SPP 91: Writing Assessment Reports People Will Read, Understand, and Remember

everybody welcome to schools like podcast we're super happy to be back we've spent a little bit of time at nigh Aspen New York and that was way fun and did a presentation in real life which was super scary because we actually saw people watching us but it was a lot of fun and we met a lot of cool people and talked about social media so um that was that was good stuff but real excited tonight um when I approached our guests at NASP I was super nervous and because I you know check out his blog and when I'm and I'm familiar with some of his work and approached him and he knew about schools like podcast I was like it was really thrilling for me especially because I often go up to people in like so I run this podcast and they were like what are you talking about and they kind of give me a silly look and wonder if I'm a crazy person so it was really the reformation too that he recognized the name of school psych podcast so I'm really happy but my name is Rachel I'm a school psychologist working in Maryland and I'm gonna pass it over to Rebecca who's gonna talk a little bit about how to participate tonight Rebecca hello everybody I'm Rebecca I'm a school psychologist working in Connecticut and I was really also thrilled to meet so many of you at Nyhus this past last week and this weekend and know that many of you listen to us not live but after the fact on iTunes and pod bean and wherever you get your podcast so I'm going to keep that in mind all of tonight and try to make sure that I am encouraging you're commenting later on as well but if you are watching us live on YouTube you can sign in to your Google account and you'll see a chat box right next to your video and we welcome your comments thoughts exclamations or questions or whatever you got for us we're really happy that you're here and able to watch live as well and then also I will be looking for comments and questions on our Facebook pages school site to your school psychologist or on the school's like podcast page or on Twitter all using the hashtag psyched podcasts looking out for notifications comments there so please feel free however you're listening and tuning in to comment and we'll share questions with our wonderful guests and now I'll pass it on to Eric who's going to introduce himself and our guest Thank You Rebecca hi everyone I'm Eric and I am a school psychologist also in Connecticut and we're excited to have dr. Joel Schneider with us this evening before I introduce him I want to remind people to please like and share and subscribe to us on iTunes YouTube etc sometimes that feedback and data helps us improve what we're doing you know give us a rating let us know what you like what you don't like all of that feedback is beneficial to us as we continue the podcast so I would had the privilege of seeing dr. Schneider in Chicago at nasse with dr. McGrew who we've also had on as a guest so it's exciting to have him here this evening and I'll tell you just a little bit about him dr. dr. Schneider grew up in Orange County California he holds a BS in psychology from the University of California Berkeley his MS and PhD are in clinical psychology from Texas A&M University and his clinical internship was at the Dutchess County Department of Mental Hygiene from 2002 to 2007 teen he was lecturer an assistant professor associate professor and then professor of psychology at Illinois State University and from 2017 to the present associate professor professor of psychological studies in education Counseling Psychology at Temple University and we just learned also that his wife is also Renee Tobin also professor at studies in education counseling and psychology at Temple as well so that's that's exciting to hear dr. Snyder's gonna speak to us this evening or speak with us this evening on writing assessment reports that people will read understand and remember and as school psychologists and I think also clinicians who might be listening I think we can all say that this is an area that's interesting and important to us so dr. Snyder welcome and we welcome your thoughts and ideas thank you so much for having me I I love talking with people about this topic and I like sharing my ideas and I also like learning what other thoughtful people have to say about it and I regularly incorporate new things that I learn in these conversations into presentations thank you I have prepared some slides and here they go yeah so let's see here I have a number of goals I I know that any kind of presentation like this involves some opinions my opinions are strong I understand that they are my opinions and your opinions may differ and I love diversity in all its forms including diversity of opinions so if you disagree that's great I would love to understand why I I understand that some of my recommendations about report writing run counter to your current situation like your your job might not allow you to do it the way that I recommend and I understand that I've been in that kind of situation before we we do the best that we can and we advocate for change whenever whenever that's possible I want to give a plug for this idea that assessment is not the right tool for every problem in fact most of the time most of the routine problems I believe that a rather minimal assessment without an assessment report is the right way to go I think that doing a full on assessment for most routine problems this like pulling in an excavator a jar a gigantic machine to do routine weeding it's it's just a not the right tool for the job and conserving the public's resources by withholding assessment until it's needed is a vital component of any job in which you're given the public's trust and so I personally welcome the changes that have been happening in the field of school psychology where this idea of not assessing doing a full you know Wisc for everything is is I think it's a great idea my position is evolving on on this topic right now I'm calling my position last resort ISM is that you you do a big assessment when when all of the other interventions have have ceased to work and the the the team is getting frustrated and no one knows what else to do when not knowing what's going on is not working then try knowing for a change and so that's that's where I am on assessment but let's say you've decided that you do want to do an assessment and you want to do a thorough assessment and that's that's the topic for today those those hard cases what I'm going to recommend I understand that clear important legitimate exceptions can be found for every statement I'm going to make including this one so if you say you know that idea didn't seem quite right to me or something like that if you were to voice that by email or in the chats I'm likely to agree with you that it's a complex world and it's very hard to say something that's true and useful in every situation for every person for all times in history but I hope that when I say things that I'm relying on you to apply the appropriate scope to it my my true confession is that I'm not a school psychologist I was trained in clinical psychology but the idea of empathy is doesn't belong to any branch of the helping professions empathy it's hard to underestimate its importance and I think that the assessment process begins and ends with with empathy it is the psychologists superpower it's rather easy to explain it's difficult to do really well we owe a great debt to Carl Rogers who explained how empathy is one of the core ingredients of any kind of helping enterprise he says empathy means entering the private perceptual world of the other being sensitive moment by moment to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person that means sensing the meaning of which he or she is scarcely aware I try to root any any helping activity I do in in empathy first and when I stray from that is usually where the trouble begins in terms of psychotherapy outcome if you do meta-analyses and whatnot you can see that of the common factors empathy is is a really big deal in terms of effect sizes and anyone who's helping who displays empathy has a much much better chance of actually being helpful applying empathy to the assessment process is not a new idea people have been talking about this I started reading advice articles and books about how to do a good assessment and right from the beginning and the the the first few articles that were ever written on the topic empathy although wasn't called that list was definitely included a formalized treatment of this this topic can be found in some of the great works of the assessment literature some of my favorites and ones that influenced me the most the constant fish constance fisher in her book collaborative assessment the the idea that we are that no one person owns the whole truth and that we can collaboratively explore something with another person when you're dealing with children of course this involves the entire ecosystem of the child's world and that that you collaboratively define what are the assessment goals what are the meanings of the data with the parents with the teacher with the child and with anyone else who's involved a more thorough and structured way of of incorporating empathy into the assessment process comes from Steven Finn and his his approach called therapeutic cess meant with the capital T and capital a he also talks about therapeutic assessment lower case which is anyone who's attempting to make the process of assessment therapeutic I don't exactly follow therapy at assessment with the capital T in capital a is a highly structured manualized way of making assessment therapeutic in and of itself but the goal of making the assessment therapeutic all the way through works and it's quite different from the typical assessment where you say okay I'm gonna you know find out what's going on and in the very end I'm going to reveal the big reveal in my report and hope that that makes a difference I know research is evolving on this question all the time the preliminary answer is that if you wait for it to be helpful to the very end it's not likely to be very helpful but anytime someone has tried in a systematic way to make the whole process therapeutic all the way through they tend to succeed so for example there was a recent meta-analysis recent meaning ten years ago of various attempts to make a psychological assessment process therapeutic in and of itself and the effect sizes vary because the approach is here in the mid analysis vary quite a lot but when when people try to make the the assessment process therapeutic they tend to succeed now this meta-analysis does not mean that all assessments are therapeutic or all assessments are useful many of them are essentially a waste of time and and and money that we're seeing with ever greater clarity that certain kinds of assessments just are not particularly helpful but there is a way to make it helpful and so my my goal here is not to defend assessment practices as they are but to make assessment practices defensible and I think this is one major area in which the helping professions can improve that they if they're going to do the assessment that they go in with the attention the intention that I want it to be helpful all the way through in very very broad strokes therapeutic assessment starts with the idea of building and maintaining and working alliance easier said than done particularly in the cases that come before you that merit and assessment that often we're dealing with people who've burned their bridges everywhere they've gone and and these are folks for whom building working alliance does not come naturally and this is why they need seasoned excellent kind caring conscientious helpers the while building that working alliance that you collaboratively define assessment goals that you work together with the person if all you do is you show them a basque results and say well it looks like your depression is high or something like that or the child's depression is high you're telling the person what they already knew they told you that on the basque that instead what we're working for working toward is helping a person understand things that they don't already know and so one of the basic questions of this approach is at the end of this process what would you like to know that you don't know already and what would be useful for you to know now not everyone has a ready-made answer for the house so you work collaboratively to to find something that they would like to know and at the end of it and then you can see if you can put together an assessment that will work towards an answer and along the way you may discover quite a bit of serendipity of new questions that didn't occur to you that first time ins that you met and so you can update this list of questions as you go instead of doing a big reveal at the very end the idea is that you share assessment results as you go this is something controversial but that you work with a person to explore what these results mean as you go and you collaboratively verify with all the parties involved what what these results mean and explore their meanings and this makes it so that very little in the report comes as a surprise and it makes a person feel seen and heard and understood in a way that we rarely are and this in and of itself can be therapeutic it also has the benefit that when you do the report that they're already on board because they've collaboratively agreed to your your your interpretation already and that they've not your interpretation the collaborative interpretation that you've co-developed and with children of course there's some wrinkles and in this you're collaboratively developing a an interpretation with teachers with with parents and often with the child stories I think that narrative is a big deal in assessment and the assessment report should have a narrative quality and it doesn't mean that we're writing great works of literature like John Steinbeck did but I I like what he has to say about it he says we are lonesome animals we spend all our life trying to be less lonesome one of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say and to feel yes that's the way it is or at least that's the way I felt it I feel it not as alone as you thought so the assessment process it begins with listening to their narratives and we do an interview I have to say I love the tests and the tools that we have but if I had choose between a great interview and all the other tools I'll take the interview every time I'm glad I don't have to make that choice but that is that is I think our most important tool it's the point of contact and it's where I think the meanings that develop that have the greatest certainty at least for me during this interview we empathize we're collaboratively sharing back our interpretation of what it ever ever it is that they say continually checking to make sure that we understand and continually communicating our understanding and graduate students often ask me what if you're wrong and this is I love that question because when when you're wrong when you communicate your empathy it means that they have an opportunity to update your wrongness if you don't venture any interpretation then you'll just persist in your wrongness and you won't know while we're listening we're still investigating there's it's a guided kind of listening it's a collaborative kind of listening and in the end we're clarifying as we go at some point there's an agreement that the listening has diminishing returns that that clarity has emerged and then we go to a different phase of the assessment which is learning from new data outside of an interview and this includes you know reviewing records it direct observations and testing so there's some data gathering and there's some math I happen to love math I love the numbers I love the statistics I'm weird like that I would bei the numbers if I could however once I've interpreted the data I tend to put the math aside it's not the best way to communicate with other people we communicate with narrative and so I learn from the math I thank the math and then I let it go there's a process by which we we take the narrative that we learned in the beginning we update it with new data and then we transform it back into a narrative a narrative that we can retell in a way that gives a person new understanding of where they are this retelling can induce empathy in in the child it can and more importantly induce empathy in the adults in their life that they can see the child with new eyes often we take a toxic narrative this is a lazy kid this painting and the whatever this as a kid who's not trying enough not motivated what have you this is a kid who hurts other people this is a kid who with out a tough time reaching and you can retell that kid's story in a way that details detoxifies it but not with rogues rose-colored glasses we face facts squarely that sometimes there are difficult people in the world and there are even difficult children however we can always tell the story in a way that is true and helpful that we can explain the problems in a way that puts things in a more hopeful light and restore hope and inspire change and in this way we've got kind of a narrative sandwich in which narratives are the beginning and the ending of assessment I love so much of what you're talking about and and we've got some comments to that especially people really like when you said you know what would you like to know that you don't know already and I think that that's that's super important because sometimes yeah I feel like I'm just reporting back that yes the things that they already know and so I think I think that's really important when you're talking about the the share as you go I'm wondering and maybe it'll get into this and wondered how that looks just because I find that as you know I get on my data and I'm sitting down and writing kind of pieces of my report here and there I want to have a chance I feel like I'm interpreting it as I'm going and by the time I get finished with my report then I'm like okay now now I kind of see how this fits together I feel like if I shared as I went it would be I would be reversing and saying oh no I take that back and whatnot so so I don't know I maybe yeah sure so obviously if you're presenting your interpretations as final pronouncements that's going to backfire because nothing's final and so it might be something like well on this on the self report of personalities like bask or something like that you said that you know you have a lot of anxiety can you tell me more about that it and as you check in with with a person you you develop a deeper understanding of whatever it is that the person told you on the questionnaire that years you're continually deepening the conversation if it's something like academic results that are unexpected that you didn't already know about you could say you know one of the things I was really that surprised me was was how difficult it was for you to write this essay that took a really long time and it was something that you it it looked like you were really struggling to do it like each letter was what was hard is that true is this normally how it is are there any other times when it's like that oh what other things you know so I'm continually just asking questions like what happened there is this like what happens outside of of this room is there anything else in your life that's like that let that answer your question for sure yes thank you all right yeah of course there are some some things that you do in the final report writing that you have you know late-breaking epiphanies and I tend to write those into the report but I don't usually actually sign my report until I've gone over it with with the major parties in the assessment and and say okay here's here's my rough draft let's go over it and then make any Corrections that I need to any other questions a lot of people comment a kind of agreeing with your point mates and have a nice little sidebar going next to the video okay my my retelling of this that narrative sandwiches that we start with you know the best available data and this is my my artistic rendering of geeky math and then we we look at a person's development and their learning history we incorporate whatever is going on in the current context and then there's this dynamic tension between these more narrative kinds of data and harder like test scores we don't I try not to privilege either side of this equation that we're that I'm continually trying to to integrate and see how they're both true in some sense and often they agree and sometimes they don't and when they don't they're not inconsistent with each other they're inconsistent with my simplistic interpretation so I'm trying to find some some way in which it all fits together and is all true getting to the specifics of writing a report as opposed to the process of assessment I loved this quote from Constance Fisher she wrote back in the 80s finally it helps to remember that reports are for their readers and that's her emphasis not for the author reports are for communicating key findings along with illustrative support to readers the report is not a repository of everything the Assessor did and notice a place where the Assessors to wander around and finally discover the outcome or laboratory report of esoteric scientific indicators or an arena for the Assessor to demonstrate personal clinical prowess superiority of insights technological wizardry and so on or a place to test the elasticity and comprehensiveness of the Assessors theory or the occasion to demonstrate the author's literary potential to repeat reports are for readers that was a major revelation that often we write reports with many competing goals and often making the report a communicative document to the readers is rather low on the on the hierarchy that often what we're trying to do is document some finding and avoid a lawsuit and you know try to avoid being called out as wrong or what not keeping this goal firmly in mind is a big deal and it makes the reports so so much better and it makes the job far more enjoyable the idea is that we as helpers I think as a group we're pretty good at demonstrating empathy face-to-face what we're often not trying to do is to demonstrate that empathy in our writing and in our reports and so what I'm proposing is that what we're trying to do with a good report is take our empathy for the trial and inspire the readers empathy for the child to give the the the reader a new vision of of the child and one of the best ways to do this I think is to have empathy for the reader and by that I don't mean a boy dear reader you've had a tough day or something like that that's not what I'm talking about it's the kind of empathy of imagining what is it like for a reader to read my report if the reader doesn't know what I know and this act of act of empathy is crucial for writing a report that can be transformative I think that's the best way to do this is to communicate with stories I I don't know how many times I've heard of you know Erickson stages or Maslow's hierarchy of needs any kind of list kind of theory I have very difficult time remembering all of them and yet there are episodes of The Brady Bunch and Three's Company from the 70s that I remember still and I haven't seen them since I was a kid there's something about a story that sticks in the head and so I think that if you think of the assessment report as a kind of narrative that you're telling a story it's has a much greater chance of sticking in the head of the reader so my goal is to tell the story of the person being assessed and not the story of the assessment of the person that in this process you can help the world you can help a person to understand the world a little better and you can help the world understand a person so I my goal is that I write about people and I resist the temptation to write about tests I'll give an example of two different approaches to writing an Assessment Report the first one is one that was not that different from the kinds of reports I wrote not long ago maybe a decade or two so it might go something like this on a test in which judy had to repeat words and segment them into individual phonemes judy earned a standard score 78 which is in the borderline range only 7% of children performed at Judy's level or lower on this test this test is a good predictor of the ability to read single words isolated from textual cues on a test that measures this ability Judy scored in 83 which is in the 13th percentile it's considered to be in the low average range reading single words is necessary to understand sentences and paragraphs on a test that requires they evaluate to read a paragraph and then answer questions that test they evaluates understanding of the text Judy scored in 84 which in this which is in 14th percentile and in the low average range an 84 and reading comprehension is 24 points lower than her full scale of I guess full scale IQ of 110 75th percentile higher average range this is significant at the 0.01 level and only three percent of children and Judy's age range have a 24-point discrepancy or larger between reading comprehension and full scale IQ thus judy meets criteria for reading disorder more specifically judy appears to have phonological dyslexia phonological dyslexia refers to difficulties in reading single words because of the inability to hear individual phonemes distinctly this difficulty undercoating single words makes reading narrative text difficult because the reading process is slow and error-prone intensive remediation and phonics skills followed by reading fluency training is recommended explanation 1 this is the kind of explanation I'm aiming for these days explanation 2 for most 12-year olds is light as bright as judy is reading is a skill that is so well developed an automatic that it becomes a pleasure for Judy however reading is a chore it takes sustained mental effort for her to read each word one by one it then requires further concentration for her to go back and figure out what these individual words mean when they're strung together in complete sentences paragraphs and stories it is a slow laborious process that is often unpleasant for Judy why did Judy a bright and delightfully creative girl failed to learn to read fluently this simple question has many answers that are not so simple the problem that most likely first caused Judy to fall behind her peers is that she does not hear speech sounds as clearly as most people do it's as if she needs glasses for her ears the sounds are blurry for example although she can hear the whole word cat perfectly well she might not recognize as easily as most children do that the word consists of three distinct sounds and for this reason she has to work harder to remember that these three sounds correspond to three separate letters is C an is a and is T with simple words like cat J DS natural ability is more than sufficient to help her remember what the letters mean however learning to recognize and remember larger words uncommonly used words or words with irregular Spelling's it's much more difficult for Judy than it is for most children many children with the same difficulty in hearing speech sounds distinctly eventually learn to work around the problem and come to read reasonably well however Judy is a perceptive and sensitive girl these traits are typically helpful but unfortunately they allowed her to be acutely aware from very early on that she did not read as well as her classmates she clearly remembers their friends and classmates giggled when she made reading errors that were to them inexplicable for example for a while she earned the nickname the nickname tornado girl when she was reading aloud in class and misread volcano as tornado she came to dread reading aloud in class and felt growing levels of shame whenever she read silently to herself she began to avoid reading at all costs she did not read for pleasure even when the texts were easy enough for her to read because she felt in her words dumb dumb and dumb over the next several years she fell further behind her peers by avoiding reading she'd never developed the smooth automatic reading skills that are necessary to make reading a pleasurable and self-sustaining activity although Judy's abilities to hear speech sounds distinctly is still low compared to her twelve-year-old peers this weakness is not what is holding her back now indeed her current ability to hear speech sounds distinctly is actually better than that of average six and seven-year-olds most of them who learn to read without difficulty with extra help Judy can learn to code words phonetically however in order for her to develop her reading fluency and her reading comprehension skills to the level that she's capable she will need to engage in sustained reading practice sustained practice reading texts that are both interesting for Judy and her at the correct level of difficulty she's likely to be willing to read only if she's helped to manage the sense of shame she feels when she attempts to read a book and this may require the collaboration of a reading specialist and a behavior specialist with expertise in the cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety related problems I think that explanation one is not a bad explanation it's just written in a genre that is incompatible with most readers needs that very few of us have the ability to conceptualize another human being in terms of continuous variables that we don't think about each other and we don't talk to each other in terms of continuous variables and thinking this way requires basically graduate school and once you acquire this habit of thinking people in this thinking about people in this way you forget how strange it is and that you have to relearn how to take that continuous variable view and re translate it back to the language of ordinary folks I think that explanation one had some problems because it had some jargon in it I could have taken all the jargon from explanation one and inserted it into explanation - and explanation - would still be better I could take all the description of the tests - and you know put it in explanation - explanation - I think would still be better it's better mostly because the story is not about the assessment but the story is about Judy how did this problem start how was it maintained and then we have a glimpse as to how it could be remediated I understand that writing this way takes quite a bit of work and this is why I put in the blog for reserving this this kind of activity for the really hard cases when when other attempts if I've not worked and that people are starting to get frustrated we were commenting in in the chat that as you read the you read explanation - I was imagining myself as the parent of this child you were describing and in such a much more empathetic and helpful and it just it just made me feel more hopeful for the same exact you know child in the second explanation and I I wish that there was a way that wasn't as time-consuming and I also wonder about you you were saying about describing you know what the test measures are what it consists of and and maybe some of that is important because the testing so mysterious my parents if there's a way to do a little both maybe and not have it be so time-consuming is the question how do I talk about tests is that necessary I feel like I was taught it sorry that we have to explain these tests and what they measure and and they're you know why they're valid and you agree that that's necessary in the report yeah I in I understand that there are situations in which you would do that my my personal feeling is that that stuff can all be tucked away in a technical appendix where it can do no harm that if you feel that you have to explain your tests put it put it in a place where the average reader knows that that's it's a technical appendix it wasn't written for them and it won't that what what I'm trying to do is not to alienate the reader who doesn't have the kind of training that we have who is very unlikely to understand the tests even when we explain them some people can and you know veteran teachers of course know a lot and and whatnot but for the average parent even know well educated sophisticated in other areas parents they I think we forget sometimes just how strange our tests are I mean I was just yeah listening tonight and we were also there was a sidebar conversation about how having your voice is very soothing it were like books and things like that but you know I mean the writing is just beautiful and I'm thinking like how in mining I like I'm gonna need some work to do this but it is so much more consumable and engaging and it yeah it does read like you said like a story like I feel like I've you know I'm opening up a novel and an interesting novel to is something that I'm you know if this was about my kid I would I would be like totally glued to you know and yeah we mostly write these reports that that our jargon filled and our it's it would be hard I think to shift out of that one when you're like me and whack some writing skill but I think that that's a worth of Iolande endeavor like I think that's really cool I just enjoyed listening to that thank you I I'd like to say that I came to this possession this position you sort of all on my own but other people have been saying very similar things as I've said but the thing that really drove home was when I started supervising graduate students and they were imitating the style that I was writing in and I saw just how tone-deaf it all was and I didn't realize how bad my own writing was and it's like oh gosh this is horrible to read I'm bored and I'm confused and I can't keep all these details straight in my head what chance does anyone else have and I started taking a long hard look about you know like what what can I do to to make this more consumer-friendly and I'd love to be able to say that you know a week's reflection fixed all the problems it didn't it's just every every every report I identify new things like why am I doing this like that's a weird way of saying it and I just look back at old habits and it's they're all over the place and they're invisible to me right now I I often say to my students that I work with I want to curse you for the rest of your career with being a little embarrassed with reports you wrote five years ago the if you are it means that you've grown since then and you're continually growing and so I I'm continually embarrassed by my old reports and I hope that I always am that's great we we had a viewer question who and she asks I was under the impression that to be legally reliable we have to describe the score so I've never thought of explanation to type of narrative style for a report sure you if you feel that it is your legal obligation then you should do what you think is best there are some alternatives to what I just did and one of them is to put that in a summary and then you know put that put the rest in a technical appendix described away all you need to but make it clear that that is a technical component and that the average reader is not required to to follow every twist and turn of the explanation yeah I like that idea a lot I think I have seen that one time where the subtests are described really clearly at the end I think that would make it better for the parent especially who I think is one of the most important people in this room I've seen innovations in which they split the report down the middle and some one column is the technical side and the other column is the reader friendly side another alternative is to use footnotes or side notes so that you can have a narrative approach but document the scores as you go but look where where did I get this and then you can put it in a and footnotes in side notes in that so you meet that obligation to explain whatever it is you think you need to explain I tend not to do that and you know so far knock on what else ok and other people have told me that they don't always explain all the the test results that they are giving a a final evaluation in the end and this is I I doubt very much that anyone who's seeking an evaluation says you know what I'm really looking for is a bunch of continuous variables don't we understand this we have dr. Kevin McGrew in our chat and he comments that most of us were trained to make sure other psychologists understand our interpretation and they think that's true we kind of write reports for each other sometimes yeah so this is an example where psychologists are not failing to meet the reads of the reader they're succeeding at something else which is you know writing for the next professional or something like that and that often interferes with the goal of clarity for you know parents and teachers [Music] I how much time do we have I can't see my clock well we are at 8:47 so we're good wrap you into a second uh second one if you're a fear will I wait sure so I'll put in my cloak plug for making you reports beautiful that I see a lot of reports that look like this and this is the typographical equivalent of this that it might be time for makeover although this look was rad a tea sky and uploaded my plug for making your reports beautiful by reading this book it's free and it's online practical typography and I'll just say that people are not in a position to judge you know the technical merits of what we do but they are in a position to people it off by sloppiness and so that when you create a professionally polished report that they it's a signal that you didn't cut corners and other aspects of the report of the assessment process either and so I always work hard to make sure that my reports look nice so instead of this you get something like this where people feel like they're in good hands so are there other other questions or I could keep going I think you can keep going there's this right plus let's just move along here good paper nice pen I always put my reports in a in a sleeve so that it's it's it's going to be available to the next professional that this is this is a way of signaling that this document matters and it means something and it shouldn't just be shoved in a drawer to keep company with you know you know expired coupons and things like that when when Ellen and needing Kauffman asked if I would join the to revisit the essentials of assessment report writing book the second edition our first plan of attack was to just you know update some of the tests and and and our big innovation was to ask seasoned professionals that we admired to contribute their assessment reports that were annotated with their decision making process along the way we started asking ourselves some fundamental questions and I I like these kinds of questions we were I liked the title of the assess the essentials series that it's get down to the essence of what things are and so I started asking myself questions like wait a minute why do reports even exist at all what why couldn't you just have engaging conversations we've got the technology we could have have it transcribed and just you know have a transcribed report and that's we could be done with it I wasn't questioning the value of assessment but like why the report and I was reminded of this quote by Susan Sontag what I write is smarter than I am because I can rewrite it or as writing expert Peter elbow said think of writing not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message writing is a way to end up thinking something you couldn't have started out thinking and I I started thinking about yeah that that this the writing is a way to clarify your thinking in ways that you probably couldn't do just on the fly in a conversation and so if you can use the assessment report writing process as a way to write something that is literally smarter than you are you are making good use of your time and everyone else's a lot of people think that bad writing is liking or not understanding grammar and stuff like that these are my this is my Horror Show of grammar errors this is not actually what stands in our way even if you have lots of grammatical errors you're usually perfectly well understood the problem usually is that we do a kind of data dump onto the page and we're telling the story of what happened to us rather than thinking about what is the reader need I'll skip along here one of the books that helped me write better had completely trained transformed the way that I thought about writing was this wonderful book called clear and simple as the truth and the idea is that you use ordinary language to address an intelligent and competent non-specialists reader as if we're having a conversation directing the readers gaze to that which was previously unknown by the reader but can now be seen by both and the metaphors that prose is a window to the world and you're standing shoulder to shoulder with your reader and the reader doesn't know all the things you know but once you direct their gaze out into the window into the world that they can see something just as well as you can now and that you're equally in possession of the truth and that there's a leveling between the expert and the person who's reading and I love this metaphor of standing shoulder to shoulder looking out into the world together that you're just I'm showing you what I'm seeing and and when I hold that this metaphor I write much much better reports but I'm not thinking about like how do I document this thing instead of how can I communicate to someone who's standing shoulder to shoulder who can't give me feedback right now because I'm writing but someone who who can be led through my interpretation in a way that that communicates something useful and true I in this book they talk about some some classic writers who were especially good at this and I'll leave it to readers of the book to discover some of these things but I did want it forward along too [Music] there's a kind of level one interpretation like all know Renaldo was quite shy he's well liked by his peers in part because he's a good athlete and is extremely polite his teachers describe him as very mature for his age there's nothing wrong with this kind of statement except that everyone he knows Renaldo already knows all of this instead if I'm if I've been listening attentively in and observing and carefully trying to figure out what what do other people not already know then I can give people a view of Renaldo that they wouldn't otherwise see something like compared to other adolescents Renaldo was unusually well-mannered and formal with both teachers in his peers for example he makes it a point to formally introduce himself to teachers and other adults with a firm handshake addressing them with respectful titles pleased to meet you mr. Hampton sir is sometimes over-the-top old-fashioned courtesy is seen by his peers as quirky but harmless and in some ways endearing his peers can count on Renaldo for an endlessly warm good morning to you and how are you this fine day Renaldo is indeed warm-hearted but also much higher than he first appears at first appears in the classroom and on the sports field he can relax because this role is clear at all times when faced with an unstructured social situation interaction he is easily overwhelmed by the fast-paced banter of his peers he worries constantly about saying the wrong thing and becoming the object of ridicule he's found that being formal and polite is a kind of safe script to follow whenever he would otherwise feel awkward unfortunately what saves him from feeling anxious and vulnerable prevents him from developing closer relationships because Renaldo treats everyone and almost exactly the same friendly but relentlessly formal manner his friendliness does not win him close friends and for a long time having friendly acquaintances was enough for Renaldo in the last year he has felt increasingly lonely and here I'm trying to offer something that a teacher a parent might not see about Ronaldo that just because Ronaldo isn't causing trouble doesn't mean that he doesn't need help that ronaldo's in becoming increasingly depressed and anxious and falling behind in school but because he's friendly and he's warm and he's polite he might not get attention and in this report I'm trying to to get others to take an interest in Ronaldo that's really beautiful I had a thought though is this is this part of your report that you would kind of check out with the student yes right yeah so I should have clarified that this is this is like this is already vetted with with Ronaldo with his parents that as we're going I would I would never write something that is is this intimate without his consent it's great I of course have many other things that I could say but oh I think we're out of time is that right reflecting on something you said dr. Schneider there's a literacy professor named routine Sims bishop dr. Minnie Bishop and she talks about literacy as being a window a mirror and a sliding door and it just you know the the that each piece that the mirror can reflect my culture the window allows me to reflect on other people's cultures and the sliding door allows me to walk in someone else's shoes and she speaks more to literature in the classroom and stuff reminds me of that have any met that's beautiful yeah I've often like when I recruit students to be in in counseling I often think that training in in literature and in theater is often better training for the helping professions and psychology major is that you're spending a lot of time inhabited the mind of others both heroes and villains and in between I mean I'm just yeah I mean I mean on and I kind of feel like if you were to write a fiction book - I would love to like Ronaldo right now and I'm like yeah I'm Ronaldo is fiction I mean there there is uh uh although deep several layers back but yeah this is a I I want the best for Ronaldo - so yeah last call for any comments if anybody has anything to say but I've just been seeing yeah lots of people kind of mulling this over and thinking about we've had some comments let's see I want to see if I can pick a couple maybe to highlight but Courtney said something about she needs to go back and improve one sentence or one paragraph just a little bit that our time is well spent yeah cuz I'm all my reports I mean they look like explanation one for sure for your what I'm putting out and now I'm like wow yeah explanation - is something that I aspire to but the pole of explanation one is very strong and I haven't weeded out all elements of it from my current approach yeah yeah and I think that it goes back to to what you were saying about assessment is kind of you know you do it when it's necessary when it when all else fails and so it's not the type of thing you can't write you know 100 evaluations in that man or a year like you would just not be able to physically do it so you have to kind of reserve it for you know you test when you need to test and if you don't need to test them don't test yeah right and I think you can acquire the reputation of the kind of report writer that when you spend the time to write a little extra that it's a signal that everyone needs to perk up and notice because you have earned that trust by you know being economical with your prose elsewhere and that that that when you take the time to really engage with this this this one kid that has had quite a difficult time but it's time to listen alright I'm not seeing any other Courtney says she's an overachiever so it's just we're gonna that I don't see any other questions so thank you so much for taking the time and we'd like to I think try and rope you into a part two at some point so we can get I would love that yeah yeah that the the conversation can continue obviously I've got a lot of slides I always come with too much but I'll show you that for for for greater detail that this book was published last year and that Liz lichtenberger Nancy Mather Nadine Kaufman and I worked really hard on it and tried to make every sentence worth reading and we were joined by a number of other professionals who volunteered their time and produce gorgeously beautiful reports and John Willis contributed a whole extra chapter which was an incredible gift Wow yeah he's great yeah very cool ok thank you so much we're gonna wrap up I want to remind everybody that I looks like we'll be back on eleven three and we'll have dr. Lisa Kelly Vance on to talk about early childhood so we look forward to seeing everybody everybody everyone