A colleague recently sent me an article titled, "How Bailey Reimer's kindergartners came to love testing." The article opens with Ms. Reimer explaining how her announcement that her class of kindergartners would be taking their last math test that day was met with a room full of groans. One little boy even said, "But I love math tests!...I just want to keep showing what I know." By the time I got to the line, "In my class, testing is one of the best tools to get students excited about how much they are learning," I thought surely I was reading an Onion article. But the article wasn't intended to be satirical in any way. 

Ms. Reimer does make one valid point when she says, "Of course, 5-year-olds don't come to school automatically loving testing." Nor should they. There are plenty of early childhood experts who could (and already have) speak eloquently on how children are meant to learn through play and how the downward creep of standardized testing into lower elementary grades (and even preschool) is essentially robbing them of a childhood. What I would like to focus on is the sentence that comes after her one valid point that 5-year-olds don't naturally love testing. She writes, "As educators, it's our job to build that appreciation and understanding [of tests]." 

I don't know Ms. Reimer. I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that her intentions are only good. But somewhere along the way she became brainwashed by the idea that the only way to improve education is by throwing more and more tests at our students, including the ones who should be exploring math by building with blocks instead. 

I'm not arguing that assessment does not belong in education. In fact, I believe assessment is essential to good teaching, but only when it is used appropriately and meets the following criteria:

• Teaching and learning should shape the assessment and not the other way around. Teaching to the test, as Ms. Reimer seems to do, is a dangerous path to chose and what many believe is destroying education. Instead, teachers should craft assessments that effectively provide data on the level of understanding students have of the teaching point(s) in that lesson or unit. You can think of it as a cycle of teaching, practicing, assessing, and then reteaching. 
• Assessment should not come at the expense of learning time. If the learning target of a lesson is clear, it should be easy to create a formative assessment that takes no more than five minutes for students to complete and that will give the teacher a picture of their understanding. Exit tickets are far more valuable than a standardized test in communicating to the teacher what students do and do not understand. Unlike with standardized tests where it can be months before teachers receive the data, exit tickets deliver the data in the moment and teachers can modify their teaching immediately or for the following day. 
• Whenever possible, summative assessments should be authentic. Find ways to give students opportunities to demonstrate the learning they have done throughout a unit through a real world application and for a real audience. 
• Students should have opportunities to relearn and reassess. If we want assessments to be a valuable tool for not only teachers but also students, give students additional opportunities to demonstrate their understanding once they learn from their mistakes. Assessment is something we should do with students, not to them. 
• Assessments must inform instruction. Many teachers assess students, record the data, and move on. This is almost understandable--with caseloads that often creep well over 100 students, it is difficult to individualize instruction for each student based on their answers on a test. It's hard to remember that Suzy needs practice with commas, Thomas needs additional instruction on topic sentences, and Elizabeth could use some coaching on writing conclusions. But that's our job as teachers, and the right assessment tools make it possible to do just that. For example, if an assessment is narrowly focused on a specific teaching point, it is easy to quickly sort student responses into three piles depending on level of mastery. The teacher can then easily provide additional challenges to the most proficient students and small group support to students who fell short of mastery. 
• While students should be taught how to analyze their own assessment data in order to improve their performance, students should never compete against each other. Ms. Reimer explains how students track their progress by moving flowers up the wall in the classroom. What kind of learning environment is it for the student whose flower is at the very bottom? It's certainly not the kind of environment that would encourage a youngster to take risks and develop a growth mindset. 

It isn't easy to assess students appropriately and effectively, and perhaps that's why teachers like Ms. Reimer come to believe that the government should take that responsibility away from them by providing high stakes tests through big corporations like Pearson. But as teachers we know our students best, and we're the ones in the position to use assessment to help our students succeed. Teachers should be in the driver's seat when it comes to assessment, not bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. or executives at big corporations. 

​For additional ideas on using assessment to effectively inform instruction, consider hosting a professional development workshop. 

The lucky citizens and visitors of Grenoble, France can get more than just a soda or a snack from vending machines these days. A local startup is currently piloting short-story vending machines that print out stories on a long ticket resembling a grocery receipt. Users select whether they want a story that will take one, two, or three minutes to read depending on how much time they have. 

This concept immediately reminded me of Donalyn Miller's idea of "reading emergencies," which she discusses in her fantastic book Reading in the Wild: The Book Whisperer's Keys to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits. A "reading emergency" is a time when you have nothing else to do, such as when you're waiting in line, sitting in the car, waiting for soccer practice to begin, and so on. Children who always have reading material with them are able to rack up an impressive amount of reading minutes during these "reading emergencies."

Yet as much as I begged, pleaded, and demanded that my students always have their independent reading books with them, the reality didn't always match my vision. Students were full of excuses--they had to carry too much already, they left their books in their lockers and going to get them would eat up all of the time they had in the first place, they just finished their book and hadn't selected a new one yet, or they only had two minutes and it would take them longer than that to get back into a book. I could provide solutions to every excuse but that last one. Even with bookmarks and post-it note reminders, it is true that reading in two or three minute chunks is remarkably unsatisfying and certainly does not lead to rich (or even basic) levels of comprehension. We all want our students to reach that magical place of being completely immersed in the world of their books, but is this even possible to achieve in three minutes? It isn't for me, and I'm an experienced reader!

What if we borrow an idea from the French and create short story vending machines in our classrooms and schools for our students to use when they find themselves with a short "reading emergency?" You don't need fancy technology--simple file folders tacked up to the wall will suffice. Each folder can be labeled with an estimate of the length of time the materials inside will take to read, or folders can be further classified by topic or genre. Fill the folders with copies of very short stories, short articles, poems, or even excerpts from longer works. Here are some ideas for materials for your literary vending machine:

• There Is No Long Distance Now: Very Short Stories by Naomi Shihab Nye
• Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories
• Stories on the Go: 101 Very Short Stories by 101 Authors
• A Really Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools (hosted by Billy Collins)
• Articles from Newsela, NPR, Dogo News, Scholastic, etc.
  

Think strategically about where to place your literary vending machines and don't limit yourself to your own classroom. Cafeterias, lobbies, busy hallways, athletic locker rooms, and other classrooms make great locations for students to sneak in a few minutes reading a selection from the vending machine. Materials can be laminated or placed in sheet protectors to protect them for multiple students to read, or students can be encouraged to keep stories they enjoyed. Recruit student volunteers to help decorate and maintain the vending machines. Students can help find new stories and articles for the vending machines, or even pen their own.

For additional ideas for creating a school-wide community of readers, consider hosting a professional development workshop.