Systems of Reporting
Understanding Reporting
Designing Effective Reporting Systems
Ensure Alignment
Support and Report Behavioral Growth
Make a Strong Professional Judgment
Determine How to Report Results
Share Learning Stories
Develop Clarity
Final Thoughts
Questions for Reflection
Architecture
Student Response
Personal Response
Recognizing Hard Edges in Reporting
Softening the Edges of Reporting
About the Author
Katie White is coordinator of learning for the North East School Division in Saskatchewan, Canada, and an educational consultant. With more than twenty years in education, she has been a district and in-school administrator, a learning coach, and a K–12 classroom teacher.
Katie was an integral part of her school division’s multi-year journey through renewed curricula and standards-based assessment and reporting. She helps develop and utilize strong assessment and grading practices that support teaching and learning in classrooms. Her focus is on helping educators develop a personalized understanding of the connections among curriculum, assessment, and instruction. She has developed multiple supports for teachers and administrators as well as facilitators of school-based professional learning. She is a co-moderator of the All Things Assessment (#ATAssess) Twitter chat and a frequent contributor to the All Things Assessment blog (http://allthingsassessment.info/blog).
Katie received a bachelor of education and master of education in curriculum studies from the University of Saskatchewan.
To learn more about Katie’s work, visit www.kwhiteconsulting.com or follow @KatieWhite426 on Twitter.
To book Katie White for professional development, contact [email protected].
Foreword
By Cassandra Erkens
As educators, we have often heard about the art and science of teaching, but we have seldom considered the art and science of assessing. If anything, assessment has been a largely clinical task, shrouded in technical discussions, and a predominantly scientific endeavor laced with designing perfect prompts, gathering sufficient evidence, triangulating data, validating inferences, monitoring for controls and variables, and drawing accurate conclusions. But in Softening the Edges: Assessment Practices That Honor K–12 Teachers and Learners, author Katie White masterfully reshapes the face of assessment to be as much an art as it is a science.
The Science of Assessment: A Fresh Perspective
Assessment includes technical aspects that we cannot ignore. Much has already been written about the granular details of how to accurately design and effectively use classroom assessments (for example, Ainsworth, 2003; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2004; Vagle, 2015; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). White contributes to this field and offers a fresh perspective on the extant literature. Specifically, she helps her readers integrate critical concepts with practical examples, meaningful questions, and applicable strategies.
Softening the Edges offers educators a comprehensive yet accessible path for navigating the assessment process from start to finish. White helps teachers integrate important concepts in the field by showing her readers the connections. Using stories, charts, reflective questions, and examples, she illuminates the tight relationships between assessment and instruction, precision and flexibility, formative and summative assessment, and, most importantly, student learning and teacher learning throughout the assessment process.
As she navigates the details of assessment development, White provides concrete ways to implement the work. She argues that targets are more than statements of what students will learn, and they are more than indicators for assessment development—targets inform the instructional actions teachers must take to make the learning visible and available to the learners. White illustrates learning continuums that illuminate the connections among targets, learning progressions, proficiency levels, and specifically, the reflective questions teachers must use to guide instructional decisions when moving all learners forward. White’s handling of the nuts and bolts of assessment helps teachers delve deeper so they can integrate assessment practices in meaningful ways.
While addressing the technical aspects, White reminds us to challenge our own assessment work. This is a field, she notes, that does require precision but in the context and service of building hope and efficacy for our learners. She writes:
If we believe an assessment has fallen short, we may consider using that evidence as formative evidence only and seek more information in a different way. If each assessment was strong, we may begin to ask ourselves, “Did the learners struggle with a particular piece the first time, and do we know this learning gap was addressed the second time?” If so, then the most recent evidence is the most reliable. (page 177)
The evidence we ourselves generate through the assessment process must sometimes be further investigated or impeached. In this, and so many other ways, Softening the Edges provides clarity to many misunderstandings within the science of assessment.
For far too long, debates regarding formative and summative assessment have raged in the field (Can formative assessments be graded? Are summative assessments the end of learning? If one is better, why is the other even necessary? and so on). With this fresh look at assessment, White renders the debates meaningless. She argues that the issue has little to do with the mechanics of assessment and everything to do with the human dynamics involved in the assessment process.
The Art of Assessment: The Master’s Landscape
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