Collaborative design of instructional sequences: teacher developed support for formative assessment

Professional development activities focused on the organization of mathematics content can be used to enhance the relationship between teacher content knowledge, formative assessment, and instructional decisions. To synthesize and apply what mathematics teachers learned from a three-year professional development project designed to improve classroom assessment practices, we designed the Learning Line Activity. Groups of teachers co-constructed and presented learning lines that reflected their collective understanding of how the content domain was represented and developed. The processes and products of the Learning Line Activity can be used to support teachers’ instructional planning and enactment of formative assessment.