From an Intermediate in Teaching to the Superior Ego of an Evaluator: The Complexity of Evaluating without Labeling

In 1995, in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte — in a corner that, at the time, seemed more rural than capital —, I made a decision that would shape my entire professional path: I decided to enter 1st Degree Teaching. I was just a young man fascinated by the possibility of teaching, but since those early years, a restlessness silently haunted me: What are we doing when we evaluate someone?

Thirty years have passed. I followed academic paths, worked in the clinic, in teaching and in coordination. However, today, faced with the conceptual vastness of Education, I humbly feel like the same learner I was in 1995. The difference is that, today, I understand that the pedagogical maturity we have achieved in recent years has brought us something essential: respect for the subjectivity of those who learn.

The weight of the word "criterion" and the illusion of proof

Assessing, in essence, should be an act of acceptance. The keyword here is process. However, when we try to translate this process into "criteria", something strange happens. The word criterion it often carries an authoritarian, almost repressive tone. Who sets the criteria? Under what level of satisfaction do we decide that a human being has proven that he or she has learned?

And the most fundamental question: Does he really need to prove it?

The recent history of Brazilian education was also shaped by technicality. This industrial approach was excessively concerned with preparing individuals for the job market, standardizing behaviors and classifying minds through grades and exclusion exams. In this factory mold, there was very little space left to encourage the joy of living, the pleasure of interacting socially and the expression of individual powers.

This criticism of bureaucratization and the coldness of technical productivity criteria is deeply discussed by Dermeval Saviani, creator of Historical-Critical Pedagogy. Saviani argues that technicality dehumanizes the educational act by subordinating teachers and students to instrumental and bureaucratic goals:

"In technical pedagogy, the process defines the action, leaving the teacher and the student to carry out pre-planned tasks. It is a rational organization of means, where efficiency and productivity become ends in themselves, emptying the educational relationship of its political and human dimension."

—Dermeval Saviani

The great philosopher of education Cipriano Luckesi precisely points out this distortion by differentiating the act of examine of the act of to assess:

"The exam is classificatory and exclusionary; it looks at the past, judges and labels the student between those who are useful and those who are not useful for the market. The assessment is diagnostic and inclusive; it looks at the present to plan the future, welcoming the student where they are and helping them to take the next step."

— Cipriano Luckesi

When standardization prevails, a person's expertise becomes measured by their usefulness in the market, and not by the genuine satisfaction and internal joy they feel when discovering the world.

Mediative listening and respect for individuality

Each student brings with them a unique channel of interpretation of the world, full of their interests, traumas, experiences and passions. If we ignore how significant a subject is for the student's concrete life, the assessment becomes just a mechanical task of short-term memorization.

That's what Jussara Hoffmann, defender of Mediator Assessment, calls it a commitment to the student’s becoming:

"Evaluating is not testing to assign a grade that ends the dialogue. Evaluating is establishing a relationship of mediation, an attentive listening that provokes the student to reflect, respecting their time of maturation and their unique ways of constructing knowledge."

—Jussara Hoffmann

Mediating assessment invites us to abandon ready-made answers and focus on the paths the student took to reach a certain conclusion.

The EGO and the Supremacy of the Evaluator

Here lies the greatest danger for us, educators, educational psychologists and many other professionals dedicated to human development. When we wear the mantle of evaluators, it is extremely easy to fall into the trap of EGO supremacy. The ego whispers to us that because we are in the position to apply the test or define the criteria, we are intellectually or morally superior to the person being evaluated.

This is dangerous self-deception. The evaluator who believes he is more intelligent or superior to the person being evaluated has already lost the ability to educate. True pedagogical intelligence is not in pointing out the error or classifying the failure, but in the sensitivity of discovering how that mind works and in the ethical respect of placing oneself as a partner on the journey, and not as the supreme judge.

If there's anything that these thirty years of walking have taught me, it's that learning assessment only makes sense if it serves to expand lives, and not to limit destinies. May we look at our students with the curiosity and respect that the young teacher from 1995 had at the beginning of his journey. After all, in the school of life, we are all eternal learners in the same classroom.