Overcoming the Negative Effects of Evaluation in ELA Teaching: Assessment for Inclusive Learning

Dominant standardized summative assessment and testing systems promote deficit orientations toward students and their learning. The ubiquity of these assessments challenges English language arts teachers’ ability to see their negative effects on classroom instruction. To explore how teachers can see and shift their unintended practices, the authors engaged in practitioner inquiry. Using interactional ethnography as a logic of inquiry, they studied their instruction within a graduate course designed to teach teacher-researchers how to analyze their classroom assessment data through a justice-oriented lens. The study offers eclipsing views and confluence, conceptual terms for understanding how, in learning to use four formative assessment inquiry moves (engage, describe, sort, and name), teachers made instructional shifts toward more equitable instruction. The telling case of one teacher-researcher, Erin, illuminates the value of eclipsing views, which emerged when dominant assessment frameworks were juxtaposed alongside inquiry-based assessment frameworks. These views made visible assessment corona, the discourses-in-action that support and sustain a framework. Confluence, the additive power of recurring eclipsing views across inquiry moves and time, revealed institutional and interactional opportunities to redress systemic inequities by adjusting instruction. The study offers how eclipsing views and confluence in teacher education and professional development are critical to developing ELA teachers’ classroom-based or learning-oriented formative assessment literacies against the backdrop of the increasing dominance of externally produced standardized summative examination.