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 and educators to relax into the learning, adjusting and reflecting as needed and responding within a context of trust and support. Learning to recognize the hard and soft edges of classroom assessment experiences will invite both teachers and students to examine their roles, beliefs, and actions and redesign everyday assessment practices to meet the intellectual, physical, social, and emotional needs of all of those in a classroom.
When we engage in processes we don’t fully understand or we implement practices we don’t fully accept, we can feel frustrated, resentful, confused, and unheard. These emotions indicate a hard edge, and both teachers and students can feel these hard edges in classroom experiences. When the edges are hard, we have likely infringed on some aspect of the whole self and, without intention, may have caused emotional harm, social challenge, or intellectual difficulty to ourselves or our learners. For example, when we preassess and see students’ confidence suffer, we know that in our attempt to support their intellectual growth, we have inadvertently challenged their emotional safety and formed a hard edge. The pain students may feel when encountering a practice they don’t understand may be sharp and unexpected.
As a result of encountering many small hard edges over time, students may feel marginalized or voiceless in assessment and instructional practices. They may not have been given time to make sense of what was happening to them in their learning environments. They have become part of a story but have no agency in designing the plot, and this, in turn, impacts their emotional and intellectual well-being. At times, students may feel there is a difference between what they understand about themselves and how their classroom experiences reflect their skills and knowledge. This can result in a lack of growth and engagement and indicate a hard edge.
This lack of student growth and engagement, in turn, creates a hard edge for teachers because learners are not invested in the processes we have designed and our need for efficacy is challenged. When trying to determine whether an assessment has developed a hard edge, we can ask ourselves if some aspects of our design choices are impacting our own emotional, intellectual, physical, or social safety. Are students invested in the learning we have so carefully crafted? Are we spending more time grading papers than our learners spend reading our feedback? Are we discouraged by the lack of progress students are showing?
When we are caught in a cycle of hard edges, something will have to shift to soften things for everyone and ensure our assessment architecture supports all aspects of the whole person. Assessment architecture refers to “a layout of the plan teachers will use to monitor learning throughout a unit of study” (All Things Assessment, 2016a). By attending to the diverse needs of our learners and ourselves, we can ensure that our blueprint for assessment is flexible enough to address needs as they arise but thoughtful enough to accomplish the intellectual growth we are intending to develop.
Whether modifying existing assessment tools and approaches or creating them anew, the practices explored in this book are intended to either remove a hard edge or create a soft edge of learning and offer empathic approaches to classroom assessment and reporting that honor the intellectual, physical, emotional, and social needs of both teachers and students. To further clarify these concepts, see table I.1 for select indicators of soft and hard edges.
Table I.1: Indicators of Hard and Soft Edges
| Hard Edges | Soft Edges |
| • Teachers, students, or both feel boxed in by a practice. • Teachers, students, or both suffer emotional pain as a result of a practice. • A teacher’s or student’s sense of self and intellectual, physical, emotional, or social capacity are diminished by a practice. • Teachers, students, or both feel helpless as a result of a practice. • Teachers, students, or both feel a separation between who they are and what they do. | • Assessment processes invite flexibility, responsiveness, and creativity for teachers and students. • Assessment practices support investment, compassion, and optimism for teachers and students. • Teachers and students experience efficacy and agency in decisions about their own actions. • Teachers’ and students’ voices are heard, and physical, emotional, intellectual, and social needs are met. |
All students have a learning story. These stories are powerful because they represent an accumulation of all the learning experiences a student has had over time. Each day is a page in this story, each year a chapter. The main character in the learning story is the child, and teachers are the supporting characters who ensure the plot is filled with achievement, efficacy, and empowerment. Ultimately, we want to support a story of learning that contains the right balance of success and challenge, wonder and consistency, creativity and competence.
When we establish a strong understanding of what we are trying to accomplish in our school system, we are better able to meet the diverse needs of both teachers and learners and support the creation of a positive learning story. This means we design actions that reflect this understanding and create classrooms that offer students the voice and confidence they deserve. This, in turn, supports the teachers who will walk alongside learners as they develop their learning stories.
The stories of the teacher matter, too. When the edges are softened in our assessment practices, we no longer feel boxed in or helpless, scrambling to defend a grade or explain a reporting decision, because we can take control