Assessment and Sharing With Families

In a classroom, deciding what kinds of strategies  you will use for assessing students' learning can be difficult. Since time is so valuable within the tight boundaries of things like testing, goals, and numerous students, assessments should not take time away from learning. Assessments can be learning experiences in themselves and finding the strategy that fits best for your student's individual needs is probably going to save you more time in the long run. We need to be using learning assessments that are beneficial for students' learning and that help motivate them to keep learning.

In "Catching Readers Before They Fall," chapter ten focuses on assessments that are inseparable from teaching. Some of their topics include:

• The importance of authentic, ongoing, and informative assessment
• How we use informal and formal assessment tools to gather information
• What ongoing assessment looks like in a classroom
• How we analyze the information we gather to find out how a child is progressing in constructing a system of strategic actions
• How we use assessment data to inform our teaching
• Several methods of documenting and organizing the information collected and how we share this information with all the teachers working with a child

We use the information we collect to tell us which students are struggling and in what areas, as well as which students are ready to move on to greater challenges. Ongoing assessments that actually involve students in the assessment process. This might look like students setting goals with teachers and teachers letting the students feel in control of their successes. These type of assessments encourage students to try their best because they begin to believe in themselves once they see their successes.

Running records are a type of formal assessment tool and are described as "a tool for recording and then interpreting how children work on texts" (Clay 2001, 45). These records have a coding system to record on paper what a child says and does while reading. Looking at running record errors and self-corrections after a child has read will help teachers see if a child was using meaning, structure, and visual information to solve words.

Chapter ten reminds us that "as we continually collect data, we are simultaneously planning our instruction for the whole class, small groups, and one-on-one teaching" (pg. 187).

Every parent wants to know: "How's my child doing?" "Is my child's reading improving?" Chapter eleven in "Catching Readers Before They Fall," explains how many teachers ward off many of these questions by finding ways to communicate with their students' families right from the beginning of the school year to help expand their understandings of how reading works, explain classroom practices that support all readers, and inform them about expectations of what will come home throughout the school year (pg. 200). It is important to carefully draft a welcome letter to the new families. This letter should stress the importance of working together and being partners in their child's education. It is our job to not only teach the children in our classrooms each year but also to help families understand how they can best help their children at home.