Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Grade Level: High School (9-12)

How School Administrators Can Support and Promote Formative Assessment

Reflecting on the How I Know initiative in the Dallas Independent School District, Susan Villani writes about her work with administrators and educators to implement formative assessment practices into school cultures and practices. In this article, Villani focuses on the most powerful strategies that school administrators utilized to support implementation of formative assessment practices into educators’ instruction. Villani writes about five main leadership strategies:

  • Learning about formative assessment so they could be leaders.
  • Listening to the pilot teachers and students to find out what they need.
  • Letting Go of a current way of doing something to make room for a new way.
  • Lingering to observe and learn from each other.
  • Lighting the Way by inviting other teachers to observe pilot classrooms.

As school leaders and educators consider how to implement, and eventually scale up, formative assessment as part of instructional culture, these leadership practices can be valuable considerations for developing action plans.

Ethnic Studies Legislation: State Scan

Reviewing state efforts to develop and implement curricula that reflects and affirms students’ racial and ethnic identities, Sylvia Kwon from the Region 15 Comprehensive Center developed this summary of recent and ongoing states’ ethnic studies legislation. For the purposes of this scan, “ethnic studies” encompasses coursework that purposefully reflects and supports students’ identities. Kwon examines state legislative initiatives (enacted between February 2019 and January 2021) that require ethnic studies to be incorporated into K–12 standards or curricula.

Kwon’s scan details legislative efforts in 19 states, along with summarizing the legislation’s implementation timeline.

Lessons Learned About Leading the Implementation of Formative Assessment: A Framework for School Leaders and Leadership Teams

When teachers and students share the responsibility for learning, students become active agents in their own learning who respond to feedback, set learning goals, track their progress, and adapt their own learning strategies when needed.

Formative assessment provides a clear path forward to this kind of teaching and learning experience, and site leadership is critical for creating the conditions needed for formative assessment to take root.

This brief provides a framework for how leaders can go about doing this, highlighting five leadership practices that appear to enhance the implementation:

  • Fostering understanding of formative assessment
  • Communicating a vision for formative assessment that highlights expected changes in the student role
  • Modeling a culture of learning in which adult learners, like student learners, use evidence from and get feedback on daily practice to guide their own learning
  • Leading site-based professional learning in which teachers engage with new content and build shared capacity to implement formative assessment
  • Nurturing the conditions necessary for the changes associated with implementing and scaling formative assessment

WestEd’s Standards‐to‐Standards Alignment and Evaluation Studies

WestEd’s content and assessment experts are available to conduct standards-to-standards alignment studies, which provide: findings to meet rigorous evidence requirements, such as federal peer review guidelines; and key feedback that contributes to quality content standards. This service is available for a range of grade levels and content areas.

WestEd’s Item‐to‐Standards Alignment Studies

WestEd’s content and assessment experts are available to conduct curriculum-to-standards alignment studies, which provide: findings to meet rigorous evidence requirements, such as federal peer review guidelines; and key feedback that contributes to quality assessments. This service is available for a range of grade levels and content areas.

WestEd’s Curriculum‐to‐Standards Alignment Studies

WestEd’s content and assessment experts are available to conduct curriculum-to-standards alignment studies, which provide: findings on the alignment between local curricula and state content standards, and key feedback that contributes to quality standards-based curricula. This service is available for a range of grade levels and content areas.