Piloting for Your Present and Future Wins by Including Assessment

Dr. Marlon Johnson, Seminary of the Southwest Assistant Professor of Counselor Education, has hope, vision, insight, and expertise around healing racial trauma in community-based settings. When it came time to pilot his Racial Healing Initiative (funded by the Moody Foundation), he sought Learning Forte as a thought and design partner.

The work of Johnson’s Racial Healing Initiative is vitally important. It is also potentially huge in scope with possible applications across the US and beyond. In our work together, it became clear that our task was to design a tightly focused pilot for a local group in the near term that would simultaneously be of significant value to present participants and yield significant data for use in future iterations across diverse contexts. We needed the pilot to generate information to help us carve a path through an otherwise overwhelming sea of possibilities in the mid and long term.

Using our Aligned Design process, we clarified and distinguished the objectives for the pilot and the objectives for the broader initiative. With these two related sets of objectives firmly in view, we could build strategic and illuminating assessments into the pilot design. These assessments illuminated our wins, of course, but they also revealed our growth edges: places where the design stood to be revised or refined.

At Learning Forte we find that if one can be appropriately attentive and responsive to the information assessments yield, in a sense, it’s all a win.

It was an honor working with Johnson on this pilot, including analysis of the assessments and plans for iteration. We celebrate the future of his project!

Looking for a thought partner? Schedule a call to learn more about Learning Forte’s collaborative consulting. Our team can help you develop courses and programs, improve and implement new systems, train your faculty in technology and research-based processes, create a plan to tell your story through digital media and platforms, and more.

written by Carly Lane
May 2024