Summative assessments provide data to evaluate the effectiveness of schools, teachers, and educational policies, contributing to a robust accountability system worldwide. However, educators and scholars argue that summative assessments do not effectively promote ongoing learning, enhance teaching practices, or align with the skills required in the…

The learning journey toward sustainability requires the generation of action-oriented knowledge to understand the progress and potential adaptation of strategies to facilitate collective transformation. One integral area where advancing these strategies is essential is higher education. While efforts in the field have identified relevant learning…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to explore the tensions between what secondary teachers think and believe about assessment and the corresponding actions they take in their classrooms. Of particular interest was the development of Teacher Assessment Identity (TAI) and the impact of experience on TAI. Survey data and semi-structured…

The article draws on a policy experiment, intended to develop guidelines and recommendations for teacher evaluation. A systematic review, used in the experiment, revealed that teacher evaluation fails to fulfill its formative intention, and is reduced to summative technicalities when systems violate acknowledged principles from evaluation…

The researcher seeks to address the needed changes to superintendent evaluation by suggesting an integrated formative evaluation process that balances both the need for accountability and ongoing professional growth and support (Hallinger, Heck, & Murphy, 2014; Duke, 1990). The nuances of the superintendent and school board relationship…

This memo, which is the third in the series, highlights the work of Summit View Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona and its use of ideas and practices from a blended online course, Student Agency in Assessment and Learning (SAAL) developed by researchers at WestEd, also an ALP grantee. This memo describes how the school's participation in the…

Instructional coaching can help teachers adopt new practices. In this webinar, participants explored how instructional coaching can encourage teachers to adopt new practices and whether coaching has lasting effects. This webinar featured Jim Knight, Ph.D., a Research Associate at the University of Kansas, who has been studying and writing about…

Schools, districts, and state-level educational organizations are experiencing a great shift in the way they do the business of education. This shift focuses on accountability, specifically through the expectation of the effective utilization of evaluative-focused efforts to guide and support decisions about educational program implementation. In…

The rationale for the introduction of standards in the United States in the late 1980s was that the quality of education would improve. Assessment instruments in the form of written tests were constructed in order to perform a monitoring function. The introduction of standards and the associated monitoring have been replicated in South Africa. It…

Teachers routinely ask and answer a series of three questions with and for students: Where are my students headed? Where are they right now? How can I close the gap between where they are and where I want them to be? This text suggests that teachers also ask these parallel questions of themselves: (1) Where am I going?; (2) What can formative…

This Special Issues Brief from the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center) offers insight into three human capital management policies that are critical for career and technical education (CTE) teachers: certification, performance evaluation, and professional development. CTE teachers are uniquely positioned to improve college and career…

The authors worked with 22 middle school math and science teachers for one year with the goal of improving the quantity and quality of inquiry-based instruction implemented in the classroom. The professional development experience was framed by the 4E x 2 Instruction Model, which combines key components of inquiry instruction (Engage, Explore,…

Formative evaluation and its associated methodology of reflection on practice are used extensively in academic staff development. In reflecting on formative evaluation processes in both more traditional and newer programmes conducted at a university of technology, a number of variables reported in the literature were observed to have influenced…

This classroom guide is intended to inspire and expand teachers' thinking about effective assessment in project-based learning (PBL). The tips listed in this guide are organized to follow the arc of a project. First comes planning, then the launch into active learning, and then a culminating presentation. Reflection is the final stage, and it's…

For the past two years, teacher evaluation has been the most visible aspect of educational policy in Portugal. The model that was established in 2008 has prompted not only strong reactions among teachers but also many passionate discussions in the context of the Portuguese society at large. In this article, we discuss issues of teacher evaluation…