She Likes to Dance 💃
What a nursery school report card can teach us about being seen
“You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen. Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine, oh yeah.” ABBA (are these lyrics creepy????)
When I was 4 years old, I was a student at the Carson Valley Nursery School in Chestnut Hill, Pa.1
This was a little sweet school that happened on a farm not far from Philadelphia. It was lovely. I remember getting to sit in big piles of hay and somehow lots of sunshine. And I remember wearing little dresses there, and picking strawberries (which may or may not have happened.)
We also had some form of report cards that listed skills like “Knows numbers from 1-10“ or, “Can tie shoes.” And teachers rated them from “not yet” to “working on it” to “mastered.”
Most of these were early academic skills about numbers and letters and sitting in a circle, taking turns. But then there was an arts category, with statements like, “Can sing in tune.”
My teachers, maybe they were progressive for the time, crossed out this line. And instead, they wrote in, “She likes to dance.” They even underlined dance.
And I think if you ask anyone who really knows me, they’d know this. It’s still true to this day, and even though it did not show up in the pre-determined card, they saw it.
They didn’t say I couldn’t sing (though I probably couldn’t). They didn’t try to fit me into a box where perfect notes were the only evidence of musical talent or engagement.
They noticed something else. They noticed me. My movement. My joy. My rhythm. My body’s instinct to respond to music with exuberant motion.
And then, they did something rare and radical: they let the report card flex. They made space for a new kind of metric. They saw a child instead of a checklist.
What if more educators felt free to do that?
The Big Idea
What if more teachers had the time, space, and trust to really see their students, and the freedom to reflect that seeing in the ways they assess and describe learning?
What if a report card wasn’t just a rigid form to be filled out, but a canvas for noticing? What if it was less about what boxes are checked, and more about what is revealed?
Do you think this could even be possible in schools, especially in earlier grades?
So often, education systems ask teachers to evaluate students using pre-defined criteria, skills that are legible, measurable, standardized. And how meaningful is this really, when children are learning to BE.
So much of who we are isn’t there.
Especially for the kids who don’t thrive in tidy rows or neat rubrics. Maybe they don’t sing in tune. But maybe they dance like nobody’s watching. Or light up when they solve a puzzle. Or hold eye contact with empathy well beyond their years.
What might school feel like if we elevated those forms of knowing?
What if educators could rewrite the evaluation criteria?
Or, alternatively, we could find ways to support the process of writing learning narratives that provide stories rather than benchmarks against pre-determined non-magical criteria.
Making Big Ideas Usable
Imagine if we let teachers be not just transmitters of content but co-authors of the metrics themselves. If we trusted their relationships with children. Their observations. Their insight.
What if instead of squeezing every learner through the same narrow keyhole, we made room for the many ways people can show growth, joy, brilliance, or connection?
What if singing in tune wasn’t the measure of a “musical child”? What if the metric was dancing?
Is this happening anywhere? Because I don’t see it.
I still like to dance. Not in the trained, performative sense. But in the turn-up-the-music, socks-on-hardwood kind of way. I actually LOVE it.
And maybe that’s what’s most powerful: that my teachers noticed something enduring in me, not just a skill, but a way of being in the world.
What if school let more kids be seen that way?
What if we allowed the space for children to surprise us and for teachers to capture that surprise, even when it doesn’t fit the form? What would change if evaluation wasn’t about compliance with standards but connection to self?
Maybe we’d build a world where learning is a dance. Where we don’t just ask if someone can keep a tune, but consider whether and how well we’ve tuned into them.
After all, being seen may be the first true curriculum. And for me, it started with an underlined word: dance.
Thinking more about this with these resources
📚 Books
The Future of Smart: How Our Education System Needs to Change to Help All Young People Thrive by Ulcca Joshi Hansen
Challenges traditional measures of learning and advocates for a more human-centered, developmental approach.Rethinking Assessment in Education: The Shift from Assessment of Learning to Assessment for Learning by David Carless
For a deeper dive into how feedback and evaluation can empower rather than reduce.
🎧 Videos
Revisionist History (Malcolm Gladwell) – “My Little Hundred Million”
Examines what we measure in education—and what we might be missing.
📰 Articles
Narrative Report Cards: What We Learn When We Write Stories About Students – Cult of Pedagogy
Real-world examples of schools experimenting with storytelling instead of standardization.
This story was shared previously as a note, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit more as school ended for the yr.