Currently reading “A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment” by Newby & Cornelisen (2025)
The title “A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment” by Newby & Cornelisen (2025) sounded provocative enough that it went directly to the top of my reading list! And I am really not sure what to make of it yet. Help me understand!
We teach about constructive alignment in all our courses. Figure out what you want students to be able to do at the end of the course (i.e. your intended learning outcomes), figure out how you will know that they can do it (your assessment), and then figure out what students need to do in class in order to learn it (your activities). If all of this is consistent, even students just “learning for the test” learn what we want them to learn, because the learning outcomes and the test match each other. We use it as a “simple toolkit”, and Newby & Cornelissen (2025) challenge this view by discussing the theoretical underpinnings and assumptions that we carry with it whenever we implement it.
While I see the problem with prescribing all learning outcomes and with that all assessment and all activities, I see ways to reconcile that with constructive alignment, for example by negotiating learning outcomes with students. And I see definite benefits with making it clear what we want students to learn and how we will (attempt to) measure whether they did indeed learn it; whether the learning outcomes are co-created or prescribed by the teacher, surely transparency is good? But the authors argue that constructive alignment “cannot and should not be reclaimed because its foundations were flawed to begin with”. You have my attention!
With the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy, Biggs provides a hierarchy of learning outcomes from very simple to very complex that distinguishes levels of understanding, and where the highest levels can only be reached when students use a deep approach to learning. Biggs explains that which approach to learning, surface or deep, students use, depends on the interaction between personal factors (like preferences) and contextual factors (like the curriculum or teaching activities). So if students perform poorly, that is either due to a student who “simply lacked the requisite intelligence, motivation, or background knowledge to perform better, or with the teaching context, which was not sufficiently aligned or otherwise badly structured.” So all other factors that we know do influence student performance, like structural inequalities or uneven access to resources or having to work to make a living in parallel to studying, are ignored. Biggs also sees disabilities and neurodiversity as an individual deficit, rather than as a function of unjust social processes and forms of exclusion where society creates the disability for some people.
Also the role of the teacher is questionable: They are an expert that “define what is acceptable for each stage of the degree programme, given a student’s specialization and degree pattern”, not a conversation partner. (Although Biggs apparently advocated for negotiating learning activities with students, but not learning outcomes or assessment) And then there is the legendary quote saying that in constructive alignment, “[a]ll components in the system address the same agenda and support each other. The students are “entrapped” in this web of consistency, optimising the likelihood that they will engage the appropriate learning activities”. Clearly entrapping students is a horrible image to use! And if we have such a conception of a teacher, rather than a gardener or a guide or a facilitator or something less aggressive, it is difficult to reconcile that with imagining teaching as a practice of empowerment, liberation, hope, or justice.
And then with Bologna, constructive alignment started to be implemented all across Europe, both as a way to plan teaching, but also as policy for quality control. I remember my own, pre-Bologna studies quite vividly, where I had all the freedom in the world, and then working at TUHH, when the system changed from a 5 year degree to 3+2 years, when teachers had to formulate measurable intended learning outcomes. I like the idea of enabling mobility behind Bologna (but then again, I did parts of my studies in Southampton without any problems before we had the 3+2 model), and as the authors write, at some point, constructive alignment was “no longer primarily a theoretical model concerned with student performance, CA became entangled in political agendas concerning international standardisation, employability rates, and regional mobility”.
And with that, it also became a compulsory part of teacher development in many European countries. And I guess, these days I am part of the constructive alignment industry (CAI): “Consisting of a legions of experts, consultants, auditors, and teacher trainers that are found at every level of the university sector, the CAI exists to stimulate (or, if necessary, enforce) constructively aligned teaching at both an institutional and individual level.” The authors are very critical of that: “While it tends to masquerade as staff development, in truth the CAI deploys a form of institutional discipline that not only erects sharp limits to the pedagogies they are able to use but also targets lecturers as a workforce. Today, in countries like Britain and Sweden, the CAI is embedded is some form or another in lecturer certification programmes, hiring processes, promotion decisions, and staff development. […] These modalities of discipline are, of course, unevenly distributed. They move along axes of class, race, and gender, as discipline always does, but they are also heavily inflected by the logics of patronage, seniority, elite deference, and cliqueism that are uniquely prevalent in academic spaces. This means that as a tool of managerial reason, the CAI is much more likely to reproduce and exacerbate than challenge existing inequalities.”
If constructive alignment is deeply embedded in policy and quality control, that makes it very difficult to involve students in choosing their own learning goals or putting “Bildung” above pure skill development. “For these traditions, the intersubjective distance between teachers and students is precisely what makes knowledge exchange possible. They see disagreement, messiness, indeterminacy, and uncertainty not as snags to be ironed out of the curriculum but defining features of any functioning classroom: flashes of the unexpected and spontaneous, the lifeblood of university learning.”
And what is really problematic, which I hadn’t really considered before, is that constructive alignment “presents itself as best practice, a scientifically grounded theory of learning”, in contrast to which all other theories then become invalid. “This means that practitioners of radical pedagogies find themselves having to teach through subterfuge, tinkering in the margins of their curriculum to afford their students some measure of control over their learning. This subjects those teachers to friction and places them at increased risk of reproval, discipline, or worse.” This is actively working against decolonialisation and disability-positive pedagogies.
The authors write that “in our view, everyone with a stake in HE should learn more about the ideas behind CA. Lecturers and students alike have the right to know the composition of the pedagogical framework that has effectively become mandatory in our institutions. This should be the subject of debate, rethinking, collective action. In our view, so long as tertiary teaching and learning remains yoked to an epistemology rooted in hereditarianism any gestures in the direction of decolonisation and disability positive reform will remain little more than lip service. For these ambitions to have any meaning at all, CA will need to go.”
And here ends my summary of the article. And I find it really difficult to figure out what I think about it. In my own practice, I think about constructive alignment at the same time that I am open to negotiating and co-creating learning outcomes, assessment, activities, time tables, resources, etc.. In my co-creation project at the University of Bergen, we have been surprised that there is a lot more flexibility in the rules than we had assumed — for example, it is ok to prescribe 80% of the assessment and leave 20% open, as long at it is clear when it will be decided — for example decide together with students within the first 2 weeks. Or the weighting of different parts of the assessment can be negotiated. In my own practice, I see constructive alignment as a tool, but not as a fixed framework that I have to 100% adhere to. So on the one hand, I don’t really see the problem. At the same time, the authors’ call that constructive alignment “cannot and should not be reclaimed because its foundations were flawed to begin with” actually makes a lot of sense. Even if it is working ok as a tool to plan teaching, if we cut away the scientific foundation it is built on, how is it then better than any other alternative tool we might use? Shouldn’t we then figure out a better tool that is both working and fully aligned (haha) with our own values?
In other news: Dipping and wave watching this morning. Look at how the wind waves travel around the floating piece of ice into its lee!
And also below. Wind coming at us, waves defracting around the edge of that floating ice sheet, and tiny wind ripples locally generated at the bottom of the picture!
Newby, L., & Cornelissen, L. (2025). A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment. Teaching in Higher Education, 1-16.