Using the Revised ALN Windowpanes as Formative Assessment

Published: November 21, 2025

Revised K-5 Windowpanes

We are very excited about the new and improved Windowpanes for kindergarten through fifth grade. These Windowpanes now have intentional organizational systems to support math educators in responsive decision making when supporting student needs. Elementary math educators are responsible for supporting students along a progression of High Leverage Concepts which are embedded in the new Windowpanes. 

The High Leverage Concept Maps and Progressions guide math educators in what content to prioritize when providing additional time and support to help students understand deeply.  The High Leverage Concept Interviews and Assessments are both formative assessments to help educators to understand student strengths and assets related to their own progression of HLC skills.

Formative assessment is an instructional practice that we use consistently at ALN to help us understand student thinking and plan responsive instruction. As part of a robust formative assessment practice, educators look at student work that illuminates understanding in order to plan differentiated instructional steps for the whole class, small groups, and individuals.  We use a variety of assessments and student interview techniques to build a robust picture of student understanding and facilitate responsive decision making.

The revised windowpanes can now function as another purposeful and informative formative assessment that occurs weekly during math menu time.  Windowpanes can provide frequent and detailed formative assessment which can support educators in monitoring and measuring student growth as well as finding students’ just right next challenges and goals.  Windowpanes can help monitor progress.

Thin-Sliced Big Ideas

Most importantly, the revised windowpanes consider the progression of each High Leverage Concept. In the K-5 revised windowpanes there are now five sets of 6 windowpanes for every K-5 High Leverage Concept. Each set focuses on thin-sliced big ideas that grow to support the High Leverage Concept across the entire school year.  

Our goal is to provide sets of six windowpanes that represent a slice of the HLC progression. Each slice contributes towards students’ deepening conceptual understanding of that grade level HLC.  Knowing the progression slice that each set represents will help educators to better match the right windowpane set to students’ just right practice.  As educators set goals for individual students based on their unique assets and areas of weakness (the process of specializing math instruction), they need to find ways to monitor a student’s progress towards those goals.  The revised windowpane set structure can also help guide the educator in finding a set of windowpanes that can provide a measure for monitoring student growth and progress.

We have created a guide to the revised windowpane structure that helps to illuminate the purposeful revised windowpane structure.  In this guide, educators can see the thin-sliced big ideas for every windowpane set.  They can also see the general box structure as well as the item details for every windowpane set.  Finally, they have a generic data tracker that could capture a school year’s worth of windowpane data for an individual student or a classroom.  This guide to the revised windowpane structure allows educators to now use ALN Windowpanes as both spaced or interleaved computation practice during math menu and a way to progress monitor students’ with individualized goals. 

A sample scenario might look like:  a first grade classroom teacher and the math interventionist are working together to support a first grade student.  This student came in able to count to 12, subitize groups of 3 or less, and count sets of objects with one-to-one correspondence with less than 10 objects.  They are currently working on two goals with the student; subitizing dot arrangements 5-10 (structured and unstructured) and increasing their forward rote oral count sequence to 30.  After setting these goals, they use the guide to the revised windowpane structure to look for Windowpanes sets that may have a thin sliced big idea related to these goals for the interventionist to use as a form of measuring progress.  They see that both set 3 and set 5 in the kindergarten Windowpanes have a composing and decomposing number focus.  When they look at the item details for those two sets, they decide that set 5 will be one form of data they collect and respond to. They decide that the kindergarten set 5 Windowpanes will be used during a small group with the interventionist on progress monitoring days.  The classroom teacher also has a math menu for her classroom which the student also participates in.  The classroom teacher is currently starting the Windowpanes in set 2 for first grade on the math menu.  Using the item detail table for first grade windowpanes, they decide that box A and box H in this set will be the data that the classroom teacher collects and responds to as well.  Both educators are supporting this student in mastering their goals and both educators have data they will be responsive to during this intervention cycle using windowpanes as one of their formative assessments.

Purposeful Item Details

Each Windowpane still has 8 boxes or panes.  These 8 boxes have been structured purposefully to support monitoring students’ growth and progress within an HLC. Across a set, the tasks and concepts will be similar from box to box.  An educator could pick the boxes that are most relevant to a student’s goals to track progress across time, collecting 6 (or more) measurable data points across a set.  The new structure of the boxes helps to ensure the majority of the practice is related to the grade level HLC, but also includes a mix of spaced practice, interactions with models, and some practice with additional standards.

The revised Windowpanes are still in google slides which makes them easy to edit to better match student needs. If one of the boxes is not the right practice for your students, feel free to make changes that better reflect your students’ needs.  Just make a copy of the windowpane document, save it to your drive, and make any edits that make sense for your students.  Within each set, a box on the Windowpane will have a consistent concept, skill or structure.  These can be used to help monitor progress on specific aspects of the High Leverage Concept Progression.  
The revised structure for the Windowpanes provide a clear and organized way to see how students are growing as mathematical thinkers throughout the year. The Windowpanes are organized in sets of 6 and informed by big ideas from the HLC Progressions. The concept/skill focus for each box of the windowpanes remains the same throughout the year’s 30 Windowpane series for each grade level K-5, increasing in number range and complexity. This continued focus provides students with consistent practice on important concepts and skills and provides teachers with evidence of student progress.

The Windowpanes can provide valuable formative assessment data. Educators can keep track of the problems students are accurate on and the ones where their responses are inaccurate.  Beyond accuracy, educators can note the decisions students are making, the models and strategies they trust the most. 

Consider what tools students could use to support their work.  Refrain from helping students so that the Windowpane provides a better understanding of their independent assets and struggles.  When students frequently skip or avoid specific boxes, the problems they opt out of is also valuable formative assessment data.  While looking at student work on Windowpanes each week, consider first what the boxes show that students can do and can understand.  

Questions an educator can ask themself while looking at student work on Windowpanes:

 

• What does this show students can do or understand?
• What models are present in student work?
• What strategies do you see students applying?
• What trends or patterns of growth do you see across student work samples?
• What next steps make sense for these students or a sub group of students?
• Which box were students more successful in solving? Why?
• Which box was most challenging for students? Why?

 

What Now?

To learn more about the strategies and tools discussed, explore any of the following:

• Start from the beginning! Read this article to learn What Are the New ALN Windowpanes?
• Get more insight on how Windowpanes are used in Math Menu with The Stars Debate article.
• Learn more about ALN's High Leverage Concepts (HLCs). 
• See for yourself how smooth implementation can really be, with this article: From Overwhelmed to Clarity: One District’s Journey with HLCs