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CHAPTER

1

Assessment and the Whole Person

In my first year as principal in a brand-new community, I spent the summer before school trying to figure out how to be an administrator. I thought about all the practicalities: the school discipline process; how I would communicate with staff; what kind of school-home relationships I would engage in; and how I would manage playground supervision and assemblies. The list was endless. I interviewed teachers and surveyed the students to determine where they felt they needed support. I did all the homework I could think of until I felt like I was drowning in details and plans. In spite of all this preplanning, I still felt I was missing a focus on the most important things—students and learning. In short, I was preparing myself to be a great manager but I was missing the leadership part. It took an event in my personal life involving my daughter to clarify what I was missing—a mission and a vision. I needed to step back from the details and look at the bigger picture.

Around this time, my young daughter developed what seemed to be a small infection in her finger. We thought we were responding appropriately by putting a bandage on it, keeping it clean, and hoping it would clear up. We went away for a family holiday and while we were away, her infection worsened, and we decided to visit a clinic. The waiting room was empty, and our daughter was quickly ushered into a treatment room. As soon as the doctor entered, it became clear he was not a pediatrician, nor did he have much patience for young children. In the course of our fifteen-minute visit, he yelled at both me and my daughter, accused me of ignoring my child’s needs, and treated her injury in a very painful and abrupt manner. We left the clinic completely shaken by the experience.

This doctor treated my daughter’s injury, the infection cleared, and the pain disappeared. However, the damage to our mental health lasted for quite some time. It was through this experience that I came to understand some very important things about my role inside schools—the methods I may consider using as an administrator may work, and I may get the results I am hoping for in my school, but the end does not justify the means when dealing with human beings. It was important for me to ensure that the processes I chose to shift practices in my new role would also respect the people involved in the process. I needed that doctor to treat my child’s injury and honor her whole being. I needed empathy and kindness as her parent. It was not enough to manage the problem; the problem was a human problem, and the response needed to equally respect the humans involved.

This event led me to realize that the students in my school had similar needs when it came to their learning and assessment experiences. A single assessment event is a moment in time, but it is wrapped up in context, tone, choice, emotions, and beliefs about what assessment is and its role in the complete learning cycle (which includes goals, experiences, assessment, reflection, and response). How learners experience assessment will shape attitudes and determine how they receive it in the future. Assessment, depending on the context surrounding it, can either support continued learning or stop it dead in its tracks.

Following the event at the clinic and my discovering this connection between an experience and the humans engaged in it, I chose three words to guide my work every day, and those three words still hang on my wall nine years later: safety, love, and learning. The order is intentional, and the direction these words have provided me cannot be overstated. The work we do as educators is human work. We bring our own humanity to our learning spaces and there, we meet human learners. When we engage in assessment after considering how each choice we make will impact learners in multiple realms, we are softening the edges of assessment. Together, students and teachers can co-construct conversations and experiences that impact us well beyond our time together in the classroom. If we are going to teach humans and assess human learning, we need to honor the needs of the whole person.

Understanding the Concept of the Whole Person

The term whole person expands on the more familiar term whole child. Carol A. Kochhar-Bryant (2010) explains, “As school professionals become increasingly concerned with the academic performance of students, they are more aware of the need for educating the whole child—attending to cognitive, social-emotional, physical, and ethical development” (p. ix). The expansion to whole person is a recognition that educators, like students, have complex needs, and attending to the needs of both groups is critical. When we feel we have failed because a student unexpectedly performs poorly and withdraws from engagement or resists formative instructional discussions, often due to their engrained negative perceptions of assessment, not only are student needs not being met but our own need to impact learning in a positive way is challenged. It is important in these moments to pause and reflect on the experiences we are having holistically. We may need to explore our own responses to situations as well as those of our students. We may need to move beyond intellectual needs and explore social contexts, physical demands, or emotional safety. Multiple factors can impact any experience and anticipating needs can be challenging. It is also helpful to remember that, “being a learner, the holistic teacher has to discover new knowledge, and the primary mode of discovering knowledge is to undertake research” (Patel, 2003, p. 273). Giving ourselves the time and space to be reflective and responsive is one way of ensuring the edges can become soft once again.

When we explore aligning our assessment choices with the needs of the whole person, it is critical to remember that the edges must remain soft (and the needs of the whole person must be met) for both learners and their teachers to create and nurture holistic education experiences. The notion of whole adults educating whole students opens up discussions about how the story of learning is experienced in schools. What does it mean to educate and nurture? Are we responsible for educating all parts of a person? While there are many important questions about holistic learning to consider, this text will focus more narrowly on assessment practices that honor the whole person. This is not an attempt to ignore or simplify the complexity of education. Holistic education is complex in and of itself, and one book can’t cover the concept’s entirety. However, considering the importance of the whole person impacts our assessment decisions and is crucial to softening the edges.

Assessing the Whole Person

Introducing the concept of the whole person into an examination of assessment invites a conversation about how our instructional and assessment decisions impact the development of a human in multiple realms—socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. When we invite students into an assessment experience, are they intellectually active or passively compliant? Are we inviting questions and self-exploration, or are we telling our learners how to think and feel? Are we exploring our next steps with curiosity and critical thinking, or are we defining each move and narrowing the focus in a manner that removes a strong purpose? Are learners part of the assessment and learning conversation, or are they standing outside it? Is the story theirs to create, or are they simply consuming our story? Winifred Wing Han Lamb (2001) reminds us, “We should view children as partners in learning, as adequate people rather than as inadequate adults” (p. 210). When assessing, there are a number of foundational philosophies we must keep in mind.

The following list articulates the philosophical beliefs that underlie the connections between assessment and the whole person. Each of these beliefs provides a lens through which to develop and support practices to soften the edges of assessment.

• Students are not incomplete. They are complete and changing, just like adults.

• All students can learn, and all adults can learn.

• We show students and adults respect by believing in them and challenging them.

• We show respect for students when we help them build independence and believe they can be independent.

• Clarity builds confidence, and confidence in learners can be nurtured through choices adults make.

• Students are different from each other, and this difference is a gift, not a complication.

• Learning occurs within tension, risk taking, and mistake making, but in a safe environment.

• Assessment can support hope, efficacy, optimism, and joy.

Through our assessment practices, we want to promote integrated approaches, not fragmented focuses. Our exploration of assessment and the whole person is about breadth and balance (McLaughlin, 1996). Softening the edges involves increasing our belief in students by allowing our assessment practices to reflect the best-of-the-best knowledge, rich understanding, and strong connection making.

Identifying the Benefits of Assessing the Whole Person

When we make the choice to soften the edges of assessment for our students and attend to their wholeness, we produce learners who are intellectually active while also developing their inclination to be empathic, kind, caring, and fair. We instill a desire to be creative and curious while also ensuring the ability to be disciplined, self-directed, and goal oriented. We support the development of critical thinkers who are confident and free to express their needs and hopes. We nurture students who clearly feel cared for and valued for precisely who they are (Commission on the Whole Child, 2007).

Creating environments and experiences that foster these learner characteristics is part of the broader purpose of our work in schools. When we use these outcomes as a filter for the choices we make in our assessment practices, we can begin to see how our choices may nurture or contradict these characteristics in students. The soft edge of assessment attends to and supports the development of the whole student.

Learning is a complex dance between environments, experiences, and the social, intellectual, and emotional needs and conditions of human beings. Reflecting on how our instructional decisions impact all parts of a person increases the likelihood of environments that support growth, risk taking, safety, love, and belonging, all of which indicate a softened edge.

Understanding Assessment

If we are going to soften the edges of our assessment practices to honor the whole person, we must ensure we clearly understand the fundamentals of what assessment is, as well as why, when, who, and what we are assessing, and how best to capture all that it entails accurately, reliably, and in a way that is accessible for everyone. Knowledge leads to efficacy for both teachers and learners, and efficacy indicates a soft edge. Spending time deepening our assessment knowledge is vital to supporting learning and bringing out the best in everyone.

What Is Assessment?

An assessment refers to a specific tool used to measure and document learning within a specific context in relation to a goal. Goals can include learning goals (I use this term throughout the book to generally represent terms such as standards or outcomes) or behavioral goals. The broader practice of engaging in assessment refers to the continual intention and act of capturing learning in the moment and making inferences about the degree of a learner’s understanding in relation to a goal over time.

A strong argument can be made that humans are constantly engaging in assessment. For example, we may think: I have to make it to work by 8:00 a.m. and it is now 7:30 a.m. I had better leave now or I won’t make it on time. And then later: Well, I was wrong. I needed forty-five minutes to get to work. Perhaps we engage in this mental conversation: Oh, here comes a puddle. I had better jump now or I will hit the water. Oops! Not enough distance on that jump! In fact, any time we clarify a goal, take action, and measure our efforts in relation to our goal, we are assessing. It is an incredibly natural process and a vital part of our decision making every day.

For assessment to be primarily embedded in the learning cycle, it must remain formative. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998) clarify the meaning: “[Formative assessment is] all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged” (pp. 7–8). Through daily learning experiences, we ask students to practice the individual skills and knowledge that build toward the learning goal so that, over time, students can synthesize those skills into deeper understanding.

Ideally, the impact of daily formative assessment is to increase the chances that decisions and actions meet goals. The consequences for not achieving goals on our first attempt are simply to learn, adjust, and try again. This cycle of goal setting, action, and reflection is naturally organic and part of the learning development that humans experience. Black and Wiliam (1998) assert the impact of formative assessment: “The research … shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning. The gains in achievement appear to be quite considerable … amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions” (p. 61). It is this kind of assessment that we recreate in our classrooms to promote student learning. As Cassandra Erkens (2009a) explains, “If we understand what we are trying to accomplish instructionally with each learner … we can use the assessment process to leverage the outcome” (p. 16). When we co-construct goals alongside students, invite them to take risks, and engage in actions that will serve as a springboard for reflection, we are fostering an assessment practice that supports hope and growth. This kind of learning environment meets the needs of both ourselves and our learners and softens the edges of classroom experiences.

When we feel students are ready, we engage in summative assessment—moments when we measure progress, consistency, and independent proficiency in relation to goals. These moments are akin to the learning “performance” or “game” and require synthesis and connection making inherent in the larger learning goals. According to Richard J. Stiggins and colleagues (2004), summative assessments are designed to measure student learning and “are used to make statements of student learning status at a point in time to those outside the classroom” (p. 31). When these summative moments become a celebration of hard work, practice, feedback, and engagement, the edges remain soft for teachers and students. When they do not reflect these things, summative assessment and reporting become unclear, unfair, and convoluted. In these instances, we may find ourselves falling back on magic math to tell us how students are doing. We look to our gradebooks filled with numbers, and we depend on the calculation of a single score after averaging, weighting, and converting to tell us whether learners are proficient or not. The number of variables involved in this type of process makes the resulting score have an unclear meaning. This approach can create stress and lack of confidence for all involved, ultimately producing a hard edge. Instead, we can engage in summative practices that truly validate growth and invite us to report progress with confidence and clarity to concerned stakeholders (parents and the school community).

Why and When Are We Assessing?

Assessment doesn’t have to be a bad word. In fact, assessment should be part of the learning cycle. If assessment just equates to a report card, we need to reconsider our practices. Assessment is something we are always doing—from preassessment to formative assessment, through feedback and relearning, to observation and demonstrations of learning—and essential in supporting the human need to grow. When assessment is solely used to rank and sort students, we are risking our learners’ emotional safety and potentially stagnating opportunities for their continual development, thereby creating a hard edge. Instead, with constant engagement in assessment, we can continue to make decisions about our instruction and how to invite even more learning from all students, regardless of their ranking. Assessment should be optimistic and hold the promise of success. We have to believe all students can and will learn and that this process is never-ending. This is the nature of a student-focused, learning-driven education system. DuFour (2015) explains, “In the end, creating a learning-focused culture requires an organization to answer this question: Are we here to ensure students are taught, or are we here to ensure that our students learn?” (p. 103). We may also ask ourselves whether we are here to measure past learning or to support future learning. Is our work about building walls and documenting who climbs over them, or making sure all our learners have the tools and supports to get over any wall life places in front of them?

Being clear about our reason for assessing ensures an assessment system that is multidimensional, inclusive, proactive, reliable, accessible, and future focused. If we need to know whether a student is ready for the learning goals we are about to introduce, we can design a preassessment, which occurs before learning. If we want to ascertain the effectiveness of our daily instruction, we craft smaller formative assessments, which occur during the practice and acquisition of learning. To plan for differentiation in our instruction that is responsive to student needs, we can create a common formative assessment, which we may deliver at a key point during the learning process in order to inform the next chunk of instruction. We can engage students in self-reflection and goal setting through self-assessment several times throughout the learning journey. If we want to capture learning after much practice and movement toward proficiency, we can engage students in a summative assessment. We can use reporting to communicate student progress toward learning goals at various key points during the year. Developing a clear understanding of why we are assessing, when it best makes sense to do so, and then sharing this understanding with our learners fosters emotional safety and is vital to ensuring soft edges for everyone.

Who Are We Assessing?

One could argue that assessment in a classroom measures students’ learning and the teacher’s instruction. When teachers use assessment to augment the relationship between the learning experiences they design and the impact of those experiences on the learner, it serves the needs of both parties. Understanding ourselves as teachers is as important as understanding our learners. If we are going to respond to student needs as a result of what our assessments tell us, we also have to know our own strengths and preferences. Engaging in personal reflection is key to developing instructional practices that meet the needs of students. We must reflect every day in preparation for receiving the assessment information we gather about our students so we respond in ways that nurture the needs of both ourselves and our learners.

Knowing our learners is important in signaling when and how we should assess their learning. We must find time to know our students in all their complexity. Making time to observe them while they learn, listen to them as they interact with their peers, and support them as they take risks is all part of figuring out who they are. Knowing their strengths and challenges helps ensure our assessment practices capture their understanding fully and avoid the unnecessary hard edge of bias or privileging. It is critical that we ensure we do not inadvertently ask students to demonstrate their understanding in ways that are contrary to cultural norms (for example, self-assessment is difficult for learners from cultures where talking about oneself is considered bragging). We also have to be careful we are not framing our prompts around contexts with which they may not be familiar (for example, asking students to calculate the area of a swimming pool when they have never gone swimming in anything besides a lake). Without an awareness of our learners and their personal contexts, we could privilege certain students who have had specific experiences over those who have not. We could also require assessment processes that offer an advantage to students who have access to materials, technology, or time that others may not be able to access.

To ensure we know our students, we must also find time to talk to them about their lives outside school. It is important to find out who has supports and who doesn’t. We must ask students how much homework they have, whether they have job or childcare responsibilities, who they spend time with, what their cultural beliefs and traditions are, what technology they have access to, and how they see the world. This allows us to avoid asking more of them than their circumstances outside of school can accommodate. This way, we are also in a better position to set up our students for success.

Robinson (2015) asserts, “All students are unique individuals with their own hopes, talents, anxieties, fears, passions, and aspirations. Engaging them as individuals is the heart of raising achievement” (p. 77). Knowing our students enables us to understand when and how to encourage risk taking and provides insights into their beliefs about themselves and their abilities. When we know our students, we understand the roadblocks preventing their success and can identify the best supports to help them create new stories about their potential.

What Are We Assessing?

We assess a myriad of things inside our schools. We assess students’ academic growth and behaviors. We assess their ability to apply strategies to new learning experiences and to comply with our requests. We assess their willingness to take risks and their ability to work well with others. This range of assessment on a wide variety of goals is important in ensuring responsive classrooms.

However, when we blend academic assessment with behavioral assessment and practice data with summative data and report it as a single code or number, we are unable to offer feedback specific enough to be helpful, which creates a world empty of true formative assessment and neglects our learners’ intellectual needs. We may also prevent students from understanding where they are going and how close they are to getting there, and eliminate their ability to self-assess. Mixing academic, behavioral, process, and product goals together into one measure makes instructional agility—an intentional instructional adjustment a teacher makes in response to assessment evidence—next to impossible, and it muddies our reporting practices. As Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe (2006) point out, “A grade should give as clear a measure as possible of the best a student can do. Too often, grades reflect an unknown mixture of multiple factors…. How effective is such a communication system?” (p. 133).

The solution is to start by being crystal clear about what we are assessing and to assess it using concise criteria so teachers, students, and families know what is being explored and what proficiency will look like when it happens. Ken O’Connor (2007) asserts, “Students and parents need to understand that achieving in school is not about only ‘doing the work’ or accumulating points…. We want students to understand that school is about learning” (p. 6). Unpacking or unwrapping learning goals is important so we can first clarify for ourselves what we want students to know and then preassess our learners to gauge their foundational readiness and possession of the needed building blocks for the academic learning journey. This process also allows us to be crystal clear about the targets we set along the way that will support our learners to meet them. Throughout this book, I will use the terms targets, “I can” statements, and stepping stones to refer to the distinct skills and knowledge students will need to learn and develop as they work toward the larger learning goals. We identify these skills and knowledge when we unpack the learning goals. Being clear about these items by unpacking them from the learning goal allows us to recognize when a student is proficient and ready to engage in enriched learning opportunities. After unpacking or unwrapping our learning goals, we can be sure that when we measure a student’s progress toward the goals, we know we have captured exactly that and nothing else.

At the same time, we can also evaluate students’ growth of skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. These behaviors and competencies should be assessed and reported separately from academic goals, but teachers must similarly clarify the criteria for proficiency. Being clear about what we are assessing is essential to assessing it accurately and reliably and reporting it clearly, transparently, and accessibly.

How Are We Assessing?

Tom Schimmer (2014) reminds us, “The reality is that all assessment methods have their place in a balanced assessment process, but the learning target needs to be matched with the assessment method that will most accurately allow students to show what they know” (p. 42). There is no single way to assess learning, and this allows us to meet multiple student needs with a softened edge. However, to avoid assessment methods that are disconnected from our learning goals, we must first clarify what we are assessing before we determine how best to do so. At the heart of assessment is clarity, and we can only achieve this clarity by choosing assessment methods that invite students to demonstrate the skills and knowledge articulated in the learning goals. Furthermore, we also need to ensure our assessment results are reliable, so measuring our goals on more than one occasion to confirm the accuracy of our assessments is optimal.

Once we know why and what we are assessing and we engage in it when it makes sense and in a way that honors our learners, the options for how we assess open up. Selected-answer questions, open-ended questions, performance tasks, demonstrations, and discussions are just some options. If we are formatively assessing the smaller building blocks of a learning goal, for example, we may decide that selected-answer questions, such as multiple choice, matching, and true or false, are the quickest way to capture this in-the-moment learning and may be the most effective way to efficiently capture recall or conceptual understanding. However, if we are inviting the summative demonstration of a complex learning goal, we may design a performance task to measure this degree of learning. Attending to the kinds of learning indicated within a learning goal (and within the smaller building blocks that the goal comprises) is an important step in determining how we will assess students. In chapter 2, we will clarify the learning continuum, which can help us with this process.

Clarity affords us the opportunity to have fun, experiment, and engage our learners in authentic processes and products. Our professional understanding allows us to watch and listen to our students and determine where they are on their journeys so we can invite them to explore further, take risks, and celebrate growth.

Changing the Assessment Paradigm

Many educators have come to associate assessment and the standards-based movement with rigid rules and boundaries that can impede learning. As a response, many new education trends have emerged, including Genius Hour, problem-based learning, and flipped learning. These approaches are often positioned in contrast to the traditional paradigm. They are engaging and student focused, and it is no wonder they get much attention. With the current tension in the world of education around standardized assessment, teachers may be left believing they have to choose between a focus on standards or exploratory learning. Teachers may design lessons around learning goals most of the time but try to sneak in inquiry and creativity when they can find the time. This can result in a fractured approach to teaching and learning, where students long to move away from test preparation and learning goals and move into the fun days when they can engage in topics of their own choosing. As teachers, we may feel some choices we face when planning and assessing are stark, and we long to nurture engagement for our learners. Engaging in this type of either-or paradigm can be troubling. Often, however, these paradigms are false dichotomies.

Our beliefs about these false dichotomies can not only impact the decisions we make around assessment and instruction but can also impact the language we use when we speak about learning. In our rush to get things done, prepare for high-stakes tests, and fit in the learning goals we are required to teach, we may be communicating a message about assessment that ultimately affects how students are positioned in relation to learning. Bringing an awareness to the false dichotomies we may perceive and the language choices we may be inadvertently using could help us to make assessment everything it could be and learning everything we hope for.

False Dichotomies Between Achievement and Creativity

The task of making classroom decisions is not without doubt and conflict. We can sometimes feel conflicted between defining a goal ahead of time to ensure we are supporting all students and not being overly prescriptive in classrooms. We want a solid place for creativity and innovation for both ourselves and our students. We want to bring ourselves to the learning space and meet students there so we can co-construct meaningful experiences, discussions, and explorations of interest. However, we also know that learning goals are the reality in our education systems and it would be unrealistic to deny or ignore them—and tragic to fail to invite students to explore the things society has determined are important for them to learn.

However, the reality is we don’t have to choose! Goals in specific areas do not necessarily marginalize creativity (Reeves & Reeves, 2016). Formulaic learning doesn’t have to be the cost of achievement in school. We can honor students’ skills and interests within our explorations of what our system has decided students should learn. Mary Catherine Bateson (1994) states, “When you are able to attend to something new or to see the familiar in a new way, this is a creative act” (p. 10). With creativity and freedom to explore ideas in a multitude of ways and with a willingness to work alongside children, we can actually do both. We can develop our learning goals while engaging in creative acts.

We need to be receptive to the related combinations of playfulness and discipline or responsibility and creativity. Creativity is developed and enhanced through a combination of creative acts and the assessments that capture these acts. Robinson (2015) says:

Being creative is not about having off-the-wall ideas and letting your imagination run free. It may involve all of that, but it also involves refining, testing, and focusing what you are doing. It’s about original thinking on the part of the individual, and it’s also about judging critically whether the work in process is taking the right shape and is worthwhile, at least for the person producing it. (p. 147)

Edges are soft when we explore ways to assess and meet the creative and intellectual needs of our learners.

How We Speak About Assessment

Even when we approach education with the intention to empower and the desire to nurture the whole student, our language can often contradict these aims. Although unintentional, the language we use about assessment and its connection to learning can be at odds with what we are trying to communicate and accomplish. We may tell students that practice is important for developing learning but then ask them to rush through an assignment because time is short. We may explain that self-assessment is about developing independence and determining how they perceive their own progress toward goals but then use phrases like “Tell me what you liked” or “Justify to me why you made the choice you did,” implying that the audience for a self-assessment is still just the teacher and not themselves. Our language reflects our beliefs, and our beliefs impact our decisions. As Anne Burns (1992) notes, “The teacher’s verbalisations reflect something of the interplay between belief and decision-making constantly operating beneath the surface of more observable classroom language and behavior” (p. 63). When we hear students talk about point grabbing (demanding additional marks for effort or compliance alone) and how to get out of work, we need to examine the paradigm our language is establishing and the effect it is having on the beliefs of our students in our shared spaces. Furthermore, the language around assessment we use as adults both reflects and forms our own beliefs.

The messages in our language around assessment practices and learning can be subtle, but over time can establish a wider belief about what assessment is for, what it means, and who it serves. When our language aligns with our assessment practices, and both communicate responsibility and authentic purpose, we can avoid the dreaded question, “Is this for points?” Table 1.1 provides some examples of language considerations.

Table 1.1: Language Considerations

Instead of …	Try …
We need to help students make connections in their answers.	Students will make connections in their answers.
This is a subtle difference, but anytime our language implies who is responsible for the learning, and that person is someone other than the learner, we have set ourselves up for an ownership problem. Our language must always communicate a belief that students are responsible for their own learning and that we believe they can handle that responsibility. We cannot let ourselves believe that we will make anyone learn; the finesse of teaching is creating circumstances in which students are able to learn and then gradually releasing that responsibility to them.
This counts; this doesn’t count.	Every bit of learning matters, and every bit of learning counts.
In reality, everything counts if it is part of constructing new understanding. As long as we continue to delineate, we inadvertently create a paradigm where formative assessment, practice, and daily learning do not count and will not be taken seriously. When we use these terms, we reinforce point grabbing and undermining intrinsic motivation. However, clarifying the difference between learning and assessment to improve versus reporting is important when talking about formative and self-assessment. Our work as educators is to know where our students are going, to support them in reaching those goals, and to verify learning once it happens. At the core of these responsibilities is professional judgment, and when we are making reasoned and well-informed judgments, everything counts. Learning counts.
We will be covering …	You will be learning …
Covering is a verb that relates solely to the teacher. When teachers refer to covering content, they are often referencing the work they need to do with the course topics and resources. Again, this implies that the teacher—and not the student—owns the content. The student is passive in this equation. True learning happens when the learner is an active participant. We have to move from discussing what we are teaching to discussing what students are learning.
Prove your understanding; justify your thinking.	Support your understanding; clarify and expand on your thinking.
While we certainly want our students to be persuasive and comprehensive when they communicate understanding and share opinions, these terms again can imply that the sole reason for doing so is to give the teacher what he or she wants to hear; the teacher becomes the only audience and purpose. Asking students to prove or justify their thinking to us can establish a singular purpose dependent on another person’s opinion. This isn’t all bad, but we want to shift the purpose away from the teacher and toward the students’ personal messages and encourage their commitment to ensuring they are clearly represented. We can achieve this by searching for audiences and purposes that invite true student investment, supporting their students’ desire to be heard and understood. In those cases where the teacher truly is the sole audience, changing our language to reflect a purpose that rests with the student is important. Prompts like “How can you ensure your message is clear and convincing to others?” is a slight shift in language but reminds students that their message is what is most important.
This is worth ten points.	This will show your understanding and hard work.
When we state that an assignment is worth a grade or a certain number of points, we can inadvertently communicate that the only reason to do the assignment is because it has a quantifiable value. We engage our learners in a game, where they weigh their effort against the value of an assignment. Students who are accustomed to experiencing failure will often see this reward as insurmountable, while high-achieving students ready themselves for playing the game of finding the best way to please the teacher. We want the learning experience to be intrinsically motivated as much as possible. Assessment responses show learning, and this is worth more than any grade.
Great response. I am impressed.	Thank you.
When we offer students feedback like this, we can create a cycle of compliance and a desire to please the teacher as opposed to thinking deeply. This can greatly reduce creative and critical thinking as well as risk taking. Before we know it, students are looking to us to confirm learning, and the opportunity for self-regulation is lost. Furthermore, students will also acquiesce to those in the room who everyone accepts as being the knowers. Praise like this can support this paradigm and diminish participation when it is handed out to some. Simply thanking students for thinking without offering general praise can better support students in developing independence and authentic engagement.
I am going to …	Your job is to …
It is important to consistently place the responsibility for learning where it belongs—in the hands of the learners. We can offer support, but it is far more valuable when that support follows self-reflection and goal setting by the student. Too often, we step in too early, believing this is what good teachers do. We have to empower students in their quest for knowledge.
Once we finish this unit …	This learning leads us into …
One of the biggest misconceptions our education system perpetuates is that learning has a beginning and an end. Our day is divided into timetabled segments, and our teaching is divided into subjects and units of study. This can promote the idea that the skills and knowledge students gain in a unit only matter for a short time. Students will cram for assessment events and leave learning behind as soon as the marks have been given. To shift this story, we have to continually strive to connect learning for students. Learning is continual and so, too, is assessment. New learning replaces old; clarity takes the place of misconceptions. The skills and knowledge we gain in one unit will serve us in future learning. These connections need to be explicit.

Our language around assessment and learning reflects the positions both teachers and learners hold in relation to what happens in classrooms. The reflection can, in turn, create a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1948). Lee Jussim and Jacquelynne Eccles (1992) explain the power of beliefs to create reality. Our beliefs about assessment impact our language, which, in turn, can affect our students’ beliefs, creating a cycle. Therefore, it is critical to examine both our beliefs and our language around those beliefs. Do we acknowledge that assessment is a relationship between people; between content and context; and between the tool and the people using the tool? Or is assessment an event to be done by students, for teachers, for the purpose of generating a number value? When we make a statement, does it honor the intrinsic value of learning, or does it imply motives for assessment that do not relate to learning? When learning is tied to extrinsic valuing, it removes any intrinsic value it may hold. Our language choices are indicators of our beliefs about assessment, and they can influence what our students come to understand about themselves, their learning, and their reasons for being in our classrooms every day.

Final Thoughts

It is time to reimagine assessment and write a new story that honors both teachers and students. Assessment can support rich learning experiences that attend to all parts of the people who engage in them. Students can explore assessment alongside teachers, and together they can create a new narrative for what the process means and what it becomes in the classroom (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995). Assessment can make learning more creative, more expressive, more diverse, and more responsive when it is viewed in a new way. It is time to soften the edges of assessment and align our practices with our beliefs about learning and students’ needs.

Questions for Reflection

The following questions for reflection have been divided into three sections: (1) architecture, (2) student response, and (3) personal response. The architecture questions invite consideration of how we design our assessment processes to ensure our assessment choices reflect learning accurately and reliably. The student response questions prompt us to consider assessment choices from the perspective of the learner. The personal response section asks us to reflect on our own beliefs about assessment and consider these beliefs in relation to decisions we may make. Each question is intended to act as a catalyst for deeper thinking and may lead to new questions. Taking time to reflect on one or two at a time, through journaling, conversation, or as part of a group discussion, can help determine aspects of assessment that may have a hard edge and those that we have successfully softened.

Architecture

• Do you have a personal philosophical belief about assessment? How does it connect to the purpose of education?

• How often do you explicitly engage students in discussions about their lives? What are some of the ways you do this? How will this help you meet their needs?

• To what degree are you able to build a relationship with each student you teach?

• What are your reasons for assessing students? How often do you assess them?

• How often do you have the opportunity to reflect on your assessment practices, choices, and results? Is it enough time?

• How often are the audience and purpose for student products someone other than you and for a reason beyond grading?

• How prepared are your students for the next grade level at the end of the term or school year? If they aren’t prepared, why not? Could you change this? Why or why not?

Student Response

• How do your students act when receiving assessment information? What are the conversations that accompany assessment?

• How often do your students ask questions about assessment?

• How often do your students volunteer information about themselves? Why?

• How confident are your students in making mistakes? How confident are they in responding to mistakes?

• How comfortable are your students in taking risks and trying new things?

• What language do your students use when talking about assessment? Record some of their words and phrases. What do these word and phrases indicate?

• How engaged are students in your classes? When is engagement highest? When is it lowest? What does this tell you?

• How often are students invited to be creative? To be curious? To be critical?

• To what degree does each of your students feel cared for and valued? Do you need to address this for any students?

• To what degree are your learners’ intellectual, physical, emotional, and social needs being met by your assessment choices?

Personal Response

• How often do assessment results surprise you?

• How often do you discuss assessment with students?

• How often do you invite students to co-construct learning and assessment experiences?

• How much say do you have in how students are assessed? To what degree does this frustrate you? How could you address your own efficacy?

• To what degree do you have strong professional knowledge about assessment?

• To what degree are your intellectual, physical, emotional, and social needs being met by your assessment choices?