 I've been in Washington State for almost 18 years now, serving the community and technical colleges as the coordinator for outcomes assessment efforts across the system, and in that capacity I'm used to being something of a lightning rod for faculty who resent what they see as the intrusion of assessment into their normal routines. As one example, some time ago a community college faculty member complained to me that assessment projects are simply getting in the way of good teaching. It's been far too much time and energy in trying to assess learning. An unattainable goal. I love teaching, however. It is a great pleasure to share my enthusiasm for my discipline, and I absolutely love the chance to pick the minds of my bright students. Well, this complaint is typical of comments I've heard over the years, and in many ways the perspective is perfectly understandable. For many people, higher education assessment work is inevitably associated with a dominant and often misguided strategy in this country involving a large dose of high-stakes tests and external accountability processes based on those tests. There is a different way, however, and it's one grounded in the core elements of effective instructional practice. Pat Cross says once called assessment, the zipper between teaching and learning, and it's a very apt metaphor for its role, but in my mind it's even more tightly woven into the process than that. Good assessment is simply part of the learning process, not just a means of documenting or judging that learning. Assessment can't really be separated from instruction. Good assessment tasks are interchangeable with good instructional tasks. Good teachers are continually gathering evidence and providing feedback about how well students are performing, but they often don't consider this work to be assessment. It's just good teaching. I believe that the most powerful learning involves changing our students' understandings of core concepts and ways of interpreting the world around them, and I think that a key part of promoting that kind of learning involves focusing attention on what those students' understandings and working models are, both prior to and during learning. I would argue that the best way to do this is by focusing on assessment as learning, by examining and refining the kinds of classroom assessments that can and frequently do happen every day. Clearly, it's one thing to argue that an emphasis on classroom assessment is important, and another thing entirely to actually do something about it. The culture of American education, and particularly of higher education, makes it extremely difficult to even begin to truly understand, much less improve, what happens behind the classroom door. On the other hand, I think it is possible with sufficient resources and some logistical support. A significant number of teachers are quite willing to share their work and learn from each other. This collective aspect of assessment involves teachers using actual assignments and student work to provide a powerful springboard for conversations about what works and what doesn't, grounded in specific and real classroom context. While I would suggest that if so-called assessment project is truly getting in the way of good teaching, then indeed it's not worth doing. But as I've tried to suggest here briefly, something like that wouldn't really qualify as assessment in my book. Assessment as learning is nothing more than the act of observing, attempting to understand, and provide feedback on the ways in which students are grasping, integrating, and applying the material and concepts they are confronting in your classes. And I have yet to see a good teacher who doesn't do this sort of assessment in some fashion, regardless of what she may choose to call it. If assessment of learning is really an unattainable goal, then why bother giving students any sort of assignments or tests in one's classes at all? Certainly it's true that drawing clear causal inferences in the complex circumstances of college classrooms is extremely difficult. I don't believe that the inability to draw such inferences means that assessment is impossible, or that we shouldn't try to understand more deeply what learning is taking place and how it occurs. The work is simply far messier and requires more complex approaches than most people want to acknowledge, especially those who are so concerned with easy quantifiable answers that they are willing to reduce assessment to simple grids and checklist, often wind up being nothing more than busy work. Finally to this critic I would say, if you love teaching as you say you do, the question is, does sharing your enthusiasm for your discipline represent all that matters about teaching? Or by saying you love teaching, are you really also saying that you love learning as well, that you love your discipline, you want your students to at least understand it if not love it the way you do? I expect it's the latter. I really believe that most good faculty, especially after teaching for a while, would say that of course learning matters. If so, then assessment is learning is not something to be despised or ignored as irrelevant or impossible, but embraced as an essential aspect of learning in the best way to truly understand and improve that learning.