutely weekly reports are a good one. One of the things we often do think of assessments just a survey and we survey our folks to death and oftentimes surveys aren’t even going to get you good info. So what are other ways to collect that information? And I love that you’re talking about weekly reports. I think that’s really critical. Some other things that I have found, social mapping.
So the sociograms that you do with your RAs, tell me who’s in your community, who’s connected to who, who likes what, what are people’s weaknesses? Who’s not belonging to the community? Those types of maps are a great form of assessment that are really useful in talking about sense of belonging and building community. I’ve been doing a lot around, so let’s look at your building. I just want you to sit in your building, hall director, and observe what you’re seeing. Where are students studying? Where are students connecting with each other? Where are people escaping when they’re overwhelmed? And then how do you activate those spaces differently? What spaces aren’t being utilized? How do you activate those spaces in a way to promote community?
That’s a form of assessment. So it’s those sorts of things I think that are also really important. Floor group meets, those text messages, what themes are coming out from there. Those are all pieces that help inform our practice.

Paul Brown:
Well, and I think even the one-on-one itself, that is assessment. I mean, I think sometimes when folks think of one-on-ones, you’d think, “Oh, this is a supervision duty. And so I’m going to check in. How are things doing? Do you need help with anything? How are your classes?” Things like that. Important, that’s also a form of assessment in terms of helping the staff member, but there’s other opportunities in that space to be, like you said, what’s going on in your community? You could just leave it generic like that, or you can kind of drill down. You were very specific of what spaces are people in? Things like that. Even the one-on-one, I think, presents itself as an assessment opportunity, even though one might not be like, “I don’t feel like I’m doing assessment. I’m just asking questions about…” But it is. I mean, it’s a data collection kind of tool that you’re improving it in real time kind of thing.

Amanda Knerr:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, thanks Amanda. I mean, we could talk about this forever-

Amanda Knerr:
I know.

Paul Brown:
… endlessly. I have one final question for you, I think. As someone who’s thought about assessment deeply, worked with other people on assessment projects and things like that, if you go back to younger Amanda, grad school Amanda and you reflect on what you thought about assessment then versus what you think about assessment now, what is one thing you think you didn’t understand, appreciate, or maybe get as much as a younger professional that now that you’re older, like, “I feel like I understand this now and it was not on my radar or I didn’t understand it differently or I thought about it differently.” What’s one thing that younger Amanda didn’t know that you’ve learned as a present day Amanda?

Amanda Knerr:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think as a young professional, I wanted the assessment to prove that I was doing a great job. I wanted it to prove that I knew exactly what was happening in the building and everything was right. I think I’ve found that the best assessments I’ve done are those where the results have surprised me. And so I think sometimes finding out that something isn’t going as we thought or, oh, wow, this is unusual, this is unique, this is different than the expected outcome has gone further to help me improve my practice and to develop my skill than always having an assessment that’s like, “Oh, yep, I already knew that. That’s exactly what I thought.” So kind of testing that, I think that has been a piece that’s really hard. Sometimes you get assessment results and they’re like, “Oh gosh, what do I do with this?”
And that’s exactly what we want. We wanted to bring something forward to us that we weren’t aware of so we can do something differently. So I think I’ve come to embrace those failures, if you will, and not always as expected or want it to always be exactly as I thought things were, if that makes sense.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, it does. That resonates with me. It’s a great takeaway. Well, thank you for joining us today. I also want to say to all the listeners, you’ll see more from Amanda. I mentioned she is a fellow for us, so you’ll be seeing some articles and writings as well as webinars which we do for Roompact schools, but also make publicly available after the fact so that everyone can benefit from it. So be on the lookout for those and thanks for joining us for the most recent episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat. Bye, everyone.