Leaders are essential to formative assessment implementation and scale. They are responsible for developing, communicating, and supporting a new vision for both teacher and student roles, to model new ways of learning among adults, and to create adult learning conditions that encourage adults to explore evidence of their own learning. These resources provide guidance, examples, prompts, and progression tools to support leader dialogue and exploration of these new ways of working.
Lessons Learned in Leading Formative Assessment: A Leadership Framework
This brief outlines lessons learned in the ‘How I Know’ project and details five specific characteristics of leaders whose sites had successful and sustained formative assessment implementation.
Guiding Questions for Leading Formative Assessment
This template offers guiding questions for leaders to use as a self-assessment or in dialogue with peers, to explore their use of the five principles in WestEd’s Formative Assessment Leadership Framework.
Teacher Stages of Development in Formative Assessment
What does it look like as teachers develop formative assessment knowledge and skills? This table captures qualitative data collected over multiple WestEd projects to conceptualize teachers’ shift in mindset and practice.
Supporting Teachers at Four Stages of Formative Assessment Learning
Designed for leaders, this resource gives an overview of how teacher learning develops in formative assessment and offers strategies leaders can use to strengthen teacher practices as their learning develops over time.
Launching Demonstration Sites and Lab Classrooms
To sustain and spread formative assessment, districts can benefit from having models of practice within their own schools and classrooms. This guidance is designed to support districts to launch these efforts.
Culture of Learning to Support Student Agency
This reflection tool offers a synthesis of Menucha Birenbaum’s (2012) research on the characteristics of school and classroom learning cultures — essential elements in successful formative assessment implementation.
Necessary Conditions for Successful Implementation of Formative Assessment
This resource describes three conditions that are essential to sustaining formative assessment and has been used to guide elements of program design.