Designing the assessment layer for AI-assisted K–12 instructional workflows.

Formative is a K–12 real-time instruction and assessment platform that helps teachers create activities, assess learning, give feedback, and understand student progress in the flow of classroom instruction.

During my time there, Formative was acquired by Newsela, bringing together Newsela’s instructional content layer with Formative’s assessment, feedback, and classroom insight layer.

That context sharpened the design challenge. Teachers were managing scattered materials, disconnected systems, manual grading, student responses, standards, and classroom data across fragmented workflows. The product needed to reduce administrative overhead while helping educators move from creation to insight more quickly.

As Design Director, I built and led the design team through that shift, helping strengthen Formative as the assessment layer within a more connected instructional platform for teachers, students, and school administrators.

Our work focused on making Formative feel less like a set of separate assessment tools and more like a connected assessment layer inside the broader instructional workflow.

We redesigned key parts of the teacher experience, including onboarding, classroom setup, assignment creation, example content discovery, dashboard views, reporting workflows, and early AI-assisted creation patterns powered by the ChatGPT API.

That AI work explored how teachers could move from intent to usable instructional content faster, reducing the blank-page problem while keeping educators in control of what they created, assigned, reviewed, and adapted for their classrooms.

The design process was grounded in teacher research, product usage data, growth metrics, and rapid experimentation.

Working closely with educators, product managers, and engineers, we identified friction across the activation journey and tested improvements to sign-up, onboarding, example content, classroom setup, and first assignment flows.

One important learning was that teachers were more likely to take meaningful action when they were shown relevant, classroom-ready examples instead of being dropped into a blank starting state. That insight shaped a more personalized onboarding experience and helped connect new users to the kinds of activities they could immediately assign.

The work helped strengthen Formative’s role as the assessment layer within a larger instructional platform, connecting classroom activity, feedback, standards, student progress, and real-time reporting in one experience.

It also helped create a foundation for the kind of AI-assisted creation experience Formative now markets as Luna, where teachers can generate and adapt instructional content as part of their existing classroom workflow.

The broader product work supported strong growth and engagement while making the experience feel more purposeful, easier to adopt, and better connected to how teachers actually work.

• Showing example content after sign-up made new users 3× more likely to assign assessments
• Weekly active users grew to nearly 400k
• Net Promoter Score reached 75