Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership

JNEL 15(2)

2026-01-22

JNEL

Institutionalizing Reflection as Assessment: Affirming the Value of Competency-based E-portfolio in Dialogue with Nonprofit Practitioners

2025-08-26

Aleksey A. Tikhomirov

I report on adopting a portfolio-based assessment model in a NASPAA member program. As part of the capstone experience, students articulate their NASPAA-required skills and construct professional e-portfolios to reflect on their competencies at the start and end of the program. Student receptivity and initial resistance to the new assessment model were among the early implementation challenges. I present a baseline study of these attitudes, including student uncertainty over the value of e-portfolios. I also examine how public service professionals’ participation in assessing student learning outcomes can help clarify e-portfolio benefits. These findings can serve our peer MPA programs as a means for making sense of the nuanced nature of institutionalization of reflection via competency-based e-portfolios while embracing their board members as assessment partners in institutionalization efforts.

Focus on the “Why”: Using Catalytic Thinking to Reimagine the Future of Nonprofit Education

2025-03-12

Hildy Gottlieb, Angela M. Eikenberry

This paper reimagines the future of nonprofit education as a means toward the end of true systems change, by applying the question-based Catalytic Thinking framework (Gottlieb, 2016). The questions of Catalytic Thinking lead people toward radical creation (vs. reactive planning), radical inclusion (vs. selective inclusion), and radical collective effort, including sharing resources of all kinds (vs. operating alone in scarcity). The paper first applies these questions to nonprofit education in general, then to a case study example of a masters-level fundraising class that used those questions to rework its syllabus and the structure of the class itself. Through these examples, the paper demonstrates how nonprofit education has the potential to both reach for the ultimate “why” of nonprofit education—teaching what it takes to create the end results of a strong community and teach the internally focused, organizational management subjects within the context of and with an explicit focus on those end results.