Every learning event is an opportunity for assessment. Effective teaching begins with knowing your students, and assessment is a learning tool that enables you to know them. Indeed, the real power of continuous assessment is that it informs your teaching and helps you decide what to do next.

Teacher and researcher Lois Bridges helps you understand your students' developmental needs and their interests and concerns. She writes, "As teachers, learners, and evaluators, we strive to document, as richly and thoughtfully as possible, our students' learning. To that end, we need to use an array of assessment tools from a variety of perspectives."

This book provides a wide range of teacher-developed kid watching and assessment forms to show different ways to reflect on children's work. It offers developmental checklists, student and child interview suggestions, guidelines for using portfolios, rubrics, and self-evaluation profiles. Also included are Dialogues that invite reflection, Shop talks that offer lively reviews of the best and latest professional literature, and Teacher-To-Teacher Field Notes offering tips from practicing educators.

Lois identifies five perspectives on assessment to think about when designing your own assessments:

1. Monitoring: You'll want to keep track of your students' learning experiences through checklists, inventories, and class lists. Your students can also account for their learning day through journal entries, self-reflective narratives, and tracking sheets.
2. Observing: Valuable information can be gained about each student just by observing and listening. What to record and techniques for recording the information are suggested.
3. Interacting: You'll learn successful techniques to interact with your students, to listen and to ask questions that nudge them toward examination of their own thinking.
4. Analyzing: The fourth assessment perspective centers on collecting and analyzing the artifacts of your students' learning.
5. Reporting: You will get help in organizing the assessment data you collect to share with parents, administrators, and others beyond the classroom door.

As you continuously evaluate and monitor your students' learning using a variety of assessment tools, you can design instruction and create curriculum that will stretch your students' knowledge and expand their learning worlds.