I presented yesterday at the Michigan Council of Teachers of English's Fall Conference on a question that I'm still working to answer: What counts as data and assessment? It's a question that I still don't have the answer to, a question that isn't answered as easily as the educational de-formers want it to be. No student will ever be reduced to just a number; they are stories. They are works in progress. As teachers, we hear a lot about the "triangulation of data." We're told that our assessments should "speak" to each other. And we're often given incredibly large amounts of data that is packaged with an invisible label that reads something like this: This data is reliable, and it's meant to make your job easier. It's instantaneous or nearly so, so you can make nearly immediate change in your instruction. But sometimes what we think we know to be true about students isn't necessarily true about students. Take, for example
Lessons from a novice teaching life