S1:E6 Andy Scahill on "Measuring What Matters: Empowering Students Through Creative Assessment"

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In this episode of Education by Design, we explore how innovative assessment can transform learning engagement and outcomes. Join me as I chat with my friend Dr. Andy Scahill, a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, as he shares his radical approach to assessment that moves beyond traditional tests and term papers. In an effort to disrupt behaviors cultivated by compliance, Andy empowers students to demonstrate their creativity, critical thinking, and real-world application of knowledge through immersive projects. The result? Students going further than expected and the agency to bring their own meaning and purpose to their final projects.

With the support of his institution, Andy’s approach challenges the rigid systems often found in higher education, affirming the innovative values of the University of Colorado. As he conducts community centered scholarship as the founder and Artistic Director of Rainbow Cult, we dive into how assessment can be a tool for growth, encouraging students to engage deeply and apply their learning in authentic ways.

This conversation is a must-listen for educators in both K-12 and higher education. Discover how shifting what we measure can inspire students to take ownership of their education, activate their agency, and prepare for the complexities of the modern world. This is what learning and teaching informed by assessment, looks like.

Tune in to rethink what we measure, how we measure it, and why it matters.

Catch Andy's play at the Denver Fringe Festival (2025), info here

Follow the EduByDesign Blog to explore the podcast topics, further.

And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.

Episode Transcript

Phil Evans (00:00):
Welcome to Education by Design, the podcast that
explores how schools are shapingthe future of education by
centering on values, embracingcommunity voices, and building
systems that work for everystudent.

(00:21):
I'm your host, Phil Evans.
In many educational settings,assessment often centers on

(00:46):
preparing students for tests,measuring what they know in a
way that doesn't always reflectthe full range of their skills
or creativity.
And how many of us have feltthis pressure?
For some of our students, wewish that they would take more
interest in school and thereforecare a little bit more about
their grades.
For other students, grades aresuch a focus that learning takes

(01:09):
a back burner.
And yet what we need toremember is that our objectives
inform behaviors.
What are your high schoolgrades worth to you now?
Yes, for some, they provided astepping stone, but for many
students, their outcomes did notmeasure up to the end of this
chapter in their lives, andthey've had to keep moving
forward without this currency.

(01:30):
I, for one, did not go directlyfrom high school to university.
I didn't know what I wanted todo or what I wanted to become,
but do you know what?
I do now.
And I've got to tell you thatmy high school grades had
absolutely nothing to do withit.
But what I learned absolutelydid.
So today I'm talking to AndyScahill, a professor at the

(01:56):
University of Colorado inDenver.
Andy's been a mate of mine formany years, but he's a creative
that inspires me both personallyand professionally.
When I visited Denver recently,we got talking about
assessment.
In his classroom, students nolonger write term papers.
Instead, they create immersiveprojects that require them to
synthesize complex ideas,collaborate and engage in

(02:19):
real-world applications of theirknowledge.
And his approach doesn't justmeasure what students know.
It measures their ability toapply that knowledge in
authentic, meaningful ways.
While this conversation centerson higher education, it's
equally relevant for K-12educators too.
Not only is Andy going to talkto us about assessment, but he's
going to talk to us about deeplearning.

Andy Scahill (02:40):
I teach film at the University of Colorado
Denver in the Englishdepartment.
My pedagogy has changed a lotover the last two years, and
it's been kind of runningparallel with...
my belief that i would gettenure you know because there's
there's a certain way in whichuntil that happens until i get

(03:02):
that that job security my onlyjob security in my field you
have to perform professor in avery traditional dictated sort
of way so when i first startedteaching i was bow tie, blazer
in class.
If you weren't here, two pointsoff.
If you were late, one pointoff.
I was checking your works citedpage in terms of formatting.

(03:28):
In the past, I'd have them do aterm paper at the end of the
class.
A term paper, 10 pages, fiveresearch sources that you must
have found on your own.
cited properly within the text.
And here's the thing.
The more I thought about this,I was like, when in my life has

(03:50):
someone asked me to write a10-page paper?
Never.
It's not a transferable skillunless you're going to academia.
But everyone has asked me tocreate a PowerPoint.
to talk about something.
So why aren't we teaching that?
And so now I have my studentsdo like a pitch deck for their
cult cinema class.

(04:11):
I want them to take a film thatthey love, that they think is a
cult movie, and argue why onone of those slides, and then
create an immersive experiencearound that film.
How would you encourageaudience participation through
the different modes of fandomthat we've discussed throughout
the class?
How do you encourage people toquote along with the film to

(04:31):
create a different type ofexperience.
And so that's what they'll besubmitting for their final
assignment.

Phil Evans (04:36):
So it's very project-based.

Andy Scahill (04:38):
Very project-based.
And I mean, I've even had astudent ask me, one of my
students is creating animmersive experience around the
movie Grease.
So, of course, she wants to doit in a high school auditorium.
And it was like, it should belike a pep rally.
And she's like, maybe I'll havelike an ear piecing station
over here for the good girls anda tattooing station over here
for the bad girls.
I'm like, I would go to that.

(04:59):
And she goes, hey, can I can Isend this to someplace, you
know, after I'm done with it?
Can I actually send it to abusiness or a venue?
And I was like, that's amazing.
Yeah, that's like the ideal,right?
That's exactly what this shouldbe.

Phil Evans (05:12):
Absolutely.
Andy, this is such a shift.
I love it.

Andy Scahill (05:16):
The start of my career.
Like I was teaching compositionprimarily in English
departments.
And now I teach more filmhistory, film theory.
My specialization is in genre,specifically representations of
children.
But the classes that I teach,one would be like a sort of like

(05:36):
intro to film.
How do we break down themedium?
How do we talk about how filmmanipulates us and how we can
derive meaning or how it'sembedded in the text?
And so I think I'm teachingvisual literature How do we
understand how to read film as atext?
And given that our students get99% of their information

(05:56):
through visual media these days,Do they have the skills to
analyze?
And then I also do a projectkind of on the side, which is to
create immersive cinema eventsaround cult movies that queer
people love and very muchinspired by Rocky Horror.
So how do we take somethinglike Bring It On or Death

(06:18):
Becomes Her and make it anexperience?
And so a lot of that informs myteaching as well.
I really want students to thinkabout the emotional experience
of How does identification work?
How do two people of differentbackgrounds go to the same movie
and literally see a differentfilm?
So those are more the questionsI ask rather than what did

(06:41):
Christopher Nolan intend when hedid XYZ?
I'm more interested in how didthe audiences respond?

Phil Evans (06:46):
Such an interesting kind of relationship to culture
and conditioning as well.
I think about the cinemathat's, you know, of late, The
Brutalist was an interestingfilm because it felt like, why
would you ever watch that athome?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.

Andy Scahill (07:24):
the algorithm says they will probably change the
channel.
Whereas you go to thebrutalist, if you're not having
a good time within the first 23minutes, you are not going to
pick up and leave, right?
Like generally speaking, youare there for the duration of a
cinematic experience.
And so, yeah, sometimes we sayTV is a medium of distraction,
whereas film is a medium of likedepth of like introspection

(07:49):
that you are focused on thatthing.
But even that's changing.
You know, and the new Megansequel is petitioning to have
content be put on your phoneduring the

Phil Evans (08:02):
film screening.
in sort of a more natural,consistent way.

(08:25):
They're sort of coming to anexamination room and sitting
down and doing that.
You know

Andy Scahill (08:30):
what they're really good at, those students?
They're very good at takingtests, but that's

Speaker 02 (08:35):
it.

Andy Scahill (08:35):
You become really good at faking it, but then that
doesn't serve you when you getoutside of school, unless your
job is simply to comply.
You know what I mean?
It makes you a good cog in awheel, but it doesn't make you
an innovator.

Phil Evans (08:53):
Well said, well said.
Andy, do you have any referencepoints from your own childhood?
Do you have memories of aclassroom or a teacher where you
got to do very project-based orvery application-based
learning?

Andy Scahill (09:07):
So when I was in fourth grade, I got moved into
an accelerated program, likeSCOPE is what we called it.
And there was a cohort of fourof us, myself and three girls.
And we went to the specialclass and kind of heard or
noticed through grapevine thatall four of us became

(09:28):
professors, which is reallyfascinating.
Yeah.
And so Shannon, this girl,suggested that why don't we...
Why don't we all get together?
Because I wanted to see whatthey remember about this
teacher's class with Mrs.
Dagy.
I remember that we went inevery time and we played chess
for an hour.
And then we did word games.

(09:50):
And then we did sort of liketheatrical simulations.
Like I remember us doing acivil war debate.
where we took different rolesof representatives from
different states.
We did a ceremony where werepresented a nation in this

(10:11):
sort of walk of nations.
I still have an obsessiveamount of knowledge about
Singapore, which was my countrythat I represented.

Phil Evans (10:17):
That's amazing.
In the last episode, I wastalking to John Spencer about
learning that sticks.
And man, talk about learningthat sticks.

Andy Scahill (10:24):
Yeah.
I remember building dioramas.
And for a kid like me, whowas...
I would spend months on theproject that if you did it, you
got a hundred and it was, youknow, a creative thing.
I would spend months on it andI wouldn't turn in my homework,
you know, like I, I hated the,the drudgery part of it.

(10:45):
Anything that felt like it wasjust busy work.
I just wouldn't do it, but Iwould spend months creating
these like elaborate.
I created an elaborate shoeboxdiorama of white Fang by Jack
London.
I still remember that.
Um, I have one, Weirdlyobsessive details that I
remember about the Khmer Rougein Cambodia, because I did a

(11:08):
project on that during a unit onthe Vietnam War.

Phil Evans (11:12):
Wow.

Andy Scahill (11:13):
all of us now we get together and it was very
like losers club from it

Phil Evans (11:18):
doesn't sound like it to me

Andy Scahill (11:19):
or stand by me you know what i mean it was like
really like what do you rememberabout our childhood because it
was different like we weredifferent right and we realize
now that we're allneurodivergent you know that's
why we were good at at thesethings um but to your point like
Teaching students to take atest, it creates a certain set

(11:44):
of life skills, of coping skillsthat don't last.
But teaching students toinnovate, I'm sure you've seen
that pyramid of cognition whereit's like rote memorization is
the bottom rung, and I thinkpsychologists say you remember
that stuff about three months,and then you go up to analysis.

Phil Evans (12:06):
And evaluation?
Yeah, evaluation.
Yeah, I think you're talkingabout the Bloom's taxonomy.
And I think the revised one isreally cool because it actually
puts creativity and creation atthe top of the taxonomy.
Like that's the most, you know,you know, the most advanced
application of learning that youcan actually do.

Andy Scahill (12:24):
And how long that lasts in your cognition versus a
regurgitation model.

Phil Evans (12:29):
And so it's just so much more engaging and sticky.

Andy Scahill (12:32):
Absolutely.

Phil Evans (12:33):
Absolutely.
I wanted to like ask you whothe students are, because
obviously you'd have somestudents that want to, you know,
that want to pursue film orthey're interested in the arts
aspect of it, but you must beattracting students that are
taking this course as maybe evena requirement or an elective.

Andy Scahill (12:48):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So I'll get a smattering offilm production students.
For our university, filmproduction happens over in a
different department, butlargely it is for English
students who typically they onlythought about using these
methods for literature.
And we're asking them to, okay,what happens if you apply apply

(13:09):
psychoanalytic theory to film?
What happens if you apply thoseclose reading techniques that
we use in literature andtransfer them over to film?
So instead of word choice,you're looking at symbology,
you're looking at tempo ofediting, you're looking at
soundtrack.
So it's really good to kind ofget them to see that it all

(13:31):
falls under the umbrella ofdifferent forms of literacy.
And a lot of the same schoolsapply.
I

Phil Evans (13:37):
also really love the appropriation of text because
of the way you're bringing allthese different influences into
the genre and into therepresentation.
I really also like the way thatyou've sort of articulated the
way that learning is connected,transdisciplinary, and just how
this kind of learning also helpsto paint a picture of what kind
of learner we are ourselves.

Andy Scahill (13:58):
Yeah, I mean, it became really clear to me early
on that...
I was not a math kid.
And I think one of the habits Ilearned was that I could write
something, I could half-asssomething that would be better
than most of the kids in class.
And so I kind of learned how tofake it.
And then when I got intocollege, I learned how to pad a

(14:19):
paper, to take two pages worthof ideas and expand it into
eight pages.
And those are, I think, thecoping strategies I leaned on.
When I got to grad school, thatdoesn't work anymore.
So that was a reckoning for me,quite honestly.
And I remember one of the mostdifficult assignments I had, and

(14:41):
I've reproduced this in my ownclasses, is I was taking a grad
class and we read Heart ofDarkness, and it was a theory
course.
And so every week weencountered a different body of
theory, Marxism, feministtheory, post-structuralism,
post-modernism, what have you.
And we had to write a paperabout Heart of Darkness through

(15:04):
that critical frame.
The challenging part, though,is that he limited how many
words we could use.
And I think that's fascinating.
I think when you get to thatlevel of graduate school, if
they say, write 5,000 words onthis, you know how to do it.
You can pad that out.
If you say, do this complexidea in less than 250 words,

(15:27):
that was hard.
And my first time, I handed in,I think, 500 words, and he was
like, no.
half of this.
And so that's still anassignment I do today, where I
say, respond to the filminception through this framework
that we just discussed.
And so I said, I want you tothink about this film as a
metaphor for Hollywood, and thatthe different characters in

(15:48):
this film are the different sortof roles and productions, like
the director, the scene setter,the audience, the screenwriter.
And then I want you to tell mehow that metaphor works in only
250 words.
And it's a

Phil Evans (16:07):
different

Andy Scahill (16:10):
skill.
They start to use real wordslike it challenges, it

(16:37):
reinforces.
Right.
And so part of like forcingtheir hand and conciseness is
forces them to use those moredirect language.

Phil Evans (16:46):
And it also strikes me that this short, concise
writing activity not only hasmeaning for the writing skills
development.
but it also opens opportunityfor you to be able to have real
rich conversations about matter,right?
About meaning.
And so what kind of feedback doyou provide students?

Andy Scahill (17:08):
The feedback that I can give one-on-one is so
different than the handwrittencomments that I like.
But usually I will ask them, Imean, the big term that I go for
is like the so what question,you know, like why are you
pointing this out?
Let's move from observation.
Okay, great, you foundsomething, right?

Phil Evans (17:27):
Why does it matter?

Andy Scahill (17:28):
Why does it matter, right?
Okay, great, you found a lot ofred in this movie.
Like the why now question, Ithink is really important to ask
in film.
And I'm trained as a historian,so I'm always asking that.
Like, A, is it a trend, right?
Is this a representative ofsomething larger in the 1960s or
is it an anomaly?
And that's cool.
We can talk about anomalies asresponse to dominant discourse.

(17:51):
But if it's a trend, if you seeother films other directors.
Also, what was it we weretalking about yesterday?
Oh, like the heist genre is soobsessed with stardom, right?
Whereas some genres, it doesn'tmatter if there's a stardom,
like a horror genre.
It doesn't matter.
But the heist genre is sodependent on stardom and glamour

(18:11):
and that sort of thing.
And so why?
What do we get out of that?
What does it do for theaudience?
Why is it this genre aboutfighting back against the
corporate man has to have actorswho we consider I'm

Phil Evans (18:25):
thinking of George Clooney and Brad

Andy Scahill (18:33):
Pitt and the oceans kind of thing.
translate to anything elseother than adulation within the

(18:57):
arts?
Can it translate into realsocial change?

Phil Evans (19:07):
Andy, you do such a good job of articulating the
connection or the relationshipbetween what you're teaching and
the relevance of it all.
And more so the students thatyou're working with.

Andy Scahill (19:19):
These days, I'm teaching towards the student
that I was and the student whofelt kind of underserved by
education.
And I really think about like,what projects would I have liked
to have done when I was astudent or what would have been
useful for me?
So transferable skills is a bigone for me, that whatever
they're doing, it should, Ihope, mirror the real world as

(19:41):
much as possible.
So one assignment I do is afilm pitch assignment where,
say, I'm teaching a course onFrankenstein in cinema, which is
a class I teach a lot, orWizard of Oz narratives in
cinema, or Hitchcock.
I have them pitch, let's say, aHitchcockian thriller at the

(20:02):
end of my Hitchcock as a tourclass.
By doing that, they'redemonstrating that they know
what Hitchcockian is, right?
That they've been payingattention.
They know what are the types ofstories he tells?
What are the camera angles hetends to use?
How does he tend to market hisfilms?
What Ultimately, how are yourposition as an audience?
So by the end, by doing theassignment, they show me they

(20:25):
know what Hitchcock's stylenarrative and whatever by
pitching one in his style, andthen I assign them a studio.
And so then they have to pitchit to a specific audience,
right?
It's like rhetorical trianglekind of stuff.
And so they have to researchthat studio.
Well, what is A24?
What types of films do theytend to make?
What have been their hits?

(20:45):
And so in the pitch assignment,here's the concept.
Here's potential casting that Imight do or director that I
would choose.
And here's why it's a fit forthe studio's brand.
Here are my marketingmaterials.
Here are my financials.
Here's my audience demographicthat I'm going after, right?
And so they put that togetherin, I think, like a 10-slide

(21:07):
pitch aimed at that studio.
And then myself and twocolleagues of mine, we are the
studio heads, and we askquestions of them.

Phil Evans (21:16):
So it's interactive.
It's not just about thedelivery and the production of a
product.
It's that once you bring thatproduct into the world, And that
space of what it would reallybe like to pitch it.
Wow.

Andy Scahill (21:27):
And I love the challenge of them.
You know, if I see a filmthat's really traditional
casting, I was like, why aren'tthere any people of color in
this film?
What if there are an earlyreview of this film that says
that it's a politicallyregressive revenge fantasy?
How would you respond to that?

Phil Evans (21:45):
Wow.
The college setting is not whatit was like when we were there
anymore.
Like there are, you know,progressive experiences where
students are collaborating andbuilding prototypes and creating
something.
Because as you were talking, Iwas also thinking about you
raised the Bloom's taxonomy,right?
Like, I mean, all of theknowledge and synthesis and

(22:06):
analysis and evaluation stuff isthere, but you're actually
functioning at the very top ofthat taxonomy in the creative
space.

Andy Scahill (22:14):
Yeah, and the projects that I've gotten, you
know, if I have a student inclass who is like me, you know,
when I was a kid, I've hadstudents create full trailers
for these films, you know, andthey've been incredible.
Yeah.
Social media accounts I've hadstudents create, having students
bring in like bound dossiers,you know, they really, they

(22:36):
dress up, they get into it, theycome dressed as the characters.

Phil Evans (22:40):
So that's an aspect of the assessment that's not
sort of unspoken.
It's like, here's the task,you're coming to a pitch event.
If you have the skills to puttogether a trailer and to shoot
it and to create this sort oftheatrical trailer using the
technologies that you have, doit.
If you're going to bringtogether a portfolio, a dossier,
do it.
I love that.

Andy Scahill (23:00):
And there is the kind of immediate application of
the act of researching a studioand understanding what their
brand is.
That is something you'll haveto do in the job market.
But humanities classes areunique.
I mean, one of the things thatI say in my classes is that the
process is the product.
And so if the skill we want youto leave with is...

(23:23):
how to deconstruct somethingand how to look at its parts and
make an argument, then engagingin discussion in class is like
prima facia.
And so as my pedagogy isinvolved, I've more and more
really understood the value ofjust creating an environment

(23:45):
where students feel safe toexpress half-baked ideas or
ideas they're not sure are good.
You know what the greater skillis, is taking a complex idea
and distilling it down tosomething understandable.
I think it's harder to takesomething complex and like,
let's, how does this apply toTwilight?
And that was always me, likewhen I was in English literature

(24:09):
classes, maybe one of myproblems with the way that that
lit crit is taught is I wasalways the guy in the back of
the class going, okay, can youplay this to real life?
You know what I mean?
Like, it's all great to talkabout the architectonics of
knowing, but what does thatmean?
Like, apply it to somethingreal.
So with my events that I'mdoing with Rainbow Cult, that is
me trying to take complextheory about queer spectatorship

(24:32):
and our relationship to cinemaand thinking about different
modes of participation ratherthan passive consumption of
media.
And let me try and turn thatinto praxis into what does an
event of that look like?
Or to take...
an academic critique of thesuperhero genre.

(24:57):
And I could write a paper aboutthat.
Or I wrote a play that got intoDenver Fringe Festival that is
a deconstruction of Batman andthe American Vigilante fantasy.
That's more the stuff I want todo.
To do the same critical work,but to do it in a creative form.
That I don't have tonecessarily jump through the

(25:19):
hoop of the academic book like Ihad felt before.

Phil Evans (25:22):
And your university is supportive of that.

Andy Scahill (25:25):
They are.
They are.
And a lot of universities talkabout the value of public
scholarship.
And I'm happy to say myuniversities actually put their
money where their mouth is onthat.

Phil Evans (25:33):
Andy, what would you say would be your sort of
underpinning philosophy ofapproaching assessment, learning
and teaching in this kind ofintegrated way?

Andy Scahill (25:41):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so like working with thebuilding blocks makes you able

(26:09):
to understand how to take theblocks apart.
I mean, for me, if half oftheir grade is being here, being
present, talking in class,engaging, so I am waiting their
attendance and theirprecipitation pretty high,
actually, which I think morehumanities courses should do,
quite honestly, to really thinkabout the in-class time as the

(26:31):
end product.
And then I have them do weeklyresponse papers to the text in
which they have to incorporatethat week's reading in their
response.
And again, do a lot of work ina short amount of space.
And then their midterm andtheir finals are more kind of
creative projects.
But I still have a rubric.
I still am grading concept,their ability to apply theory.

(26:54):
I am grading the labor thatgoes into, not like how snappy
the graphics are, but how muchwork does it look like you put
into this, right?
And so that is kind of like theassessment of it, I would say.
And the same sort ofunconscious rubric that would
probably happen in the realworld as they're presenting.

(27:14):
You know, if I see apresentation with typos in it, I
said, you did this last minute,right?
Or you didn't take the time,you didn't take the labor to
really invest in this project.
I think to encourage people tostill be imaginative and to...
apply frameworks rather thanthink about the multiplicity of

(27:37):
meanings rather than capital Mmeaning.
Just like teach to the studentthat you were, you know what I
mean?
Like what would you have neededor wanted at that stage in your
life?
What would have actually beeninspiring to you?

Phil Evans (27:50):
You've been listening to the Education by
Design podcast.
I've been your host Phil Evans.
If you like this episode,please hit subscribe or follow
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And until next time, staycurious.