The cultivation of star performers is a vision that motivates many who choose a life in education. Star performers add excitement in the classroom, and often spark additional learning, growth, and development opportunities in surprising and fascinating ways. Educators draw great satisfaction when their students continue on to become star performers in life. This is the educator’s legacy and dream.

Pacific Crest understands that star performers are created, not born, and therefore all students and faculty have the potential to become star performers. For the past twenty years we have provided resources and training to educators who are passionate about turning this ideal into a reality. This is not trivial work; if it were, star performers would be the rule rather than the exception. But along this journey there are mile markers showing that this vision is coming ever closer within our reach.

• Growth of the whole person requires skills and tools that are different from those needed simply to master knowledge, as happens in traditional learning. Learners must develop in these distinctly different areas as both life-long learners and reflective practitioners.

• Assessment, which is done to foster growth and improvement, is very different from evaluation, which measures performance against a pre-determined standard. These two processes are not interchangeable. Each must be used for the appropriate reasons and in appropriate circumstances to achieve the desired results.

• Learning skills are essential for promoting the growth of human potential. These skills are identifiable: Pacific Crest presents an inventory in The Classification of Learning Skills, a system that delineates the specific learning skills that are associated with the cognitive, affective, social, and psychomotor domains. Growth in skills leads directly to improved performance—and improved performance is indicative of the growth of skills.

• Learning skills should serve as the basis for the design of curricula (at the program, course, and activity level). This approach, which is the basis for our faculty development program, as well as our student curricula publications, can be summarized as:

Step 1   Identify the skills to be developed

Step 2   Implement learning activities which foster growth in these skill areas

Step 3   Track progress through the use of performance measures

The pedagogy for developing star performers resembles that of developing the skills of an athlete under the guidance of a coach. The path to growth and improvement of quality begins when a person is inspired—either by a critical situation, a role model or mentor, or from within—to take advantage of an opportunity for growth. The next step requires that the learner authentically participate in the learning experience; this means that the experience must be complex, resembling a situation that the learner may encounter in the real world, and require that the learner respond to the challenge by setting goals and making plans to produce significant results. In addition to a plan of action, the learner, together with the coach, must develop an assessment plan in which clear milestones and descriptive feedback will be used to help the learner to progress. The learning and growth processes entail repeated cycles of goal setting, participation, and feedback through which the learner becomes progressively more skilled, more strongly invested, and more engaged in monitoring and facilitating his or her own growth. This process involves hard work and struggle, but the path to improvement and growth mirrors the path of learning: it is engaging, rewarding, and beneficial to both the learner and the coach/mentor.

It is relatively easy to measure students’ grasp of content knowledge, but it can be more difficult to track or demonstrate growth in skills. Pacific Crest is engaged in a ground-breaking project to develop web-based technology that will help educators implement Process Education and its central aim of producing self-growers (star performers) more easily. The Star Performance System™ (SPS) provides user-friendly tools to help educators set learning goals, define desired results or learning outcomes (including methods for measuring and assessing progress), and collect and record students’ writing, journaling, and reporting. Among the tools is an extensive inventory of quality performance criteria with accompanying measures that can be used for assessment (growing performance) or evaluation (rating performance).

Performance measurement is the process of building quantitative scales that characterize a range of performance quality (lowest to highest level expected). These scales allow students and educators alike to work with clear and mutually-understood performance criteria, objective methods of observation for assessment and evaluation, and the use of factual evidence rather than subjective or emotional judgments. Finding or creating objective and quantifiable performance measures, which allow educators to track student and faculty performance, is one of the biggest challenges in teaching within a PE environment. For this very reason, an integrated performance measurement system is at the core of SPS.

This system will allow faculty, coaches, and mentors to provide measurement and assessment feedback more quickly, so that students can use the feedback without having to disengage from the learning process. Students and coaches can easily see the pre-determined performance criteria for the skills they are working to improve. As students produce work products (which could include anything from a research paper, an oral presentation, participation in a contextualized course activity, or more), coaches can track their progress by drawing on the bank of pre-defined performance areas and associated skills. SPS also offers rubrics to define milestones or quality levels of performance which coaches can then use to help as they assess student performance more effectively. And it’s so much easier to nudge individual students to progress to the next level of performance quality when everyone has a clear picture of what performance at that next level actually looks like.

Though SPS provides a means of making performance measurement more objective, it DOES NOT limit the ability or remove the necessity for the educator 1) to be engaged as an active facilitator of learning, 2) to use his or her own judgment based upon experience and expertise, and 3) to use and modify the system as needed for successful individual application. It DOES, however, streamline the process for giving quality feedback that promotes growth.

This system is flexible enough to be used in nearly any context in which growth can be measured and promoted by improvement of performance. Thus, it can be used by students and educators in the classrooms, by individuals, by teams, by departments, and even in the business world. The Star Performance System™ is currently in the early stages of product development. A working example of this system will be made public in the fall of 2008. The commercial release of SPS is planned for the summer of 2011.