Every day our nation's educators create assessments to evaluate what students are learning and whether instruction is effective. Assessments can also provide useful data in educator evaluations and professional development, when used in conjunction with other measures. The Assessment Design Toolkit contains 14 online modules to help teachers, principals and other instructional leaders write or select well-designed classroom assessments. Each of the modules addresses a single topic and includes a video, a PowerPoint presentation and a narrator's script. 

The Reform Support Network Sustainability Work Group has developed Great State Leaders: A Competency Framework for Growing Talent in a State Education Agency (SEA) as a tool to build the skills, knowledge and behaviors of SEA leaders, increasing their effectiveness in their current positions as well as preparing them for greater leadership responsibility in the future. The competency framework calls on research by SEA leaders in the Sustainability Work Group to define a set of core competencies characteristic of high-performing SEA leaders. The competencies are organized into three broad categories: leads change, leads self and leads others. The tool can serve to identify gaps in capacity within a specific department, as a self-assessment for individuals, or to establish a mentorship program.

State and district leaders across the country have undertaken the important work of evaluating the assessments given in classrooms to ensure the assessments serve their intended purpose and support educators and schools in meeting the needs of students. On May 27, the Reform Support Network hosted a webinar to highlight the work of the Illinois State Board of Education, Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Syracuse City Public Schools. During the May webinar, leaders from these organizations shared their strategies for streamlining assessments and ensuring that educators use assessments to measure student learning and adjust instruction. Click at this link to view a recording of the one-hour webinar. The May webinar was preceded by the Reform Support Network's February 23 webinar, also on streamlining assessments. If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact Jamila Smith at the U.S. Department of Education.

The Ohio Executive Principal Leadership Academy reflects a partnership between Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, College of Education and Human Ecology, and the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), the PROGRESS blog reports. Its purpose was to give principals of Ohio’s lowest performing schools a crash course in leadership and management. Six groups of principals attended four intensive two-day sessions over six months, with assignments to complete between sessions. Three hundred leaders from more than 150 of Ohio’s lowest achieving schools attended between January 2011 and June 2013. ODE also sent transformation specialists on weekly visits to help principals apply lessons from the leadership academy to their schools. The principals took part in statewide professional networks and regional professional development sessions.