Hello my name is Tom Martin I'm the principal at Gudith Elementary School inthe Woodhaven-Brownstown school district. I'd like to take a moment just to talkto you about the administrator’s role in formative assessment practices. First andforemost, I think it's important as administrators that we learn about theprocess. There's much more to this process than just a quick thumbs-up andthumbs-down check after a question or a lesson in aclassroom.By learning about the process we can recognize what to look for in theclassrooms as teachers engaged in this important practice for learning.Asadministrators it's very important to seek out professional developmenttraining for our teachers.Teachers do not generally come to us with a goodsound knowledge of formative assessment practices. As I mentioned,they'll come with the thumbs up, thumbs down and maybe a couple other tricks intheir toolkit, but to truly understand all of the layers of formativeassessment it's important as administrators that we seek out and findprofessional development opportunities to our local ISD s and other stateorganizations. Another important aspect of formative assessment is as anadministrator you have to value the practice for your teachers.You have toshow them that it's important to you.You do that by first modeling it duringstaff meetings possibly.Looking for it in the classrooms, and honoring thosethat are doing it well within their classrooms, by providing the feedback tothe teachers after your visits.As always, when anytime we do professional learning,time is of the essence.Finding time for staff to work together.Finding time torelease staff to each other's classrooms, so they can watch, and see differentteachers use the different techniques of formative Assessment. Trying to providesome common planning time for teachers to plan some of the questioning and thedepth of questions that is involved in theimportant literacy practice. It's also important in your school to create aformative assessment resource library, to provide teachers with different ways toeffectively question what the students are learning. Also, it’s important to haveyour staff understand that formative assessment is not just one more thingthat they need to do. These are best practice strategies thatall the current researchers honor and support.We have data from all differentplaces state-level data, district level data, but this classroom level data isthe most important to help teachers identify the learning that's happeningin the classrooms day in and day out.This data is the data that's mostimportant to help raise student achievement.