Growing Success is a Ministry of Education document focused on the practices being used in student assessments. It's goal is that all teachers are practicing the same assessment techniques to ensure that students are being assessed in reliable and valid ways. 



The Growing Success document emphasizes that the primary purpose of assessment and evaluation is to improve student learning.  

One of the most eye opening and thought provoking concepts from Growing Success is that evaluation and assessments needs to be based on 3 pillars: observations, conversations, and products. Prior to this course I would not have considered observations and conversations to be as important and crucial as student products. Thanks to the Growing Success document I better understand how important all 3 are to valid and reliable student assessment. There are some learning expectations that would not be accurately assessed using products and there are some students that would not be fairly evaluated by only looking at their products. 

I also really enjoyed taking a look at assessment FOR learning, assessment AS learning, and assessment OF learning. Before beginning my Teacher Education, I was so unaware of the many different types of assessment. I had thought that assessment and evaluation were synonymous and feedback was something you got with your letter grades and number grades. 

Throughout our look at the growing success document we discussed the importance of descriptive feedback and how it can be more beneficial to students than providing letter or number grades because of its ability to coach students.

Assessment FOR and assessment AS learning both are focused primarily on providing students (and teachers) with feedback on learning. Teachers are able to see how well students are grasping concepts and they are able to provide descriptive remarks and coaching for students to improve their learning and understanding. 

Assessment OF learning is the evaluation component that many typically imagine when thinking of the word "assessment". It is when the teacher evaluates how well a student achieved learning goals, how closely they met those goals, and how a student did in comparison with the success criteria. This is where students will receive their letter grades and number grades.