
JT Torres and Paige Gance ’13 Present at the 2025 AALHE Conference The duo offered strategies for finding campus allies in providing effective campus assessment.
JT Torres, director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, and Paige Gance ’13, assistant director of assessment strategy, represented Washington and Lee University as co-presenters at the 2025 Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE) Conference held May 27-30 in Alexandria, Virginia.
The duo offered a presentation titled “Finding Your Assessment Allies Across Campus” during a 90-minute skill development workshop session on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 28. Their remarks centered on their current project, which features a comprehensive online repository of assessment strategies, templates and exemplars for classroom and program use.
“Assessment work across multiple universities can feel detached from the day-to-day university experience, as if assessment is separate from teaching, learning and thriving in higher education and only serves the purpose of accreditation,” said Torres. “Paige and I have been working to connect assessment with the meaningful interactions that W&L — and higher education in general — experience. Everything from setting goals to creating culturally sustaining and highly engaging assignments can be supported through assessment.”
Using elements from role-playing games, Torres and Gance helped participants identify their “assessment allies” at their respective institutions. This collaborative approach reinforced their key message: assessment works best when it involves multiple campus partners rather than being contained within a single office.
“Paige and I modeled this role-playing game framework to make the point that assessment can forge meaningful connections across an institution — and also demonstrate how fun these connections can be,” said Torres. “The coolest part of the conference, though, was watching Paige successfully lead her first conference presentation! We received positive feedback stating that the audience had fun and would use our framework at their institutions.”
Gance has been a member of the W&L staff since 2019 after serving as a research assistant at the University of Maryland for four years. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics and journalism from W&L and expects to earn a Master of Science in analytics from Georgia Institute of Technology in Summer 2026. Gance is the co-owner of Just Game Lexington, where she is exposed to role-playing games (RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons.
“I saw how much fun folks had playing Dungeons & Dragons and how easily individuals from all backgrounds connected over this shared hobby,” she said. “One of the handouts for the presentation was an adapted RPG ‘character sheet’ I created, except the skills and attributes reflected features of higher ed faculty, staff and administrators.”
Torres is completing his first year at W&L. He previously worked at Quinnipiac University as the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. Torres earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Central Florida, a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Washington State University.
Formed in 2009, the AALHE is a member-funded, nonprofit organization of practitioners interested in using effective assessment practice to document and improve student learning. It serves the needs of those in higher education who utilize assessment as a tool to help them understand learning and develop processes for improving it. AALHE was launched to provide robust online resources and a wide range of both online and face-to-face interactive opportunities to its membership.
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