in passing to the influential test score a teacher will ultimately assign, assessment is deeply personal. Throughout Softening the Edges, White reminds us that assessment work is human work. She writes, “We bring our own humanity to our learning spaces and there, we meet human learners…. Together, students and teachers can co-construct conversations and experiences that impact us well beyond our time together in the classroom” (page 12). With humanity squarely in the center of our work with students and learning, there can be no hard lines in the art of assessment.
Like an artist with a canvas, White uses personal stories, metaphors, and imagery to contextualize important concepts. Her poignant illustrations help readers put empathy back into an assessment routine that can be sterile and sometimes heartless. As early as chapter 1, White reminds us that “Students … are complete and changing, just like adults” (page 14). And throughout the book she reminds us that teachers, like students, can also learn and evolve through the assessment experience: “We need to become comfortable with ourselves as professionals. We need to trust our observations. Once we do, we are free to experiment with learning experiences. We can move beyond paper into a three-dimensional world” (page 90). Like art, assessment makes life infinitely richer for everyone involved. It must be functional, yet aesthetically inviting. It must remain responsive and continue to evolve.
Painter Georges Braque (1952) once noted that science is meant to reassure, but art is meant to disturb. The true art behind Softening the Edges lies in the author’s ability to gently but rightfully disturb the traditional assessment arena in which students and teachers alike have been prematurely and thus wrongfully labeled and judged. Instead, assessment must remain open to discovery and possibility. It is about uncovering insights into the self while discovering truths about the world around us. We must rethink our work with assessment, White contends, softening our hard lines of monitoring, measuring, scoring, evaluating, and moving on. She builds the masterful argument that we must slow down enough to enjoy the journey and relax enough to appreciate the gifts we find in each other along the way. In the end, assessment must support the human endeavor to learn and love.
Preface
I once watched a ninth-grade student work through practice questions on a homework assignment. She worked diligently and confidently for forty-five minutes, but every three or four minutes she would sigh as she moved from one question to the next. Eventually, I asked her why she seemed so distressed when she was clearly able to complete the practice without much difficulty. She told me that she hated her homework assignments. When I asked her to explain, she said:
Here’s how it works. Teachers teach and then they give about six hours of practice and it doesn’t matter if you “get it” after two. People who get it spend all that time working and those who don’t get it don’t do it at all. But nothing happens to them except their final may not go that well.
I then asked her why she continued to do practice homework when she clearly didn’t need it, and she replied, “I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”
On another occasion, I was working with a learner to prepare for a test. As part of our study session, I asked him to predict what topics and major concepts he thought would appear on the assessment; I asked him to consult his notebook and determine the key aspects of the course. He seemed to resist this approach, muttering that it was useless to try to predict what the teacher might ask on the test. He stated that he had tried this approach in the past and it just hadn’t worked. He explained:
If you ask students to learn something for an assessment and then it doesn’t appear on the assessment, you are teaching them that assessments aren’t going to be about what we learn. It becomes a bit of a trickery session where kids try to guess what you’re going to pick, as opposed to learning what they need to know, and it makes me feel pessimistic about studying because assessment is a game. But that’s the reality of high school. It sucks.
Both stories highlight challenges surrounding assessment in our current education context. In both cases, the students felt discouraged and frustrated by how formative and summative assessment occurs in their classrooms. They practice when they don’t need to and are denied the opportunity to enrich understanding. Their time is hijacked by inauthentic assignments, and their energy is consumed with frustration at a perceived lack of consistency in the expectations placed on their peers. They complete work as a matter of compliance as opposed to investment. They are uncertain of criteria for success. They are unsure how to spend their valuable time when preparing for assessment, and they lack confidence in their teachers to align student needs with a measured response. They feel ill-equipped to experience success and control over their own learning, and they lack trust in the system. Even more troublesome in both stories is a resignation that things will never change and that their feelings and perceptions will never be heard or acted on.
It is clear that assessment has a bad reputation. Students may see it as verification of self-doubt or confirmation of a belief they hold about themselves and their value as learners. Teachers may see it as a necessary evil that manifests in nights of endless marking, comment making, and calculating. Parents may see it as a reflection of their child’s behavior, intelligence, or even their own parenting. The idea of assessment holds a strong connotation for each person based on prior experiences and conditioned responses over time.
There are many reasons why assessment seems at odds with a vision of nurturing students and teachers in our schools. Evaluating, grading, marking, testing, scoring—each word holds tremendous implications for teachers. As educators, we steel ourselves every day to wade into the world of assigning value to student learning. It can be an unpalatable process, and yet we collectively share an understanding that it makes up a large part of what we do in our classrooms. However, when we view assessment as a mandate, and when we view our actions of assessing as diminishing what we are able do in our classes and how much we are able to meet student needs, it is no wonder current assessment leaves much to be desired.
When I work with new teachers, I notice our conversation always seems to circle back to assessment: specifically, summative assessment (evaluation) and reporting. There is a tangible and collective panic to figure out how to engage in this process before discussing anything else. When I ask about this urgency, they share how much they worry about getting it right. They understand that assessment can immediately impact their relationship with students. They see reporting as accountability to parents and to the system as a whole.
I understand these beliefs and the anxiety that accompanies them. However, I am concerned for new teachers because of what assessment seems to represent for them and because of how they feel about it. There is very little confidence when they speak of designing assessment events that reflect learning. I wonder what has happened over the course of these young teachers’ educational experiences to have fostered this degree of anxiety and pressure when it comes to assessment. Perhaps their personal experiences with assessment shaped certain perceptions about what it means for teachers and learners. Maybe the tremendous swell in public debate surrounding accountability, standardized testing, and teacher evaluation has added to their anxiety. Simply searching the Internet elicits a vast selection of headlines with high emotional weight: “Stop the Testing Circus” (Rotherham, 2015), “Teachers’ Unions Fight Standardized Testing, and Find Diverse Allies” (Taylor, 2015), “High School Seniors Aren’t College-Ready” (Camera, 2016), “Teacher Evaluation System Is Latest Education Battleground” (Bowie, 2014). There is rarely a day that passes when the fight for ownership of education doesn’t make itself known in mainstream media. The stakes may seem very high to these new teachers.
Students also may feel conflicted by assessment. I hear their frustration with assessment practices and their assertion that there is no way to advocate
