On many pages of this book, my thought was “I wish I had written that.” Authors Cassandra Erkens, Tom Schimmer, and Nicole Dimich Vagle provide an organizing framework for classroom assessment that stresses the use of assessment to bring hope, efficacy, and achievement to all learners. Essential Assessment: Six Tenets for Bringing, Hope, Efficacy, and Achievement to the Classroom, delivers real-life scenarios of traditional educator experiences with assessment along with “a new vision” of what teacher practice and student experience might be. Each chapter ends with a “pause and ponder” set of questions well-suited for learning community discussion starters and opportunities for personal reflection.

This book serves as a resource for building assessment literacy in educators covering topics such as assessment purpose, assessment construction, accurate interpretation of the data, and communicating the results. Remembering that assessment should be a support for learning, Erkens, Schimmer, and Vagle offer history, research, and practical guidance to support teachers in their everyday practice of assessment. The ideas about instructional agility (or responsive teaching), a teacher’s ability to make in-the-moment adjustments that move learning forward, are about a combination of planning and using formative instructional practices.

Easy to read and logically organized, this book supports educators in deepening their general knowledge of assessment and classroom assessment literacy and strengthen conversations about making assessment a support for learning. ( )