Accentuate the formative: Michigan teachers use rubrics and video to improve their practice. By Theron Blakeslee, Denny Chandler, Edward Roeber, and Tara Kintz Lauri Bach, an 8th-grade U.S. history teacher in Michigan, is a member of a school-based learning team studying formative assessment practices with her colleagues. While teams like this are a supportive place to discuss new teaching practices, they may not be set up to provide an essential component of improvement: descriptive, actionable feedback to each other about actual classroom practice. Researchers from the Formative Assessment for Michigan Educators (FAME) project of the Michigan Department of Education worked with Bach and seven other teachers to observe in their classrooms, video their teaching, and then use rubrics to analyze and reflect on their teaching.