Learning Record Project Principals

Any project of this scope takes many hands, eyes, brains, and hearts. Here are the principals who originally researched and developed the Learning Record. Further, thousands of teachers, administrators, researchers, and students have contributed to the development and refinement of the Learning Record in actual use for both classroom and large-scale assessment.

Mary A. Barr, Ph.D. directed the Center for Language Learning from its inception in 1994 until 2001, when the Leave No Child Behind Act mandated standardized testing in all schools, which established competition among schools for scarce resources. The Center maintained a network of teacher leaders, experienced in the use of the Learning Record in their own classrooms, who informed its development and served as coaches to faculties using the Learning Record. Dr. Barr passed away in 2015. She co-authored many books, journal articles, and videos, including Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record: A Handbook for Teachers, Grades 6-12; and Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record: A Handbook for Teachers, Grades K-6.

Dr. Myra Barrs was until recently Co-Director of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). She has worked as a teacher, a publisher, an adviser, and a consultant in the UK, the USA and Canada. Myra Barrs is co-author and editor of many publications, including the Primary Language Record Handbook, The Reading Book, Whole to Part Phonics, Boys and Writing, The Reader in the Writer and Boys on the Margin. She produced the CLPE video series Learning to be Literate. Other publications include books on assessment, such as Words Not Numbers and Record-Keeping in the Primary School. She has written many articles for academic journals and professional journals on topics including assessment, children’s writing, gender and literacy, and imaginative play. Her research interests included children’s writing and its links with other ways of symbolizing meaning.

Margaret A. Syverson, Ph.D. is a Carnegie Fellow and an associate professor emerita of Rhetoric and Writing, and past Director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab and the Undergraduate Writing Center (now the University Writing Center) at the University of Texas at Austin. This experience enabled her to perfect and expand the use of the Learning Record beyond K-12 for college and postgraduate level courses. The Learning Record was incorporated first into her dissertation, which received two national awards, and which was published as The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition . Her work on the Learning Record was the focus of a large-scale DARPA grant (with John Slatin) for a project evaluating online learning. Her article “Social Justice and Evidence-Based Assessment with the Learning Record,” was published in the Forum on Public Policy, and “An Ecological View of Literacy,” was published in the UK journal Literacy . With Mary Barr she was co-author of Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record: A Handbook for Teachers, Grades 6-12; Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record: A Handbook for Teachers, Grades K-6.

Dana A. Craig taught first through fifth grade for many years in California and in Oregon. A charter member of the Learning Record's teacher network, Craig led district staff development in assessment and was an experienced on-site Learning Record coach.

The principal of a primary school, Dolores Fisette was an experienced Learning Record coach and a member of the Learning Record's teacher network. She used her experience as a reading specialist and language arts coordinator to design a model for districtwide implementation of the Learning Record.