Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for Getting Smart, Arlena Gaynor shares how Dallas ISD has integrated formative assessments into the classroom and analyzes how it impacts a student's mindset.

· What are formative assessments and how are they used in the classroom? How does it change school culture? How does it affect student performance?

· Read more about formative assessments and how they transform the classroom.

It is without a doubt crucially important that we continue to teach students content knowledge, but today’s students will, as the world continues to move faster and faster in the coming decades, increasingly be required to also be able to self-identify and resolve shortcomings in their skills and foundational knowledge. These metacognitive skills are unlikely to be developed through standard “sit and get” instructional models.

In an effort to identify new strategies to work around this, Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) is approaching the end of its second year of the How I Know initiative with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Through How I Know, sixty pilot teachers from Dallas ISD, Austin ISD, and Tulsa Public Schools are focused on identifying, scaling, and sharing successful approaches for designing formative assessment practice in the classroom.

We’ve learned a lot in these two years, and are excited to share our journey of how we first began to organize our efforts, how we continued to iterate on our practices, and where we plan to go in year three.

Read the full article about the impact of formative assessments by Arlena Gaynor at Getting Smart.