Amplifying Student Agency with Formative Assessment
Danny Torres in conversation with Nancy Gerzon, Franchesca Warren, and Cali Kaminsky, all experts with WestEd’s Formative Insights team.
Nancy Gerzon:
At the heart of formative assessment is a belief in the students and the communities that we partner with and their ability as a system to learn and grow. This idea that learning is for all of us is something that’s central to our belief system, that learning is something that we share as humanity, desire to learn, a desire to grow, and a desire to learn from one another.
Danny Torres:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national non-profit, non-partisan research development and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices, shaping innovations and developing equity driven supports for schools and communities across the country. My name is Danny Torres. I’ll be your host. Today, we’re here with three outstanding educators. Nancy Gerzon is project director for the Formative Insights team at WestEd. She has been at the forefront of developing scalable approaches to teacher-led learning formative assessment.
We also welcome Franchesca Warren, professional learning specialist on the Formative Insights team at WestEd. She has extensive experience in leading cross-functional teams, delivering professional learning for district and state partners, and we have Cali Kaminsky joining us. Cali is senior program associate for the Formative Insights team at WestEd. Cali leads state and district technical assistance and professional learning to support large-scale projects that expand and deepen teacher and leader agency through formative assessment. Our focus today, amplifying student agency through formative assessment. Nancy, Franchesca, and Cali, it’s great to have you with us.
Nancy Gerzon:
It’s great to be here.
Cali Kaminsky:
Thank you for having us, Danny.
Franchesca Warren:
Thank you.
Danny Torres:
Now, before we dive into today’s topic, let our listeners know how each of you came to this work and about the exciting work that you’re doing now.
Nancy Gerzon:
Glad to. WestEd has been working in formative assessment, and I’ve been doing that work with many, many colleagues across the agency for nearly 20 years. The work that we’ve been doing and why it’s so exciting to me is that it builds on my own interest and background and my passion, which is how people learn. My graduate work was in organizational development and systems change and thinking about how organizations support humans to grow and to really find passion and find a place of entry where they themselves can develop deep skills over time.
This is a way to do that in education for not just teachers, which we often see in professional learning, but also for students to learn in new ways, for teachers to gain agency over their learning, and for leaders to really think differently about how to create cultures of growth in their schools.
Danny Torres:
Franchesca?
Franchesca Warren:
Since joining the formative assessment team at WestEd, it’s really been just eye opening to see across the country and across the research across the world that says that if we give students agency over what they learn, they will learn it. They have the tools. I’ve really come to this point that I really believe that we get out of their way. We give them resources, we give them tools, and we trust them to ask the right questions. And teachers also. You’re not going in with the deficit mindset. You’re going in with, “the kids have it, how do we discover it?”
This is what’s needed. This is what’s needed right now to push us out of the compliance stage of just testing, testing, testing, and moving to assessment, and how do we use it to change what children will learn?
Danny Torres:
Cali?
Cali Kaminsky:
I’m Cali Kaminsky. I came to the WestEd team in March of 2021. Prior to that, I had a breadth of experience in the secondary space. I was leading state level secondary work, particularly focused around personalization, competency or proficiency based education, and pathway opportunities for students. One really interesting thing to me about this work, my team will think I’m a bit of a broken record here, but I really love the intersection of policy and practice and for this work to be able to work systems level with state and district leaders and the policies and the conditions that support formative assessment and student agency.
At the same time, often sometimes in the same day, being able to sit with classroom educators, sit with students and really understand how it’s playing out for them in the classroom is really exciting to me. And that’s something that keeps me excited and engaged in this work is being able to sit right at that intersection of policy and practice.
Danny Torres:
Let’s start by talking about what formative assessment actually is and how you define it, and then what exactly is student agency, and how does formative assessment lead to student agency, and how are they related?
Nancy Gerzon:
Formative assessment is a process of reasoning from evidence that is emerging during learning. It’s a process of making sense of how students communicate, show, demonstrate, what they know. The hope is that students have… we have an opportunity to be curious because students have the knowledge oftentimes, but if we are only looking for academic answers, we miss it. Formative assessment is a way of having evidence show up in the classroom in a lot of different ways. It’s creating really strong tasks where teachers know this is what this knowledge looks like as it’s emerging for this standard or for this learning goal.
Our work is to give expertise back to teachers, to create space in which teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge are the entry points for seeing what students know and can do. When we create space and structured opportunities for them in the classroom, teachers learn through formative assessment not just for more evidence to show up for more students more of the time, but how to turn that evidence into actionable steps. That’s first. Teachers have to learn how to do that.
As we move into years three and four of learning formative assessment, because it does take that long, what we see is the structures and routines in the classroom change significantly and students become the ones to use the evidence independently or with their peers. That’s a big definition. If we go back to that beginning statement, formative assessment is a process of reasoning from evidence, where students and teachers work in partnership, and feel comfortable, safe, and supported to talk about what they know and don’t know in ways that are going to move learning forward.
Cali Kaminsky:
Our team believes, and based on the research that we pull in to support our work that provides a foundation for our Formative Insights team work, we believe that three things in tandem support student agency, which was the second half of your question, Danny, so the formative assessment practices and routines that Nancy has just described, supporting greater student identity. The greater student identity in the classroom and classroom culture all support increased student agency.
For us, that means that students are thinking metacognitively about where they are, sort of just learning how to learn, that they’re confident in their learning, that they can use evidence to support where they are in their learning and what’s next, use evidence to support where their peers are in their learning to push their peers forward. That can happen with support of the teacher, but it’s really led by students and peers themselves in the classroom to know where they are in their learning and what comes next, and that they have a choice to make about that next step to move their learning forward.
For us, formative assessment combined with classroom culture and student identity really support increased student agency in the classroom.
Franchesca Warren:
I’d like to add to Cali and Nancy said is that I think something that’s really important here is the relationship between students and teachers working together. Many times when you go into traditional classrooms, the teacher holds the knowledge and the kids receive it. In formative assessment, that’s not the case. You’re working together, and students are finding new ways to self-regulate and to monitor their learning. And that’s huge. Classroom teachers will listen to this and say, “Oh my god, my kids can’t do that, or, oh my god, that’s scary.” That’s really scary sometimes, but that is where the magic happens.
When a student can notice and recognize and respond to their learning and figure out what they need to do to learn the materials or to progress in a way, that’s huge. That changes the conversation. It really makes kids be a part of the learning and not something that’s just happening to them. When you talk about formative assessment, I think that’s a big component that sometimes is lost, just that relationship, that culture in the classroom. Kids really taking the lead on developing ways to monitor their learning and self-regulating and saying, “You know what? I don’t really understand that. What can I do to really take a hold of this new learning that I’ve been introduced to?”
Danny Torres:
I wanted to just talk a little bit about the research behind formative assessment. Why is it important? How do we know it’s important? Why is student agency so important?
Nancy Gerzon:
The research that is foundational to formative assessment comes from many different sources inside and outside of educational research. We’ll start with some National Research Council publications, Knowing What Students Know and How People Learn, which identified ways in which we now understand cognition and learning that are not represented in the educational paradigm that Franchesca just described, which is a hierarchical relationship between teacher in charge and student compliant learning. This idea of developing a more horizontal relationship between students and teachers and changing the assessment paradigm has started in many places, but the National Research Council really put out a call to say formative assessment should be one of the solutions and here’s why it works.
But there’s many other forms of research that we use, and then our work is deeply informed by research on scale, by research on the teacher role in professional learning in formative assessment, by research on behavior, by research on metacognition, and by research on self-regulation, all of which speak to the critical role of developing classroom practices that strengthen students’ ability to use that evidence as a way to accurately assess and monitor their learning.
Danny Torres:
Most of the research literature around formative assessment appears to come from outside of the United States. Why aren’t we seeing more in the U.S.?
Nancy Gerzon:
As we look at the international research in formative assessment, we do see that a lot of this work comes from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. We have on our upcoming Leading Voices series, which will take place in October 2022, we have Menucha Birenbaum coming to meet with us from Israel, where she’s done extraordinary research on the issue of learning culture and its necessity in being present in order to support students to talk about what they don’t yet know and creating an environment of curiosity and inquiry in classrooms.
These stories of where formative assessment started is really rooted in national policy change related to having student-focused learning as a very central core of what’s happened. In some countries that’s gone away, and in some countries it’s pressed in. We see different timeframes. Like as we look over the last 25 years that formative assessment has been studied extensively, we see different efforts that have taken place and through policy levers have either amplified or reduced the impact of formative assessment in some of those countries. In the United States, the corollary is that we never had that policy lever.
We’ve kept steady to the policy lever of large-scale assessment and pushing down into issues related to benchmark assessments or still what we would call summative assessments, even though publishing companies or testing houses say, “That’s more formative,” but it isn’t. It doesn’t align with the research on formative assessment. I anticipate that over time there’ll be some research coming out saying that really hasn’t moved achievement. As we look at what’s happened here in the United States, it is in stark contrast to what is going on elsewhere from the research perspective, despite the fact that core researchers like the National Research Council have said this is critical practice and this should be in American classrooms.
Danny Torres:
On the Formative Insights website, there’s a series of great clips that showed district leaders, teachers, and students talk about your approach. In one of them, a third grade teacher, Annette Longchamp, says that “formative assessment isn’t something you just do on a Tuesday morning essentially. It’s something that you do every day. It’s ongoing.” I was curious to know what formative assessment, as you define it, looks like in the classroom and how it’s different than, say, experiential learning and other approaches to teaching?
Franchesca Warren:
For me, from a teaching perspective, it really positions students as capable learners. I think that’s huge. That’s different. I think Nancy touched on this a little bit before. When you look at policy in the United States and you look at very, I don’t want to say dogmatic, but very a testing-down culture that we’ve seen is that we start with “kids don’t know.” I think when you’re talking about formative assessment, you’re positioning kids as capable learners and information about what’s next in their learning, opposed to saying “this is what the kids don’t know and starting from there.”
I think it’s a mindset shift about what kids can do and using that to really push this idea, and I think Lori Shepherd talked about this a lot, is this idea of really ambitious teaching, right? And making sure that you start with that mindset. That’s a very different mindset than giving a child at the beginning of the year, “This is what you didn’t perform in. These are the areas that you’re lacking,” and it changes the conversation. For me, that’s a critical step as a teacher who’s looking to make that change, is thinking about it in those terms.
Cali Kaminsky:
I would agree in building off of what Franchesca has said is really thinking about that asset-based language and asset-based perspective in the classroom. A potential mantra of ours might be that all learning begins with what you know, and that is for students and for teachers as well. I think something that’s really different about formative assessment and implementing formative assessment practices is being really transparent with students in the classroom about why they’re learning what they’re learning and why they’re learning it that way.
And really thinking about using things like learning goals, success criteria, and others, to support students in understanding what they’re learning, why they’re learning it, and why the classroom is doing it in that particular way. When thinking about specific practices that happen in daily routines like peer feedback or teacher-student feedback, thinking about what are those routines that support students in understanding how they learn and what will move their learning forward.
Danny Torres:
Let’s talk about the students. I like to share a couple of audio clips from student interviews where high school students talk about the impact of your work. In these two clips, a theme emerged, this wonderful idea of diversity of thought, how listening to ideas from peers and teachers with different life experiences empowers the students and moves learning forward. Let’s hear their voices and then get your reaction to them.
Student 1:
I think one of the primary differences is that definitely aids with a diversity of thought. In other classes, it may be straightforward and it may seem that way. However, you don’t get as many of the differences. But especially when we look at pieces of literature, when we looked at Huck Finn or other stuff, we got great variety of different analysis. A lot of people had different ideas of what the satire meant at different points and how it affected the overall idea of the book and the themes.
Student:
One of the bigger differences I saw was just purely in how this class, we got peer advice, whereas in other classes we had teacher advice. Peers and teachers think different ways, because not only are we a different generation, but we both have different experiences in school and in life. If you’re just getting the teacher’s point of view, it’s very biased. And while it could be helpful, sometimes it’s good to have different points of view and different ideas.
Cali Kaminsky:
I love these two clips from these students. I think they’re really excellent examples of when formative assessment is happening in classrooms when the practices are there and it’s something that the teacher is working towards, that students really see the value in each other as resources for their learning. You heard in both examples, the first clip and the second, that it’s not just the teacher who holds the learning or holds all the information and that’s doing the cognitive lift in the classroom, but that rather students are seeing each other as resources.
One of those students talked about the diversity of perspectives, students are being encouraged to explore ideas together without a teacher stepping in and saying right/wrong in a traditional “is this right, is it wrong” mentality that we typically have in American classrooms. It’s really nice examples of students valuing one another and they’re learning along the way together.
Nancy Gerzon:
We have a wonderful story that we tell, where the same thing… I mean, these are seniors in high school in a literature class, and we get a certain voice when we’re listening to seniors talk about their role as learners that has a certain kind of power. We have wonderful stories and examples where that same thing has happened at the elementary level, and the students may or may not yet be able to describe what that means to them in the same rich way that we heard here. But one example of a third grade classroom I was in, students were studying irregular polygons.
You asked this question earlier, Danny, about what is different between this and say experiential learning or maybe project-based learning or other kinds of learning models that tend to be asset-based and tend to have some similar features in the sort of overall frame of formative assessment. But what’s different in this model and formative assessment we think of as a sociocultural learning model where we privilege students learning from their experiences and from one another in ways that don’t exist in those other models necessarily, right?
You might have students who are assigned roles for a project, but sometimes those activities tend to be very compliance-based. You see students going through a rote checklist or doing a task and they’re not sure why and they’re not sure what it means. In this one example of this third grade math classroom, students were learning irregular polygons. There were probably 30 kids in the classroom. Some were speaking Spanish, some were speaking English. There were learning goals in success criteria on the board. The teacher was literally standing in the center of the room observing all of these kids with irregular polygons taped to the floor, trying to figure out what the measurement was for these polygons.
They had to go and figure it out on their own with the tools they had in the classroom, which they had learned this, and importantly, from one another. It was a magical experience as kids just said, “Oh my gosh! I don’t know if that’s right. Let’s go check with them,” or other kids were just so excited about the opportunity to just be in the midst of learning and exploring something, everyone on task, everybody doing the learning, everybody in this very, very big third grade classroom in an urban school in Texas, everybody just in it. What was most important to me when I had a conversation with the teacher and I said to her, “What’s important to you about this?”
She said, “Well, I really wasn’t into this. But then when I realized that kids would stop asking me, ‘Are we done yet,’ it would’ve made my entire teaching career worthwhile to do this earlier.” But that idea of what’s different as students and partners in the learning is represented in the clips we heard, as Cali said. That students learn because they’re focused on a clear learning goal and success criteria, they learn how to listen for information, for ways to go deeper. They learn how to ask questions so that they can press their peers as they’re having discourse or giving feedback.
They learn how to self-assess using the voices from many other students, not just the teacher voice. And importantly, the teacher is never out of the equation, because teacher expertise grows with this, it doesn’t diminish, right? It might be scary to let go, but the process of letting go is a powerful motivator for most teachers that they realize, students I couldn’t reach before are really doing the learning.
Franchesca Warren:
I wanted to add to that about creating affirming classroom environments. I think this is clear in those clips. Students felt comfortable enough to have their own identities and they belonged to the classroom. And that’s critical in formative assessment, because that relationship, that personal relationship between student and teachers is critical for that achievement. I think that that is huge when you talk about other models, because you can’t have one without the other. The teacher can’t feel like, “I’m really in control. I have this. This is my classroom,” if the kids don’t have ownership in the classroom.
While there were a clip of seniors in there, we talked just yesterday about in a kindergarten classroom, even though the kids couldn’t name it, but they were very kind to one another in this clip and they were asking questions and they were on their way, by the time that their seniors in high school, where they can really articulate the difference in what this feels like. But also scaffolding. Children’s participation skills, really you cultivate them to a higher level each grade level doing this.
While in kindergarten it might look different, but in third grade, it’s a little bit more, in sixth grade, until you get them to seniors and they really have taken ownership and they can use those same skills as they go into whatever post-secondary options that they pursue. This is really about building inquisitive adults. People who will question, people who will feel like it’s okay to make a mistake and learn from it and push forward, if that makes sense.
Danny Torres:
Hearing these clips and just hearing you talk about these formative assessment practices just makes me wish that every student had this experience in the class. What are some barriers to implementing formative assessment practices in classrooms across the country in the United States?
Cali Kaminsky:
Oftentimes one of the biggest barriers to implementation or something we see really early on when working with schools and districts around formative assessment is teachers claiming, “I already do this. I already have exit tickets. I already have these particular activities. I already do formative assessment.” It’s really a shift in mindset and understanding around what formative assessment as a process of inquiry is and what it means to be gathering evidence in the lesson, both as a teacher and to support students in the routines and the ways and the strategies to be able to do that. I think particularly as we’re starting formative assessment work, a large challenge is just reframing “what is formative assessment?”
It’s separate from some specific routines or specific activities that might be happening in the classroom already, and it’s separate from just good teaching. We often hear that as well is that formative assessment is just good teaching, when in fact, they’re a particular set of skills, strategies, that are happening in the classroom on a daily basis.
Franchesca Warren:
I think Cali said that beautifully, but also thinking about sometimes you find that because students are quiet, because they do what’s asked to them that that’s agency. Or you think that agency is something that kids just don’t have because they come from a specific socioeconomic background. I think that sometimes that gets in the way. Kids have agency. They do. It doesn’t matter what set of knowledge they come with. There are things that they have agency about.
Instead of looking at it as, “I need to teach them, this is something I teach outside of the curriculum,” I think that is something that hangs a lot of teachers, a lot of educators up about this because it looks like for them it’s something new. It’s something new that I have to teach.
Nancy Gerzon:
Formative assessment is embedded in academic learning. It is explicitly designed to deepen students’ academic learning. It does so by helping students develop the use of evidence and build self-regulation skills as part of that. I know in my family growing up, I was definitely taught that some people have agency and some people don’t have agency. And that translated to some students have agency and some students don’t have agency, with an unwritten idea that if those people didn’t show that agency, they really weren’t worth spending all that much time on.
That question of “where do people develop this?” and “how do you develop this in school?” I think is something that we have to address as a society to ensure that our educators really understand that even those students that you can’t reach can develop learning skills and learn how to be learners themselves and learn how to be more effective as learners themselves. It’s our responsibility to teach that.
There’s lots of ways to teach that and lots of places where that learning takes place. In formative assessment, that learning takes place during academics, as teachers and students themselves become more skilled in being able to press on the edge of learning, to press on what we call Vygotsky zone of proximal development, to work in their next steps in a way that is supported and that they can feel confident about and at the same time really moves them forward in their learning.
Cali Kaminsky:
I would also add something that we have learned quite a bit about and that is not necessarily a barrier perhaps to challenge, is the crucial role of a leader, both at the school and at the district level. We know that in order for formative assessment to be successful in schools and in classrooms in a district or within a school district, that there need to be leaders who set a vision for why this work, why are we doing formative assessment, what is it leading us to, and really sort of setting that core vision and holding steady on that vision. It requires leaders to learn alongside their teachers, which can sometimes be an uncomfortable position for them if that’s not sort of part of their existing learning culture.
It requires leaders to think about high-quality professional learning experiences for their teachers, including setting collaboration time for teachers to explore what formative assessment means for them in their classrooms, what they’re seeing, what they’re noticing, and how they’re making sense of the things that they’re trying at within their classrooms.
Danny Torres:
What does implementation look like? I mean, where does it start? Does it start at the state level? Does it start at the district or the building leader?
Cali Kaminsky:
All of the above. [laughter]
Nancy Gerzon:
Implementation of formative assessment in the work that we do, which we look at a systems level work, needs to take place at all levels. Every school or district starts this differently. State level policy levers are very important. But we would also say that there’s been a misinterpretation of how teachers really learn this. Because in many models, it’s okay for some teachers to do this and some not to do it in a school, or for a particular teacher to come in with some graduate work in this and say, “I want to do this in my classroom.” It doesn’t really work that way.
Formative assessment is really too different from traditional academic models to sit inside of a school environment that doesn’t have the systems and culture and policies in place to allow this to take place. Many things get in the way with it. Traditional grading models get in the way with it. Frequent short or longer cycle mid-cycle assessments get in the way of it. Various student policies related to how discipline is dealt with get in the way of it.
There’s just so many places that we could look at to say these kinds of historical hierarchical policies hinder the development of the culture and the supporting of student identity to build the safety net for kids to really talk about what they know and don’t know right now and use that as the lever for change. When we think about systems level implementation according to, for instance, Menucha Birenbaum’s research, has to be supported by leaders. In our work, we’re trying on the idea, and we have not yet been that successful, but we’re trying on the idea of working with leaders first and giving leaders the knowledge that they need to lead an implementation.
In some places, we’ve done that learning for a year. We’ve convened cross site groups of leaders through intermediary organizations and through states to bring folks together so that they’re confident and knowledgeable at the time that they’re going to bring their teachers on board. We haven’t yet seen the results of that and there’s a lot of reasons for that, but it’s something that we’re going to continue to press on. The research deeply supports that. Where do we start with implementation? We can go into do implementation where our partners ask us to. Our goal is to have a throughline from state, to district, to school leader, and academic coaches, to teachers, and to students.
Danny Torres:
I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about how culturally responsive and sustaining education fits into formative assessment practices, if you could share your insights on that.
Cali Kaminsky:
Sure, I’d be happy to. Culturally responsive and sustaining education really prioritizes utilizing cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and frames of reference for students in the classroom and really supports students learning to recognize, understand or critique social inequities and be able to respond to those over time within their own positive development of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities.
As we think about the work for formative assessment and its connection to culturally responsive and sustaining teaching, a lot of the work that we’re doing around student identity, that’s thinking about supporting classroom culture, honoring prior knowledge of students, has an intersection with the core tenants of culturally responsive and sustaining teaching and learning. We’re continuing to explore those connections. I think to date, we’ve not explicitly named the connections between these different approaches, or frameworks, or structures to learning.
That’s something we’re exploring, the connections between formative assessment, culturally responsive and sustaining education, deeper learning and personalized learning, and how different tenants within each of those learning approaches can support and strengthen one another within the classroom. We know that not one instructional approach can be the be all end all. Thinking about what are the things that need to be attended to? What are the questions that educators and leaders need to ask about implementing one or more of these learning approaches together within the same school? Within the same district?
Danny Torres:
I was thinking about how culture and language plays a role in these formative assessment practices. One expectation might be that when students speak with academic language that we understand, oh, they are learning. But if they’re not speaking in what we call traditional academic language, they’re still learning. How does that play a role in part of the training of the formative assessment practices that you’re championing?
Nancy Gerzon:
This speaks highly to work that our former colleague Margaret Heritage has done with Alison Bailey around the role of language learning and formative assessment and how to listen for how students are developing academic language, and also speaks to work that we’re learning from Dr. Lorena Llosa from NYU, who is going to be on our Leading Voices Podcast in October, and explicitly helps us understand through her research ways that teachers can listen to the underlying ideas that students bring to the table. Her research has been in science, but this idea really does apply more broadly to how we hear students’ knowledge in a formative assessment practice.
I think there’s a couple of levers for that. One is that when we take the veil away and we say, “This is what we’re learning today, and this is how you’ll show it,” students can engage in multiple ways through multiple access points in showing what that means. Typically, success criteria are written in language that students can understand. Not watered-down language of the standard, but language that would really say, “This is what this looks like.” Teaching teachers to listen for that is a big part of what we do. What is the evidence? Do you know where every student is on that learning progression, on that journey of learning for that day?
Can you help each student respond to take next steps in their learning every day? And that changes the dynamic, right? It’s not like, okay, I got this group over here who’s not doing well. It’s suddenly an opportunity to really listen with care to how students understand new concepts and how they represent their normal everyday experiences with the world through their own culture, their own family background, and their own way of understanding.
It does change the dynamic in the classroom significantly when teachers are listening for what’s underneath, rather than the more obvious structures that show up in the pacing guide or in the curriculum map. This is a new way of thinking, and we’re really grateful to the folks who are doing deep research in this so that we can get better at how we’re working with teachers to understand this.
Franchesca Warren:
When you’re talking about culturally responsive and sustaining education, a critical piece of that is affirming classroom environments. I think that we saw after the impact of the pandemic, we were really forced to see the equities in education and recognizing… We knew this and Zaretta Hammond talks about this a lot, but previously we haven’t prepared students to be self-directed learners. When you’re talking about culturally responsive and sustaining education, I think formative assessment it’s right there at that intersection because you’re giving students a voice, you’re acknowledging what they know, and you’re starting with culture as the starting point.
I think that that can be a pivotal space for students and for teachers to not make it that some kids just aren’t learning, but how can we create spaces for them to tell us what they know in a way that is responsive to them and just leave it open for more learning. I just think we’re at the intersection of that. It’s just so interesting.
Danny Torres:
Absolutely. All right. Are there any last thoughts you’d like to share with our audience today?
Nancy Gerzon:
As we close up today, just like to revisit the idea that at the heart of formative assessment is a belief in the students and the communities that we partner with, and their ability as a system to learn and grow. This idea that learning is for all of us is something that’s central to our belief system, that learning is something that we share as humanity, a desire to learn, a desire to grow, and a desire to learn from one another. It is what keeps us healthy. It really is powerful when we see it at systems level, and grateful for this opportunity to do this work at this time when communities themselves are struggling.
It does breathe new life into systems, and that is just a powerful thing to see and be a part of. With gratitude to our colleagues that we work with here at WestEd who support this work, as well as with our partners in the field who are willing to take this journey with us together.
Danny Torres:
I just want to thank you, Nancy, Franchesca, and Cali, for taking the time out of your busy schedules to talk with us today. I just want to really say that I appreciate your leadership in this work. I think you are making an impact both for teachers and students. Thank you to our listeners for joining us. All the resources mentioned in this podcast will be available online at wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast. That’s one word. That’s wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast, or you can find them in the show notes on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.
For more information about WestEd’s Formative Insights body of work, visit us online at csaa.wested.org/formative-insights. If you’d like to hear more from the Formative Insights team, WestEd is hosting an online conversation in October. Nancy mentioned that earlier in the show. We’ll be joined by leading scholars and thinkers to discuss research and innovations with respect to formative assessment practices and more.
Nancy Gerzon:
Danny, thank you for this opportunity. I want to thank our listeners today and encourage our audience to reach out to us, continue the conversation, and also to have an opportunity if you’re interested in formative assessment to visit our website. There’s some great stories and videos that would be quite fun to explore and really helps create a broader picture than what we’re able to say in a shorter podcast. Appreciate your attention today and listening to our stories.
Danny Torres:
This podcast is brought to you by WestEd, a national non-profit, non-partisan research development and service agency. At WestEd, we believe that learning changes lives. Every day we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for youth and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on one really important facet of the work that we do at WestEd. I encourage you to visit us at wested.org to learn more. A special thanks to Tanicia Bell, principal content developer for Leading Voices Podcast, and to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer. Thank you and join us next time on the Leading Voices Podcast.