Rethinking Assessment: Teachers and Students Helping Each other through the “Sharp Curves of Life”

Abstract

Although dramatic changes are taking place in large-scale assessment practices, labeled variously “performance,” “authentic,” and “portfolio,” classroom teachers are realizing that they are responsible for the multidimensional, continuous, contextualized assessment necessary to the ongoing teaching/learning cycles of their particular classrooms. One teacher describes how she learned in dialogue with her students, discovering strengths in them she never fully realized before. She saw patterns of learning in and through time, not as linear and additive, but as recursive and unfolding. As she focused less narrowly on print and traditional academic tasks, she began to see learning as connected across symbol systems and through social interactions. She began to understand that knowledge is socially constructed and powerfully influenced by the personal and sociocultural history of each individual.