The Red Thread of Constructive Alignment

For the CLO and Assessment Review project, the concept of Constructive Alignment was the one “definition” that had precious workshop time dedicated to. The concept developed by John Biggs (1996) emphasises creating coherence between three key elements of teaching and learning:

1. Learning outcomes - what students should be able to do by the end of a course
2. Teaching and learning activities - how students will learn and practice those skills
3. Assessment tasks - how students will demonstrate they've achieved the outcomes

The core idea is that these three components should be "aligned" - they need to work together consistently. The term "constructive" reflects the constructivist view that learners actively construct their own understanding through what they do, rather than passively receiving information.

The objective of the training was to communicate the active role CLOs have in framing learning activities and assessments. Therefore, making it worthy of investing time creating well structured and coherent statements.

The practical challenge of “Constructive Alignment” was to demystify the process – it’s actually simple. To achieve this, I used the metaphor of keywords being the “Red thread” that ties together all the different standards and objectives different stakeholders have for the learning.

You can see this in two Project resources:

An applied version of Biggs (2022, p317) Constructive Alignment diagram brings together both a theoretical outline and a practical example:

And the video – based on the face-to-face workshop.

In this way, the rationale for CLOs became both clearer and simpler for academics to action.