Education Taskforces Work to Achieve Strategic Alignment

PSIA-AASI education leaders from across the country are turning the disappointment of the early-arriving offseason into an opportunity to create new National Standards, new educational resources, and new communication strategies that will benefit all association members.

“The taskforces are taking full advantage of the time away from snow and the larger spring events to focus on pushing up spring deadlines for strategic alignment,” said Director of Education Dave Schuiling.

The three most crucial objectives in reaching that goal, Schuiling said, include:

  • National Standards: Fundamentals drive Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria.
  • Performance Guides: Assessment Criteria focus on performance indicators of success for Learning Experiences and Assessment Activities.
  • Quality Assurance and Enhancement (QAE): How we measure consistency and alignment.

To that end, the Education Leadership Council (ELC) has three focus groups working on Quality Assurance, Performance Guide Design, and the training and implementation of the new standards, while the People Skills and Teaching Skills Taskforces are meeting weekly to finalize their content for the guide.

“The impressive part is that the larger taskforces are meeting more regularly,” Schuiling said, “Mainly to get timely updates from the smaller work groups that are meeting multiple times a week to address various projects that are critical to our strategic alignment.”

Other taskforces are concentrating on how to prepare, train, and communicate the transition to the new standards—and the assessment of those standards—as well as create new online training resources.

“Each group is making a ton of progress,” said Mariah Feno, Education Development Specialist. “Alpine and Snowboard are finalizing their work, Cross Country and Telemark are not far behind. And Freestyle and the Children’s National Taskforce are trucking along with the goal of having solid performance guides before the Spring Conference.”

Here are some of the other highlights of work being done on PSIA-AASI members’ behalf:

  • Cross Country and Telemark are preparing their standards for ELC review.
  • Adaptive is finalizing Learning Outcomes guided by Alpine and Snowboard Learning Outcomes.
  • The Children’s Specialist Taskforce is writing Learning Outcomes related to child development.
  • The Freestyle Taskforce is finalizing Performance Guide and e-learning course to replace the workbook.
  • Women’s Initiative Taskforce is studying data collected from the national survey and develop outcomes for women’s leadership in snowsports.
  • Each week, multiple taskforces meet to drive forward Strategic Alignment.