My name is Brendan Dear. My educational philosophy as it relates to education is as follows: assessments are tools that can be used to generate snapshots of student learning at various points in time. In order to use assessment to effectively measure student learning, care must be taken and the results must be used for something beyond sticking them on a report card. I believe that it is more effective to formatively assess students as learning is occurring, but that summative assessments do have their place in a classroom environment. I also believe that our current system has things backwards and places far too much emphasis on testing and not enough on teaching and true accountability. Most importantly, I believe that students should have some degree of flexibility in how they are being assessed.
