ABSTRACT
The author's goal is to give her students tools to assess their own students' reading and to empower them to critically interpret assessment and make informed pedagogical and curricular decisions targeting their students' needs. She work to give teachers the autonomy and authority of analyzing students' literacy practices rather than allowing them to rely on the state or corporations to tell them about students' reading and writing needs. The author's experience and perspective on diagnosis inform how she teaches reading assessment in teacher education. In her classes with preservice teachers, she teach and model for her students how to think critically about diagnosis and to consider its potential effects on students' self-efficacy or beliefs in their ability to succeed or accomplish a task. Moreover, the diagnostic process is based on a linear model of locating student abilities somewhere in a field of emergent skills.
