Other Self-Assessment Tools

strategies, or steps the learner might take moving forward. • Time: The teacher, mentor, or facilitator sets aside time to focus on both strengths and needs or areas for growth. • Investment and ownership: The student shows evidence of investment and ownership over decision making. • Support: The teacher, mentor, or facilitator supports the students in making decisions and establishing and then working toward goals.

In other words, self-assessment still requires teacher guidance.

Understanding these important indicators of self-assessment can help teachers (or mentors and facilitators) advance students’ self-assessment skills in daily moments of teaching and learning. In this book, I expand on each of these critical aspects of selfassessment and offer structures, templates, and tools to facilitate a variety of self-assessment processes. I specifically investigate data notebooks and portfolios, including how to engage students of all ages in quantitative and qualitative analysis. This book also discusses methods for students to set goals and strategies to encourage reflection, feedback, and celebration. By the end, I hope you understand the promise of selfassessment, the ways you might develop this complex skill in learners, and how to embed it in the daily lived experiences of individual classroom and school spaces.

Data Notebooks and Portfolios for Self-Assessment

In this book, I devote a good amount of time to data notebooks and portfolios—two tools for documenting learning and engaging in and organizing selfassessment. This is the case for a number of reasons. First, many school systems have already attempted to utilize data notebooks or portfolios as part of their approach to improving learner outcomes, and so they are familiar to educators. Second, data sets (for example, data related to benchmark assessments, data reflecting degrees of proficiency in relation to learning goals, or perceptual data reflecting parent and student engagement) and assessment artifacts (for example, writing samples and rubrics, assignments, tests, and photo and video samples) are readily available to teachers and students. Because they are already part of the educational landscape, it makes sense to figure out how to use learning data and artifacts to engage learners and enhance learning outcomes. Third, data notebooks and portfolios are highly adaptable and flexible ways to collect and organize information important to learning. Teachers and students can use them often and in many ways.

With both data notebooks and portfolios, assessment becomes more intentional, robust, and conducive to student reflection and goal setting. The data and artifacts collected over time provide a window into how learning develops in the short term and how this short-term progress contributes to continual growth. It allows students and teachers to connect discrete assignments and tasks to broader educational goals, and it makes visible the relationships between day-to-day operations and the skills and understanding that have deeply significant meaning to students. By documenting evidence within a portfolio or data notebook, teachers can draw attention to decision making and highlight strategies and dispositions that lead to successful learning in a wide variety of contexts and across curricular boundaries.

How educators choose to invite students to reflect on and analyze their own work can vary. And how teachers connect with families and share growth and progress can be individualized by either the teacher or student. But by collecting multiple data samples and artifacts of learning in a single place, like within a data notebook or portfolio, teachers can facilitate connections and relationships between learning goals, topics, and texts that surpass what is possible when teachers and students examine and reflect on assignments or lessons in isolation. Portfolios and data notebooks are about examining longitudinal growth in relation to big questions and deeply meaningful goals.

When you consider or extend the idea of data notebooks and portfolios, think about what works best in your classroom and what materials and technology you have available. Students can draw self-assessment tools, artifacts, data samples, graphs, and goal sheets on graph paper or write them out on loose-leaf paper and glue them into notebooks. Students also can place them in physical folders and organize them by theme or chronology. Another possibility is to collect and organize digital files on a computer, a tablet, or an