Featured Speakers:
- Yesenia Ayala, Program Associate, Formative Insights Team at WestEd
- Cali Kaminsky, Senior Program Manager, Formative Insights Team at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the ninth session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic: Amplifying Student Agency and Learning Through Formative Assessment. Our featured speakers today are Yesenia Ayala, program associate for our Formative Insights team at WestEd, and Cali Kaminsky, senior program manager for the Formative Insights team at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. And I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff work with policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities, and others, providing a broad range of tailored services including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now I’d like to pass the mic over to Cali. Cali, take it away.
Cali Kaminsky:
Thank you so much, Danny, and thanks all for being with us today. It’s good to see so many of you from across the country, and it looks like a variety of different positions in our education system joining us today. So my name’s Cali Kaminsky. I lead the WestEd Formative Insights team, and I’m joined by my colleague Yesenia Ayala. We support students, teachers, school and district leaders to reframe daily instruction in ways that explicitly teach the skills and mindsets necessary to develop learner agency through formative assessment routines. And we lead transformative professional learning experiences with thousands of educators across the nation by blending learning with coaching and capacity building to scale formative assessment practice system-wide. In the next 30 minutes, we’ll work towards these learning goals and success criteria.
So our learning goals for today are to understand the ways in which teacher and student roles shift with routine use of formative assessment practice, to discover the underlying concepts of agency that are brought to life through daily formative assessment practice, and to start to explore the role of leaders and leadership practices to support learner agency. And so our hope is that by the end of this webinar, with these learning goals in mind, that you’re able to do what’s defined within the success criteria on the screen here. Identify what formative assessment practice is and is not. Articulate the role of students as learner agency emerges through formative assessment practice, and identify leadership practices that support the conditions for which formative assessment implementation and learner agency can take place.
Formative assessment is among teachers’ most powerful tools in supporting student learning, and it includes ongoing in-the-moment evidence to guide instructional adjustments. The WestEd Formative Insights team uses the Cowie and Bell definition of formative assessment, which is on the screen here. “Formative assessment is defined as a process used by teachers and students to notice, recognize, and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during learning.” Now whether this definition is familiar or new to you, we encourage you to take just a moment to read this definition again and consider what word or phrase stands out to you. And feel free to share that with us in the chat. We’ll continue to keep an eye on that chat as we continue on with our slides.
So formative assessment centers how teachers and students use evidence. It captures the three-part rhythm of formative assessment practice, which is eliciting, interpreting, and using evidence. And the student role shifts as students begin to use evidence of learning in a range of new ways. The overall construct in formative assessment is that students are actively engaged in exploring academic content through collaborative learning and individual analysis of evidence. In formative assessment this happens during daily learning, where instructional routines shift from how they’re traditionally applied and are used explicitly to help students use these tools to develop the skills to use evidence to guide next steps in their own learning.
So the power of formative assessment really takes shape when students use evidence to guide their learning. When students are able to accurately notice and effectively respond to evidence to guide their own learning, it’s because the skills have been explicitly modeled, taught, and nurtured during daily lessons. And a critically important framing for formative assessment is that it involves reciprocity or partnership among students and teachers. The purpose of formative assessment is for students themselves to be able to use evidence together to guide learning in ways that build collective efficacy in the classroom. And so the research on this is really clear that supporting students to use evidence of learning strengthens student identity as learners, it strengthens their motivation to learn, and it’s a key condition to resolve behavioral issues.
But that doesn’t happen unless we explicitly model and teach what we mean by evidence use, how teachers create new routines and tasks to show students where they are in their learning, and deepen the cultural constructs so that students feel safe to engage with one another around what they don’t yet know in the classroom. And formative assessment makes these processes visible to students in several ways, including the co-construction of success criteria, engaging in peer feedback and self-assessment, and using evidence of learning during discourse. Formative assessment and formal classroom assessment are each focused on decisions related to informing daily classroom instruction. And this slide outlines how we think about the distinction between the two.
So the primary purpose of formal classroom assessment, which is depicted in the greenish color on the right-hand side of this graph, is to measure student learning at the end of a sequence of instruction. With formal classroom assessment, teachers are typically solely responsible for evaluating student learning. Assessment results are used by teachers to inform grading and reporting. And this reporting often focuses on what students don’t yet know or have yet to learn. So for example, a number of incorrect items on a test. Versus formative assessments are displayed here in the purplish color on the left-hand side. Formative assessment takes place during daily lessons as learning is underway. Students and teachers work in partnership to notice evidence as it’s developing and to apply that evidence right away during student learning, not afterwards.
So in this way, evidence of learning informs immediate next steps that students can take themselves to keep their own learning moving forward. And in formative assessment, students and teachers explore what students know and what they bring to their learning as ways to help students notice, recognize, and build on their existing funds of knowledge. The following graphics on this slide will outline your typical student and teacher roles in different instructional approaches, where we’ll start with sort of a more traditional teacher-directed instruction to an instructional approach more aligned with formative assessment. So in this first graphic, the teacher is situated above the students, and the dotted lines indicate that the teacher is primarily responsible for student learning. And so in this instructional approach, the teacher’s primary roles are to deliver content and assess student work.
Here, students are generally in a compliance stance. And when in a compliance stance, students receive information, they await instruction, they submit their work on time, but they rely on the teacher to assess their work and offer feedback. Students often identify external motivators such as grades, extra credit, or even parental pressure as having strong influence on their completing or not completing tasks. In the second graphic, it shows a classroom environment where the teacher is working alongside the students. So the horizontal dotted lines in this graphic show that the teacher is connected to each student. And in this approach, the teacher’s primary roles are to engage students in a variety of learning tasks, to organize grouping practices, to provide students with feedback, and assess student work.
In this instructional approach, the students are typically actively engaged in their learning. Engaged learners are often eager to work in collaborative groups, and students are more likely to demonstrate greater responsibility for their learning, though they typically continue to rely heavily on the teacher to assess their work and help them navigate learning challenges. In this third graphic on the bottom left-hand corner, it represents a partnership between teachers and students and among students themselves. So the dotted line represents that students are learning both from the teacher but also from one another. And in this approach, the teacher’s primary roles are to create visible learning opportunities to elicit and use evidence during lessons, to support students to learn with and from one another, to engage students in routines where they can notice and respond to evidence of learning, and to share responsibility for assessing students’ current learning status.
And in this final graphic on the bottom right, the student role is quite different from those described in the earlier graphics. So in this model, students play an active role in supporting their own learning and their peers’ learning and in assessing academic progress. This approach is really dependent on students having agency in their learning. And students with agency are likely to act metacognitively by reflecting on their current learning status and making decisions about how to move learning forward. Students demonstrate self-efficacy by persisting when tasks are difficult. They engage in self-regulation by setting short and long-term academic goals, and they demonstrate learner autonomy by showing comfort at working with peers and seeking out their peers as resources and learning.
And formative assessment is a powerful practice that supports the movement from the top, bluish graphics to the bottom right hand corner graphic. And formative assessment is uniquely positioned to help students shift from compliant learners to engaged learners, ultimately towards developing the skills of learner agency. And a common belief about student agency is that agency is an inherent trait, but the research based on formative assessment really calls this into question. It highlights that the skills of agency develop within a social learning environment where students are collaboratively exploring and grappling with ideas and support one another in order to learn, meaning that the skills of agency can and must be taught. In our next several slides, Yesenia will talk us through the definition of agency and how it emerges through formative assessment practice. Yesi.
Yesenia Ayala:
Thank you Cali for that. And hello everyone. It’s really great to be in community with you all here. So we are going to explore the definition of learner agency. So we define learner agency as the set of skills, mindsets, and opportunities that enable students to set purposeful goals for themselves, one, so then to take action in their learning to move towards those goals. And lastly, to reflect and adjust learning behaviors as they monitor their progress towards those goals. So once again, it’s important to know that the skills that support student agency can and must be taught. I know that Cali mentioned it in the previous slide, but it’s really important to reiterate that. And formative assessment is a powerful way to support students develop these skills.
So when formative assessment is implemented to dramatically shift the student role, it can lead to extraordinary results such as more equitable participation in learning where students are engaging in the learning process and are supported and empowered throughout, increased academic discourse where students are communicating about and articulating their learning, increased student motivation where students feel motivation throughout the learning process, improved learning behaviors, and lastly, increased student identity as learners where students see themselves as active and engaged learners. Now we are going to launch a poll. So we want you to think about which outcomes of developing student agency most resonate with you or align with your school or district’s priority.
So we’re gonna take a couple of seconds to complete the poll. So as you’re thinking about these outcomes, what resonates the most with you or aligns with your school or district’s priorities? Okay, we’ll keep it open for another 10 seconds. Great. We’ll close the poll now. And can we please share the poll’s results? Oh, so we see that there are elements of all of the choices, right? So we see that 48% said “More equitable participation in learning.” 48 also said “Increased student motivation,” followed by “Increased academic discourse.” And we see “Increased student identity as learners and improved learning behaviors.” So all of these. So thank you for participating in that poll. Now I’m going to share a quote by Dylan Wiliams, who’s very well known, a researcher in this space.
So Dylan Wiliams said, “When teachers do formative assessment effectively, students learn at roughly double the rate than they do without it.” So let that sink in. So again, this reiterates the power of students developing the skills of agency through formative assessment practices, which is aligned with what you all responded in the earlier slide. To strengthen agency in classroom, educators benefit from understanding both the definition of agency and key terms. So we use the four building blocks of agency, so the four elements from the research on learner agency that you see on the screen. We have metacognition, self-efficacy, learner autonomy, and self-regulation, each of which can be taught. On the left you see metacognition.
So metacognition is the ability to think about one’s own thinking, so metacognitive students regularly seek out and engage with evidence to reflect on their current learning status. Students also consider a range of approaches and understand different ways that they learn best. They also make conscious decisions to manage next steps in their own learning. On the top right you see self-efficacy. So self-efficacy involves the beliefs students have about their ability to carry out tasks. So students with higher self-efficacy believe themselves to be capable of setting and accomplishing and achieving their goals. They’re also more likely to attempt and persist in tasks that are unfamiliar and new to them. On the bottom right you see learner autonomy.
So learner autonomy describes the capacity and willingness to act independently and in cooperation with others. So the collaboration piece is also really important to think about to support learning. So students with higher learner autonomy show greater control over how they plan and carry out learning tasks. And then lastly, on the bottom left, you see self-regulation. So self-regulation capabilities involve students having the ability to direct one’s own effort towards specific goals. So self-regulating students set both short term and long term goals. They also check progress towards those goals throughout. They manage their time as another example and develop a positive learning strategies that support their own learning.
And as a reminder, these building blocks don’t just stand alone independently. They all have an effect on one another. They reinforce one another as agency also develops throughout time. And at the end of this webinar, we will actually share a document that includes these descriptions that I just went over and provides a summary of the building blocks of agency. And to gain and develop the skills of agency, students are able to link where they’ve been and where they are with a vision of where they’re going next in their learning. Students also develop an understanding of why the learning is important to them. And that’s really important to think about when students are able to understand the why the learning is important to them. And they also have strategies for how to move forward with their learnings that works with them for them individually.
Again, through formative assessment practices, we see that educators model those strategies and supports so that students are able to utilize them in their learning. And they participate in feedback loops, not just with their self, but also including their peers and others. And they engage in a range of structured learning and assessment opportunities and are part of a class where group and individual agency enhance one another. So again, it’s not just about their individual agency, but then how they’re supporting not just their own learning, but those of their peers as well. And the formative assessment, formative assessments routine reinforce student agency by explicitly modeling and creating structures for students to practice these skills. Now I will pass it back to Cali who will walk us through a culture of learning to support student agency.
Cali Kaminsky:
Thank you, Yesenia. So we saw in your introductions that many of you are in district or school leadership or even state leadership positions. And so we wanted to make sure we added in a couple of slides to talk a little bit about leadership moves, leadership roles in supporting formative assessment and developing learner agency. And so to move from traditional models of instruction to formative assessment really requires more than just the adoption of new instructional strategies. The visual that’s on the screen captures findings from formative assessment researcher, Menucha Birenbaum, who has found strong evidence that shows a relationship between how adults learn and how students learn in schools and districts that have developed expertise in formative assessment and really move towards practices that promote greater student agency.
And so as you notice and begin to make sense of this graphic on the slide, take a look at the two lower circles here that are focused on the ways of working and the ways of thinking. So you might notice that the characteristics of ways of working and ways of thinking, including dialogue, feedback, and shared responsibility, these are really closely aligned with expectations for collaborative classroom culture. That’s really the hallmark of formative assessment practice. And in schools that are successful in increasing student agency, these same collaborative practices are used throughout the system for adult learners as well as students. And creating learner agency for adults involves working together in new ways that engage teachers in ongoing cycles of inquiry and reflection and promote self-efficacy in learning.
You might also notice in this graphic that it depicts a through line indicating that district learning, school leader learning, teacher learning, and student learning are all aligned. And moving towards student agency involves each level of the system to model inquiry and reflection and learning in ways that support those who are at the next level in the system. And so just as teachers learn to model and scaffold what it means to provide effective peer feedback, so too do school leaders need to model what it means, for instance, to celebrate risk and to encourage diversity of opinion. In 2016, researcher Sue Swaffield called out that the research on the efforts to bring about the instructional, cultural, and role shifts that are at the heart of formative assessment practice underscores the critical importance of having site leaders.
And I would add district and state leaders as well. The importance, the critical importance of having them create the conditions needed for formative assessment to take root. And in our work at WestEd, we have witnessed time and time again how essential school and district leaders are to developing the conditions for formative assessment practice and learner agency to take place. So in schools and districts where formative assessment has successfully been implemented, leaders are fostering an understanding for new content and formative assessment routines to support the development of learner agency. So leaders understand what formative assessment practice is and is not to develop a shared knowledge of formative assessment practice across their school community.
Leaders immerse themselves in ongoing diverse professional learning opportunities with their colleagues to deepen and extend their own formative assessment knowledge and experience. And these leaders adapt their support as teachers and students develop and apply these practices over time. We also see that these leaders cultivate a model of schoolwide learning culture, sorry, they cultivate and model a schoolwide learning culture. So leaders model learning culture for adults that mirrors how students learn informative assessment by creating learning environments in which those leaders, as well as students and teachers, demonstrate the characteristics of a learning culture where trust, collaboration, and mutual respect are evident among peers in the classroom, in the school and across the district where everyone is considered a learner.
Leaders support a culture where learning is collaborative, feedback is valued, and taking risks is encouraged. And finally, in places where we see successful formative assessment implementation take place, leaders establish and build capacity for models of collaboration for adult learning. Leaders are ensuring conditions are established by which teachers can learn formative assessment through ongoing cycles of inquiry and reflection. Leaders provide a variety of professional learning opportunities, structures, and experiences that support agency and inquiry where learning among adults, again, looks very similar to how students learn informative assessment often with teachers and leaders developing their own learning goals and supporting one another to use evidence of student learning to guide their analysis of how to deepen instructional practice over time.
So as we come to the end of our time together, let’s check in on our learning goals. I’ll ask you to take a minute to review, and we hope that given in the short time we’ve been able to spend together, that you’re able to walk away with some of these learning outcomes today. As you’re doing that in the chat, we’ll also share several documents that reinforce and provide information on the topics that were covered today. So we’ll share a document that unpacks the definition of formative assessment that we shared at the top of our webinar. We’ll share a resource that Yesenia sort of called out that describes the building blocks of learner agency in a bit more detail. And we’ll share a document that describes in more detail the culture of learning that supports the development of agency sort of consistent with the circular graphic I shared just a couple of slides ago.
The WestEd Formative Insights team has a host of resources, testimonials, and information about our professional learning services on the Formative Insights webpage, which you can access from the link on this slide or the QR code that’s on this slide. So we welcome you to come find us and join us and take a look at some of the resources that we have. We wanna thank you for joining us today. Please reach out to Yesenia and I for questions, for thought partnership, or to share what you’re doing in your school, district, or states related to formative assessment and learner agency. We would love to hear
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you Cali and Yesenia for a great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. For those of you interested in learning more about the Formative Insights team and work at WestEd, visit us online at wested.org/formative-insights and please feel free to reach out to Cali and Yesenia via email if you have questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Cali at [email protected], and you can reach Yesenia at [email protected].
And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics including literacy, science, assessment, and more. During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. For more information about the Leading Together webinar series, visit us online at wested.org/leading-together-2025. And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. We’ll see you next time.