264 CHAPTER 16 Student Assessment as an Opportunity to Learn In and From One’s Teaching Practice SUZANNE M . WILSON We had the experience but missed the meaning. —T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets The focus of this volume is ostensibly student assessment, includ- ing assessments used daily by teachers and those used to judge the effectiveness of teachers and schools. Yet in addition to students and their learning, teachers are everywhere in this volume: Teachers use the assessments, they adapt them to their curricula, they examine and react to student work. Teachers help author assessments, vet them as users and critics, and score student performances. They offer their classrooms as laboratories to test new assessments, change their prac- tices to accommodate them, and learn how to use data and data sys- tems in order to implement them. Indeed, perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the work these researchers report is how closely they have worked with teachers as collaborators and users. While many projects purposefully included teachers in the work, not all of the collaborations were intentional. As Smithson and Porter (Chapter 5) note, “This steady migration from the realm of policy to the realm of practice was not a deliberate goal on our part, but rather a response to a growing interest among educa- tors and administrators” (p. 124-25). Incidental, accidental, serendipi- tous, or intentional, it was the teachers’ omnipresence in these projects that I was most taken with. In particular, I was struck by the notion that as student assessment became a critical part of teachers’ practice, it might also have played an important role in how much teachers were learning from their everyday experiences. Suzanne M. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University and senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.