WestEd’s How I Know Project was created to support teachers and leaders from three school districts — Austin Independent School District, Dallas Independent School District (in partnership with the Dallas Teacher Residency program), and Tulsa Public Schools — to successfully implement formative assessment. Specifically, WestEd is supporting the three pilot districts to:
- Understand and identify the current supports for and barriers to improving formative assessment practices in each district
- Develop a set of possible approaches/strategies for improving formative assessment and pilot these options in classrooms with selected teachers and schools
- Evaluate the relative merits of these approaches and consider which might have potential to scale districtwide
WestEd’s formative assessment team — which includes formative assessment experts, academic coaches, and project evaluators — provides classroom coaching, leadership development, and guidance on site-based professional learning so that each district can best support teachers and students to learn in new ways.
Ultimately, lessons learned from How I Know will be used to document and communicate with the field the most successful professional learning approaches to implementing formative assessment in the classroom.
