Lessons Learned about Leading the Implementation of Formative Assessment: A Framework for School Leaders and Leadership Teams

When teachers and students share the responsibility for learning, students become active agents in their own learning who respond to feedback, set learning goals, track their progress, and adapt their own learning strategies when needed. Formative assessment provides a clear path forward to this kind of teaching and learning experience, and site leadership is critical for creating the conditions needed for formative assessment to take root. This brief provides a framework for how leaders can go about doing this, highlighting five leadership practices that appear to enhance the implementation: (1) Fostering understanding of formative assessment; (2) Communicating a vision for formative assessment that highlights expected changes in the student role; (3) Modeling a culture of learning in which adult learners, like student learners, use evidence from and get feedback on daily practice to guide their own learning; (4) Leading site-based professional learning in which teachers engage with new content and build shared capacity to implement formative assessment; and (5) Nurturing the conditions necessary for the changes associated with implementing and scaling formative assessment. [This brief is a work product for the How I Know Project, an initiative of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.]