John Myers has been a curriculum instructor at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto since October 1994. He has taught elementary, secondary and university level programs in Ontario, New Brunswick and British Columbia. He has also done education work in the United States and New Zealand. His presentation, publication and research interests are relatively broad, including multicultural and anti-racist education, group processes in the classroom including cooperative, collaborative and other democratic approaches, classroom assessment and teacher development at both the pre-service and in-service levels. Myers is also the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters in the areas of teacher development, assessment and evaluation and curriculum, many of which have been co-authored with teachers in elementary and secondary schools and across a range of subjects, including science and language arts.

Damian Cooper is an independent education consultant specializing in helping schools and school districts improve their instructional and assessment skills. He has been a secondary English, Special Education, and Drama teacher, a department head, a librarian, a school consultant and a curriculum developer. He has specialized in student assessment more than twenty years. Damian served as assessment consultant to the School Division of Nelson Education where he worked on the development of assessment principles and strategies for a wide variety of K-12 resources. Prior to that appointment, he was Co-ordinator of Assessment and Evaluation for the Halton District School Board in Burlington, Ontario. Cooper has worked under contract to the Ministry of Education and the Assessment Training Consortium on a variety of projects. He was co-developer of the Ontario Assessment Instrument Pool (OAIP) for students in vocational programs, an initiative that introduced the concept of visual targets to educators in this province. He also served on the executive of the Association of Educational Researchers of Ontario (AERO) from 1997-2002. Cooper and his partner Nanci Wakeman co-authored both Getting Assessment Right: Language and Getting Assessment Right: Mathematics for Data-Based Directions. Damian's latest project is Talk About Assessment: Strategies and Tools to Improve Learning, a resource that includes text, DVD and CD-ROM.

Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behaviour, education and parenting. He has written eleven books, including No Contest: The Case Against Competition, The Schools Our Children Deserve, Unconditional Parenting, and The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of A Bad Thing. His criticisms of competition and rewards have been widely discussed and debated. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two children.