Tom Angelo

Over the past twenty-five years, Tom Angelo has served – often concurrently – as a faculty member, faculty developer, academic administrator and/or researcher at several institutions, including:  Harvard University, the University of California-Berkeley, California State University-Long Beach, Boston College, the University of Miami, the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), and La Trobe University (Australia). 

He has directed six university teaching and learning centers, four of which he also designed and founded. Throughout, he has continued to teach undergraduate courses – in political science, freshman composition, teacher education, and introductory statistic – as well as postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, assessment and evaluation, and higher education. 

Tom is currently Assistant Provost, Founding Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence, and Professor of Higher Education at Queens University of Charlotte (NC).  From 2008 to 2012, he held the posts of Pro Vice-Chancellor (Curriculum and Academic Planning), Founding Director of the Curriculum, Teaching & Learning Centre, and Professor of Higher Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.  From 2009 through 2011, he also designed and directed La Trobe’s Design for Learning Project, an ambitious revision and redesign of the university’s entire undergraduate curriculum.

Tom has consulted on teaching, assessment, and learning improvement in 17 countries, in all 50 of the United States, for more than 60 higher education associations/systems, and more than 250 postsecondary institutions. He has also served as invited keynote/featured speaker at more than 75 higher education conferences internationally. Among his recent invited keynotes were the 2012 Lilly Conference on College Teaching, 2012 Indianapolis Assessment Institute, 2011 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, and 2010 AACSB International Assessment Conference.

Internationally, Tom has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Program (Italy), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Australia), and the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia.

His current research interests focus on formative assessment, curriculum renewal and redesign, and research-led teaching.  His best-known publication is Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd Edition (with K. Patricia Cross, 1993), with more than 100,000 copies in print. A substantially revised 3rd edition will be published later this year. Other publications include Classroom Research: Early Lessons from Success, Classroom Assessment and Classroom Research: An Update on Uses, Approaches, and Research Findings, and more than thirty-five articles and chapters.

Tom Angelo earned his BA with Honors in government from California State University at Sacramento; a Master of Arts in political science and a Master of Education in applied linguistics – both from Boston University – and his doctorate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Peggy L. Maki

Peggy L. Maki is a higher education consultant who specializes in assisting undergraduate and graduate colleges and universities, higher education boards, higher education organizations, and disciplinary organizations integrate assessment of student learning into educational practices, processes and structures. Her work also focuses on assessment within the context of accreditors' expectations for institutional effectiveness. She serves as Assessment Field Editor at Stylus Publishing, LLC; serves on several editorial advisory boards for assessment publications; and recently served on the national advisory board for AAC&U’s VALUE PROJECT: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education. She has served as assessment consultant and workshop leader (1) for the Carnegie Foundation’s Integrated Learning Project; (2) for a Teagle grant awarded to consortia of colleges and universities across the United States; and (3) for a Mellon grant awarded to Appalachian colleges and universities focused on assessing students' learning in mathematics, the sciences, and writing. She annually serves as one of AAC&U’s assessment consultants/workshop leaders in its summer institutes.

For three years she served as sole consultant to the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education and its public higher education institutions under a multi-year assessment project. From May, 2011-May, 2013 she was appointed by the Commissioner of Higher Education in Massachusetts to serve as the State’s assessment consultant under a Davis Educational Foundation grant.  Her work focused on assisting Massachusetts’ 28 public institutions build their assessment capacity to score students’ authentic work, report achievement levels, and describe plans to improve or advance student learning. She has delivered national webinars on assessment at the request of Inside Higher Education, Educause, and Project Kaleidoscope.

Formerly, Senior Scholar and Director of Assessment at the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), she has served as Associate Director of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc., New England’s regional accrediting body; Vice President, Academic Dean, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of English, Bradford College, MA; Chair of English, Theatre Arts, and Communication, Associate Professor of English, and Dean of Continuing Education, Arcadia University, PA. She is a recipient of a national teaching award, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, has given several honorary lectureships at colleges and universities for her work in assessment, and is a frequent keynote speaker at national and international assessment conferences. 

She has conducted over 530 workshops and keynote addresses on assessment both in the U.S. and abroad and frequently publishes articles on assessment. Her handbook on assessment, Assessing for Learning: Building a Sustainable Commitment across the Institution, was published in 2004, by Stylus Publishing, LLC.  In late 2007 Stylus published her co-edited book, The Assessment of Doctoral Education. In late 2010, her second edition of Assessing for Learning, now a bestseller in higher education, was published by Stylus Publishing, as well as her edited collection of faculty perspectives on and experiences with assessment, Coming to Terms with Assessment.

Steven D. Hales

Steven D. Hales [PhD – Brown University] is a professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He works primarily in metaphysics and epistemology, and also in popular philosophy. He was recently Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is a past winner of Bloomsburg University's Outstanding Teaching Award, and is a noted skeptic of outcomes assessment. He is a prolific scholar who has produced numerous texts and articles primarily in the areas of epistemology and metaphysics

Todd Zakrajsek

Todd Zakrajsek is the Executive Director of the Academy of Educators in the School of Medicine and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Todd is the immediate past Executive Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Prior to his work at UNC, he was the Inaugural Director of the Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching at Central Michigan University and the founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Southern Oregon University, where he also taught in the psychology department as a tenured associate professor. Todd currently directs two Lilly Conferences on College and University Teaching and Learning, one annually in Traverse City, Michigan, and the other in Bethesda, Maryland. Todd also sits on two educationally related boards: ERI for Lenovo Computer and TEI for Microsoft. Dr. Zakrajsek received his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Ohio University. He has published and presented widely on the topic of student learning, including workshops and conference keynote addresses in 42 states and 6 countries.