Leading formative assessment

Key Takeaways

people often ask me why my last name only has one L and I often reply to begin with how many else do you need but the real reason is it's Welsh and in Welsh double L is actually a different letter e alphabet I say that because in Welsh we have lots of myths and legends and one of them concerns a giant who is leading his army across the countryside and they come across a chasm this is - that is too wide for them to get across by throwing ladders over there there's a river at the bottom that is too deep moved way through and there are rocks in the river that are so close together they can't use their boats and they discuss how they gonna get the army across to the other side and eventually the giant decides there is no alternative but for him to lay his body down across the chasm and the lie of his soldiers to walk across his back to get to the other side and as he has heard the latest body down across the chasm he is heard to say one that would be a leader must be a bridge and I think that's a very powerful metaphor for your role as leaders in education school leaders are successful to the extent that they get other people to be more successful in their classrooms I think it's really important to understand what this means in practice in the same way that no teacher couldn't do the learning for her students but what she can do is create an environment in which her students learn no leader can do the learning for her teachers but what she can do is create an environment in which all teachers to do develop their practice now of course teachers to develop their practice in many ways some what benefits students and some will not and one of the things I think we have to understand is that some things are far more powerful dollars and perhaps the hardest job of leaders in schools is to get teachers focusing on getting better and the things that have the biggest payoff for their students and this is really difficult because what teachers do is generally very good so people say how do we improve schools and they look for waste and there isn't any waste in schools because almost everything the teachers do contributes to student learning so the essence of effective leadership is actually stopping people doing good things to give them time to do even better things that's the hardest job is to focus teachers on the work the biggest difference to their students not the latest big thing we're all looking for the next big thing education we need to do the last big thing properly and that is formative assessment it turns out the forward assessment is the most powerful change the teachers can make in their classrooms and of course people could always say the search shows this research shows that the reason I think that forward an assessment should be the enduring focus of teacher improvement is because Fortin assessment relies on a very simple set of questions one what did I just do as a teacher to what do my students learn and as long as teachers are reflecting on the relationship between what they just did and what their students learned then they'll always be able to advance their practice the challenge of course is that this means changing what teachers do in classrooms in the 30 years within professional development I've learned it's much easier to change what teachers do when students are not present and it's to change what teachers do when students are present changing teaching practice is very hard it's not a process of knowledge acquisition it's a process of habit change and so your primary task as leaders I think is to create an environment where teachers accept the need to continuously develop their practice however it is and makes small incremental changes for as long as they stay in the job if we do that there is no limit to what we can achieve