Six Voices, One Climate
Transformative assessment, and what it asked us to build
Assessing the learning inside an experience — without flattening the experience to do it.
Chapter in Doing Assessment Differently in Management Education (Routledge), eds. Black & Rostron.
The bind we know
The shift happens in the room. We catch it three weeks later.
In the room
The shift happens here
Three weeks later
Marked in isolation
In the room, the experience does its work. Three weeks on, a reflective essay is marked in isolation and the moment has cooled.
Business students are trained to optimise inside boundaries. Climate change refuses every one of them.
The intervention
C-ROADS: the experience answers back, in degrees
A real climate-policy simulator, used in actual UN negotiations. Second-year Bachelor of Commerce.
Blocs pledge. Blocs renegotiate. The model returns a projected global temperature in real time.
No lecturer delivers this.
The contribution
Build the feedback loop inside the experience
The loop closes inside the activity. The experience becomes the assessment.
Sadler (1989) · Boud & Molloy (2013)
Method
Numbers say it works. Story says how it feels.
“Does it work?”
Large-sample studies already show knowledge gains and lasting engagement. Rooney-Varga et al. (2018, 2025)
“How does it feel from inside?”
The doubt, the argument, the moment a fixed position cracks. That lives in narrative.
The narrative core
Six voices
Reconstructed archetypes, not individual records. Patterns that recurred across four cohorts, read through transformative-learning theory.
Five grounded empirically; Elena theoretically derived.
Act one
The awakening
Stabilising emissions does not stabilise temperature. As long as inflow exceeds outflow, the level keeps rising.
“I thought capping emissions would stabilise temperature. Seeing it keep rising showed how little I understood.”
— Sarah
Act two
The disorienting dilemma
No one lectured them into this. The experience did.
Mezirow (2008)
Act three
They close the gap — themselves
The applause is real, because they closed the gap — not us.
The takeaway
Step out of role. Name the shift.
Design the debrief as the assessment event — feedback in the moment, not three weeks later.
The evidence base
What the data can — and cannot — carry
Can carry
Who arrives, with what stance, in what proportion. The weight behind each archetype. 434 students, four cohorts; 257 analysable goal statements.
Cannot carry
Any individual tracked through the session. Measured before-and-after outcomes. Claims of transformation we did not observe.
The evidence is pre-simulation: goal statements written on arrival. The arcs are reconstructions from that entry data plus four cohorts of facilitation, read through theory.
The limit we hit
Marcus never speaks.
The loop closes only if every voice is heard. Five of our six are reconstructed from people who said something we could catch.
Marcus is the one who did not. Not absent, not disengaged — present, deciding, and silent. In a room of thirty we can sometimes reach him. In a hall of three hundred we cannot, and the debrief becomes a survey three weeks late.
That is not a finding. It is a requirement our own method could not meet.
What we built
A room that can hear itself think
Everyone contributes at once — spoken or typed, no sign-in, no name attached. An engine reads across all of it live and finds the shape: the themes, the real tensions, what the room already agrees on and what it is still working out.
The same loop. Do, see, act — at the size of the room.
The honest position
Not anonymity — distance
A dial, not a switch. At one end an open box, where every contribution is named and visible. At the other, a fully mediated Bird, where what you offer reaches the room only through the engine, never at a face.
Distance is a setting a room chooses, not a promise we make.
For the facilitator
A live read of the room, and something to send afterwards
Mid-session, you can see what the room is actually thinking, and steer toward it instead of guessing from the front rows.
Afterwards, an honest synthesis of the whole room’s contribution — not a show of hands.
It complements a facilitator. It never replaces one.
Where it helps
The same quiet idea, in eight rooms
Marcus is in every one of these rooms. So is Elena.
Kept honest
What it holds to
- Do no harm — it never exposes a person or puts them on the spot
- Tell the truth — show what was said; say plainly what is not built
- Respect time — taking part is light, never a second job
- Stay in bounds — it gathers and organises; it never decides or votes
- No false consensus — it keeps disagreement visible, not averaged away
Where something is designed and not yet built, we say designed.
Learners who can think differently under grand challenges
“Everyone’s voice matters. That’s the real lesson — not just about climate change, but about how we create the world we want to live in.”
— Amara
The whole idea, in one image
Many voices. One shape.
A flock of starlings you can conduct with your voice. No bird is leading. The shape is what they do together — and it is the skyline this talk opened on.
Where does the loop-inside-the-experience idea hold — or break — in your courses?