With my own boys if there was ever any sense in me that they don’t need school that day, for whatever reason, I supported that. But the school always made me somewhat guilty.
I accepted that message, that I was doing something a little wrong. The thinking needs to change on that. I am not guilty for defending the needs of my children over the school.
Does that mean I am “soft” on discipline. We have a lot to change in our culture. We need to make it more compassionate by being more compassionate ourselves, and for teachers that means teaching and assessing with compassion.
It’s time for compassionate assessment now. The way we assess our kids in schools has just been engulfed in the wave of compassion now sweeping the planet, the universe. We’ve all tried the tough guy thing long enough in education and look where it got us.
The fact is that the assessment piece if FAR more important right now in TPRS than ANY of the long and protracted decades-long discussion about how to make the method work in the classroom. Just make it work. Talk to the kids and make it work.
Now it is time to turn our focus to the real need of opening up our hearts to our children. That’s what this assessment discussion is about. Why else do you think it is so compelling? Assessment in itself is a rather cut and dried thin.
We can’t do assess compassionately with textbooks, which shields are hearts. But we can do it with stories, which release our hearts.