You're Telling The Story: How to develop useful assessments for learning in early childhood (Basic Skills: Language Conventions)

You're Telling the Story provides early childhood educators with practical, user-friendly strategies for making documentation work for them, enabling them to work smarter, not harder, while improving teaching practice and outcomes for children. The documentation created for children needs to tell a story. To have authenticity, it needs to show a sense of place, time and continuity - the practice of making links to previous learning behaviours or actions. Learning stories provide the ingredients of the history of a child as a learner and enable us to see what is actually occurring. The learning stories in this book are all written to the child, not about them, leading to a powerful way of rethinking about assessment.

Janet Moles was a senior lecturer of education (early childhood) and course director in the School of Education at Deakin University. She has had extensive experience teaching in early childhood education settings in New Zealand, and has taught in the polytechnic and university sectors, teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as supervising higher degree research students.

Her research work has focused on multicultural perspectives in curriculum development to create learning environments that incorporate the funds of knowledge of children, families and communities. This drew on her PhD research, which sought to increase the voice of ethnic minority preservice teachers.
Janet has taken leadership roles in many early childhood service types including education and care, special education and kindergarten. This led to her forming her own company to provide centre-based professional development for in-service teachers, specialising in curriculum development, learning stories, leadership and program evaluation.