Here is our plan; we are hoping to get the funding that would enable us to implement it. The first thing we’re going to do is get together all of the administrators in the district: the superintendent, deputy superintendent, district support staff, and all building principals and vice principals for instruction. And we’re going to teach them a formative assessment lesson or two. They’re going to be the students in those lessons, so they get to experience what it’s like to be in a classroom where the focus is mathematical understanding, and a mechanism for attaining that understanding is rich discussion. After this experience we give the administrators a tool they can use for their classroom observations. Phil Daro created a tool cleverly called “The Five by Eight Card”—you can guess how big it is. It contains a bunch of questions for classroom observers to address when they visit classrooms. It’s focused on classroom discourse. “Are the students getting to explain? Are the students listening to each other’s explanations?” This shifts the administrator’s focus away from “Do I like how the teacher is running the class?” and turns it to “Are the students talking about the mathematics in meaningful ways?”