ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with how agentive teachers can reframe their interactions with high stakes test preparation and reframe conversations around testing. First, we briefly report on a genre study of testing we developed as test preparation units.33 Next, we illustrate how, when test pressures increased, we took working with the test in another direction. We leveraged overwhelming interest in the tests to draw attention to what counts as rich pedagogy and curriculum for all students. Borrowing Lucy Calkins’ mini-lesson architecture,34 we rewrote our test preparation units in language that changed the dynamic from helping students prepare for the test to helping teachers rethink and reframe their language of instruction, which in this unit was the language during test preparation.
