Review of Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers: Pathways to Partnerships, Moss-Doong, W. (2025, December 17). Review of Collaborative assessment for multilingual learners and teachers: Pathways to partnerships, by M. Gottlieb & A. Honigsfeld. Education Review, 32. https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v32.4151 December 17, 2025 ISSN 1094-5296 Gottlieb, M., & Honigsfeld, A. (2024). Collaborative assessment for multilingual learners and teachers: Pathways to partnerships. Corwin. 200 pp. ISBN: 9781071930861 Reviewed by Wendy Moss-Doong Utah State University United States Imagine a school, or a classroom, where students of all different cultures, backgrounds, and who speak many different languages, come together to learn, help each other learn, and help their teacher understand them. Imagine a classroom where assessment is not given in the form of paper-and- pencil tests, but is interactive, multi-modal, and gives students not only a voice, but a choice in how they show their learning. The days of the old, desks-in-rows classrooms are over, and students work together with teachers to create projects that show off not only their content knowledge, but their language acquisition skills. This is the future that Margo Gottlieb and Andrea Honigsfeld paint in Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers. To start, the authors emphasize that it is absolutely imperative that teachers approach their multilingual students with an asset- based, rather than a deficit-based view. A diverse student body brings with it not only a multitude of experiences, but valuable background knowledge that can help them learn the content in the classroom setting. The authors offer a poignant example of third-grader students translanguaging during a collaborative math activity, showing their strength as learners and multilingual individuals. Assessment can take many forms. The authors make the distinction between three different types of assessment, and point out the important of each throughout several chapters of the book. These three types of assessment are based on different interactions within a classroom or grade-level system. Assessment as learning is the collaboration between students, where they achieve knowledge through working together on complex or problem-based tasks. This mode of assessment requires that the focus moves from teacher-centered, to teacher-guided, and finally student-initiated. This includes student self-assessment of educational goals, aided by learner portfolios and learner profiles made at the beginning of the year. https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v32.4151 Education Review / Reseñas Educativas / Resenhas Educativas 2 Assessment for learning is assessment that centers around teacher and student interactions, including co-created rubrics to assess student progress toward their goals. There is an emphasis here on technology, as well as creative ways that teachers can utilize technology in the classroom, such as video, audio, or text online commenting. This is also offered as an easy way to share student assessment data and progress with families, since the assessment is already digital. Assessment of learning is what we think of as traditional assessment: tests, quizzes, or rubric-based assessments created with other teachers in a PLC-type setting. The focus is on constructing criteria for success and student evidence of learning to be shared in a continuous cycle of assessment and feedback. While these can be teacher-team created, the authors point out that there are resources for this type of assessment that are commercially available and may already be built into district policy. Student-led conferences are explored, with an example outline of how to prepare students to lead their parents through conferences. The ideas presented by the authors are good practice and well researched and referenced. Students should absolutely have a voice and a choice in their learning and the presentation of their learning. Parents should be equal partners in their child’s education, because they are their child’s first teachers. It is critical for students to be introduced to the idea of metacognition, so they can be aware of their own learning and their own progress; and student-set goals are important, so they have something to work toward. Ideally, teachers on the same team should meet to discuss not only common assessments, but success criteria, and meet again after a unit of study to share data and make adjustments for the future. All of these are worthy goals. However, there is a significant lack of time in any educator’s day for meeting with teammates; and there is even less time in class for constructing new co-created rubrics every year, in addition to covering the content standards required. Implementing all the ideas in the book would require an almost insurmountable amount of time that would need to be spent both within and outside of class. There are some tables and charts with helpful ideas included, but other examples that might be helpful are what a learner profile looks like, or different ideas for multimodal assessment within content areas. Creating those things from scratch would be a significant burden on a teacher, who may not think they are doing it correctly. In addition to the creation of these new tools, the focus on things like a class newsletter, blog, or other information source may simply be out of reach for most teachers who do not have additional support in their classrooms or time to create such things. A significant portion of the last chapter is about parents and including them in the educational and assessment process. The value that concerned parents bring to an education system cannot be overstated. One venue to achieving this end is bilingual liaisons, which may or may not be a resource available to teachers in every district. However, the authors include a checklist in the form of the ten I’s, which any teacher can work toward adding to their own classroom. The point is well made that assessment happens beyond the classroom and involves all stakeholders for the well- being of the students. Review of Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers 3 Students show us every day how well they have learned the content we have taught them. We need to be prepared to listen and assess them, even if it is not on a written exam, especially multilingual learners. We, as educators, should value students’ interactions with ourselves and with each other as they navigate the learning process and work toward mastery of their learning objectives. This book is a fresh take on the traditional modes of assessment and the one-size-fits-all assessment strategies that are still so prevalent in our schools. About the Reviewer Wendy Moss-Doong is in her 11th year of teaching and has taught math at every grade level from 4th through 12th. She is in her second year of her PhD program in mathematics education at Utah State University. She is a big fan of the Building Thinking Classrooms instructional and assessment framework, and has been implementing it in her own classroom for the past three years, with great success. Her research is primarily focused on the Thinking Classrooms assessment model, so all things assessment are of special interest to her. She resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her five amazing children, ranging in age from 0 to 15 years old, and her incredibly supportive husband who believes in her dreams. About the Book Authors Margo Gottlieb, PhD, is co-founder and lead developer for WIDA at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and former director, assessment and evaluation, at the Illinois Resource Center. She has devoted her professional career to improving educational opportunities for multilingual learners, their teachers and other educational leaders. Over the years she has been a language teacher and coordinator, a bilingual facilitator, a director of assessment and evaluation, and a consultant to school districts, states, publishers, governments, universities, and organizations. Andrea Honigsfeld is a professor in the School of Education and Human Services at Molloy University, Rockville Centre, New York, where she teaches graduate courses related to cultural and linguistic diversity, language and literacy development, and equity. Before entering the field of teacher education, she was an English teacher in Hungary, an English-as-a-second-language teacher in New York City, and taught Hungarian at New York University. As a Fulbright Scholar, Andrea lectured in Iceland and has presented at conferences across the United States, Canada, China, Japan, Singapore, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. Education Review / Reseñas Educativas / Resenhas Educativas 4 Education Review / Reseñas Educativas / Resenhas Educativas is supported by the Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Readers are free to copy, display, distribute, and adapt this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Review, the changes are identified, and the same license applies to the derivative work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Disclaimer: The views or opinions presented in book reviews are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of Education Review.