Unscripted Joy

Assessment is Ruining Teaching by Andrew Davinack
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2026

What do you do when a student asks a genuinely interesting question that simultaneously promises to take you in an exciting direction while also guaranteeing you’ll never get through the day’s lesson plan? Wheaton College biology professor Andrew Davinack encourages us, wholeheartedly, to not worry so much about the curriculum map or lesson plan. Instead, he urges educators to engage their students, even if the process is messy and unmeasurable. Describing his response to a student’s question that delved into the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that affected the spread of a parasite-based disease in Syria, Davinack writes: “Needless to say, I abandoned the lesson plan entirely. The activities I had carefully designed to align with that day’s learning objectives were never used. The concepts I had planned to assess were left unexplored.” And yet, Davinack admits, “the students learned something far more consequential than what I had originally planned to teach.” Davinack is not encouraging teachers to abandon assessment altogether, but rather to reimagine it “as a reflective practice grounded in disciplinary judgments rather than a bureaucratic apparatus imposed from above. This requires restoring trust in faculty expertise, embracing qualitative and narrative forms of evidence, and acknowledging that not all meaningful learning can be specified in advance.” Teachers who have experienced moments of pure, unscripted joy in the classroom, when sublime meaning and understanding seemingly emerge out of nowhere, will do well to read, debate, and share Davinack’s essay widely.