 How come this learning is so rich? How come the most powerful learning is the hardest to pin down to a number? It's fascinating. And then it starts you thinking, is that even possible? Can we measure? Sorry, guy. Can we? We can measure some things. But can I actually measure what other people have learned? Is the whole concept ridiculous? I don't know. I say this to our dean, Harry. He says, would you stop reading that stuff? You're teaching the assessment courses. I say, I don't know. I don't think I just don't know about this. And it really also got me thinking that as I worried about Alice and wondered, and I thought, well, what did kids say themselves about their learning? Can they talk about their learning? Do they know about their own learning? I don't know. That's kind of interesting. So I want to find out. So that's what I started to do and try to find better ways of capturing how rich learning and how amazing kids are. And I started with Emily here. We were in Stanley Park just sitting in a tree there. We'd just done a sleepover at the aquarium. And here's the first writing sample she gave me. We decided to do the very, very low-tech e-portfolio. This is PowerPoint. And that's about it. That's all I knew how to do. This was seven years ago. Isn't that great? OK, so look at it with your teacher eyes. What do we know about her as a learner? Because we do know some things from this piece of paper. I kind of look at it. And I think, OK, well, she has obviously seen that O-U-L-D spelling pattern somewhere. She hasn't quite got that. She knows something about long vowel sounds. Very grateful. Oh, but wood is different over there than it was up there. So it's interesting, isn't it? You could think, all right. What does she know? What might she need to work on next? Then I asked her to speak to it. So here's what she said. She read this note. And I want you to think about how you might think of her differently when you hear her. And it's a little bit hard to hear, because my tech skills weren't that great. Afterwards, I asked her how she knows it's such a good note. So here we go. Dear Tooth Fairy, I would be very grateful if you would leave the tooth as well as the money. You're sincerely Emily. Very good, but it's quite a nice note, I think. How interesting is that? It's the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy doesn't care about the spelling. And I just found it so fascinating. And suddenly here, I was wondering if you could measure anything. But what we could rely on, what we can rely on as teachers, we need stuff we can grab on to and gather. And it's usually pieces of paper, right? The piece of paper without her voice is just so, it's just a little teeny piece. It's such a small piece. And it really had me thinking and questioning pieces of paper is getting more and more scary and dangerous all the time. So here's a little bit more of her and a few others. In the picture of me weighing a teddy bear, I think 155 grams or something. That's my office. She's sitting at the door to the office, which was one of the bedrooms in the house. Feel about learning different things. This is math on the small flower's math. It isn't that good, but I'm watering it to make it better. And does she like reading? OK, it's not even a flower. It's a tree with apartments. I love that. And I have found, allowing kids to draw pictures of how they feel about their learning, you learn so much. I use these kinds of pictures as the cover of their portfolios. And we start in our interviews with the kids talking about their picture to their parents. It's just amazing. And I do it right out. I make my university students do it every year too. I torture them with it. Just one more. And I thought this one was really interesting because it's starting to show me what kids could say about their own learning. And she was very insightful about herself. She's the little middle, the one in the middle. The play was interesting for me. I love Doctor, who had a lot of ego. And it was interesting for me to see how that part was played because it's not very much like me. She's eight. I thought that was fascinating. And here's one more little thing that was. I was trying to do a reading assessment with this little girl. And you'll hear it. You've heard this before, I'm sure. Listen to this. You're picturing yourself benchmarking your kids. And this child is obviously, I picked something that was too hard. She's going to get to frustration level soon. This is not an instructional text for her. And I'm going to have to choose something else. But so I mean, that's one of the things we can kind of rely on when they're at level 32 or whatever. But she was kind of interested in this whole process. And I asked her if she wanted to hear herself afterwards. She knew we were recording it. So here's what she said. What was it like hearing yourself read? It was pretty funny. Because when I hear myself read, what I was kind of like was when I was reading, I was struggling. And then when I heard myself read, I would know the words now because I already read it. So I'd be like, now tap the way to do it. No, tap the way to do it. It's a little bit hard. Could you tell what she was saying way back there? She was saying that now she could hear herself struggling. And then when she heard herself, she knew it because she'd already seen it before. And she's like, oh, it's like I was correcting another person, but I was correcting myself. No, that's the way you do it. No, that's the way you do it. And what's kind of, it was fascinating about that. It was like, so the reading assessment I'd done five minutes before was really no longer valid either. Because it's just that teeny moment and kids grow and change so quickly. It's just, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. So it really, that whole learning experience, and I discovered these just recently, the learning principles of learning. I'm afraid I don't know how to pronounce the word, but I just love this. It tapped into what I'm thinking about and really believe. This principle of learning is how teachers help us to locate the infinite capacity we all have as learners. Developing one's own gifts and expertise in a holistic, respectful, and balanced manner. So is it possible to use assessment or is it possible to just teach in ways that help us to recognize this infinite capacity and develop the gifts that each child brings? We've got to move away from not, no, I've got to say that the other way. I hope that we can remind ourselves and the people that we work with that every child comes with those gifts. I'm tired of hearing people say they come with nothing because it's just not true. So I'm thinking about that.