I was thinking of the word test. Without knowing its etymology, I’m guessing that in that word is implied a certain amount of self will, like where an athlete would “test herself” before getting ready for a competition.
But what if the athlete doesn’t want to be tested? Does that count or does it skew the results? I think it skews the results. So the idea of even coming up with an acceptable assessment is in my view out of the question. There should be no tests. I don’t care how extreme that sounds, to me its true and I’m thinking it more true every day as I finally validate a deep feeling over four decades that every time I gave a test and ranked kids in terms of what they know or don’t know I was doing something fundamentally wrong and insulting.
We can’t test. Period. We engage them. We’ve proven we can’t test because we have no really good tests that align with the research. We do that which has been done for a hundred years, fluffing it up to look like reform, but it isn’t reform – it’s just testing.
We should instead look at that which most resembles the classroom process and give feedback to the child based on what we see there. That is just one of the jewels in the Palm article, which, as Claire says, if we don’t have time to read in its entirety then at least we can read p. 6.