Assessment Strategies - Improvement

As a co-teacher, I don't get much opportunity to guide curriculum for the "regular" students. At least I didn't this school year. Hopefully, I will be better able to this coming year. I would like to increase the amount of formative assessments used before and during the courses I work with. This would improve the quality of material presented and the way that it is presented (with tiered groups, etc).

One way to address this, I think, is to work with my teachers and develop pre-unit activities (not tests!) that gauge students' knowledge before the learning begins.