The Case of Assessment Center: How the purpose, logic and experience of an embedded performance assessment of school leaders is built around an epistemology of practice

For this paper we studied one such assessment, developed by the Principal Leadership Institute at UC Berkeley, called Assessment Center. We see it as a valuable case because it illuminates how an assessment constructed from an epistemology of practice, rather than an epistemology of possession (Cook and Brown, 1999), can work in the service of candidate and program learning, as well as for the development of the profession. We make this distinction based on the organizational theory of Cook and Brown, who argued that the learning of individuals within organizations and the learning of organizations themselves should be conceptualized as a “generative dance” between tacit, explicit, group and individual knowledge. We identify that PLI has an assessment developed from an epistemology of practice for three reasons: 1) its focus on approximations to practice simulations, which require candidates to engage in enactment of leadership, drawing on tacit and explicit knowledge, 2) the emphasis that the Assessment Center places on group knowledge and assessment, which reflects a recognition of professional knowledge as embedded in the organizational relationships of the school and educational context; and 3) because of the orientation to ongoing program and professional learning that the assessment embodies. Unlike many performance assessments, PLI Assessment Center does not rely on artifacts of practice, but, rather, creates opportunities for candidates to simulate deliberate aspects of practice to demonstrate individual and group knowledge.