needs. I see their reluctance to explore feedback, and I hear their desire to have their work be valued or assigned a number because this is what they think school is about—that this number is the only thing that matters in the end. I worry about our students, and I wonder how their schooling has shaped them and their beliefs about assessment. I worry about the degree to which a single number impacts their perception of their ability and their options for the future. I have heard students declare a lack of ability in a specific area based on a single assessment result. I have seen students become painfully discouraged after an assessment event and refuse to even discuss the result and options for future learning. I have heard students mutter, “I failed,” while handing in an assessment, even though the word fail has not been used in their classroom all year. I have retrieved students from bathrooms after they have become ill in anticipation of an assessment event. Assessment is causing stress for these students, and this stress reflects perceptions about assessment and how it works. If these patterns are not addressed, the stress will continue, potentially reducing achievement, optimism, and joy in learning through assessment.
Assessment has taken on a more sinister connotation in the larger landscape of education and politics. Terms like high stakes, standardization, tracking, academic dishonesty, retention, and teacher evaluation have shifted the meaning of assessment for many people, including teachers, students, and families. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that assessment could come to any good inside our schools anymore.
Nevertheless, I assert optimism for the word assessment and everything it could mean. I believe in assessment because I know that when used correctly, it is one of the most powerful tools available for holistically supporting students on their learning journeys. I believe in assessment because I love learning and the gift it offers human beings. I am optimistic about assessment because I love our schools and the people who live large portions of their days inside them. I see schools as places of joy and curiosity; wonder and practice; challenge and support. I love the relationships that flourish inside our buildings. I have nothing but hope that we can nurture schooling experiences where the focus continues to rest on these relationships among all people in schools as well as the relationships between the students and their own learning stories. I love that assessment can support these learning stories, build relationships, and foster curiosity, joy, efficacy, and healthy challenges for adults and students alike.
Introduction
Shortly after I began working as an educational consultant, I was driving to the airport with a colleague after we had spent three days facilitating a session on assessment with a large group of teachers. It had been challenging work, and I was trying to make sense of the experience by talking it through with my colleague. I was mostly concerned with how challenged the participants seemed to feel about the assessment design processes we were working through. They seemed burdened by so many stresses—multiple sets of standards; state testing as well as district assessments; and learners who were coming to school hungry, tired, and disengaged. Discussing assessment as an essential component of the learning process seemed to really challenge their beliefs about the work they were doing and their roles as educators.
As a Canadian, I was also trying to make sense of the education paradigm in the United States and the implications of this paradigm on my message and my facilitation. My colleague patiently explained the history of U.S. education reform and the resulting assessment reform. It was a long drive to the airport, and we talked through many important aspects of our work. My own experiences in coming to understand assessment had been personally and professionally challenging, and I already had a sense of the difficult nature of this topic, but I began to see that assessment was truly loaded with misunderstanding and harsh realities for teachers and students.
As we drove, we passed through rock formations alongside the highway. The light shifted over the red igneous cliff faces as approaching rain clouds began to alter the shadows along the edges of the stone. It made me think of the lines and edges that our education system has created in relation to assessment; the rules and processes that, to many teachers, seem static and non-negotiable. I started to think about the shifting effects of light on the edges of the rock, depending on the time of day, the weather, or the perspective of the viewer, and I began to wonder if it were possible to shift our view of assessment in the same way—by changing the conditions under which it is viewed and by changing the perspectives of the viewers. Would these kinds of shifts soften the edges of our relationship with assessment? Would they change how we see assessment and how our students experience it?
On that drive with my colleague, I began to recognize that assessment had taken on a solid form in the minds of the teachers with whom we had worked. It was a thing, an entity. It seemed vast and unmanageable all at the same time. It seemed like when teachers interacted with it, they felt a small pain, as if cut by the edge of the practice itself. I began to think that the work we were doing with these teachers was to take this hard edge of assessment and round it or smooth it out, so when teachers began to work with it, it would no longer hurt. I knew we needed to shift the perception of assessment as a thing into assessment as a process. We had to take that hard line or edge and turn it into something that was approachable, flexible, and manageable. Like a carpenter sands the edge of a table before inviting people to eat at it, like an artist skillfully blends a hard line into a soft transition between land and sky, or like a chef adds a spoonful of sugar to the vinegar to make the sauce less acidic, we were trying to invite changes or additions to assessment practices that softened the edges by addressing the needs of both teachers and students in the service of learning. By doing so, we were supporting the development of an assessment paradigm that is approachable, gentle, and not at all overwhelming.
The Metaphor
This book is about eliminating hard edges from our assessment practices and inviting soft edges through considered choices. It is about shifting the idea of assessment as an entity separate from learning to assessment as a process, integral to growth and development, and flowing in and out of the learning experience. Just as carpenters, artists, and chefs make the choice to soften the edges between two things in order to neutralize extremes, refine sensations, or create impressions of seamless transition, so too do educators. However, instead of sanding off edges of wood, blending land with sky, or mixing vinegar with sugar, teachers have the opportunity to blend their assessment decisions with the commitment to nurture and support both their own and their learners’ needs. When assessment practices align with the intellectual, emotional, physical, and social needs of the people involved in the assessment relationship, soft edges exist. In contrast, hard edges form when some or all of these critical needs go unaddressed throughout the assessment process, and without careful adjustment, those hard edges will derail even the strongest assessment practices.
During assessment processes, when we consider the needs of our students beyond the intellectual realm, we are attending to the whole student. Addressing the multiple needs of our learners is not new to teachers—we often provide food and school supplies to students who need it; we ensure consistency and safety within the walls of our classrooms; we provide exercise and rest in balanced proportions. Despite this, considering emotional, physical, and social needs is often not part of a discourse on assessment. However, if we do not attend to all parts of a learner while assessing, we can engage in practices that may be designed to support intellectual development, but instead infringe on a student’s emotional or social safety and undermine any gains in intellectual development we may have made.
The terms hard edges and soft edges are metaphors for the degree of alignment that exists among the beliefs, values, and needs of educators and learners, and the ways assessment is experienced in classroom spaces. The metaphor speaks directly to the relationship between the whole person and assessment. When the edges are softened, assessment practices blend one learning experience into the next and allow students to feel smooth transitions, growing confidence, and recursive content and skill development. Softened edges allow both learners
