Separate Intention from Task
The learning intention is what to learn, not what to do. Finishing the task is not the same as achieving the learning. Keep them distinct in your planning and in what you say to students at every stage of the lesson.
The infographic
24 Ways to Embed Formative Assessment in Your Classroom
The strategies
24 strategies in 5 groups
Each strategy below is written exactly as it appears on the card.
Clarify Learning Intentions
Build Success Criteria Together
Ask students what excellent looks like before they begin. Their language, not yours, becomes the standard. Criteria they articulate themselves land far more deeply than criteria handed to them.
Exemplars Before Rubrics
Show work at different standards before students start their own. Students spot quality in someone else's work more readily than in their own. A rubric tells students what quality is; an exemplar shows them.
Find this under Make modelling clearer
Withhold the Objective
Ask students to name what they learned at the end rather than copy an objective at the start. Generating the answer embeds it far more reliably than copying from the board.
Find this under Try this tomorrow
Elicit Evidence of Learning
Hinge Questions
A hinge question is a diagnostic question at a lesson turning point. Wrong answers each map to a known misconception. Responses tell you whether to move on or go back. Never improvise it.
Find this under Check understanding
Plausible Distractors
Engineer wrong answers as carefully as the right one. Each distractor should map to a real misconception. Every wrong answer a student gives tells you something precise. Wrong answers are the diagnostic data.
Find this under Check understanding
Deliberate Cold Call
Select who answers deliberately, not at random. Track participation so nobody stays invisible across lessons. Where appropriate, target the students whose thinking you most need to hear.
Find this under Increase participation · Inclusive practice: participation and response
Mini Whiteboards
All students write their response and hold it up simultaneously. The teacher reads the room in seconds: full participation, no waiting, no dominant voices. Works across all subjects.
Find this under Check understanding · Increase participation · Make thinking visible · Support access and participation · Inclusive practice: access and participation · Try this tomorrow
ABCD Response Cards
Give each student a card: A, B, C and D. Pose a question and all students hold up their answer at once. No hands, no opt-out. The spread of responses shows instantly where misconceptions lie.
Find this under Check understanding · Increase participation · Inclusive practice: access and participation
Every Voice, Every Time
Eliciting evidence only works if every student can respond. Offer written, verbal, visual and digital means of expression. The method you choose decides who gets to show what they know.
Find this under Increase participation · Support access and participation · Inclusive practice: access and participation · Inclusive practice: participation and response
Think, Pair, Share: Disciplined
Individual thinking first; paired discussion second; nominated response third. Nomination makes the report-back evidence, not just the most confident voice. Without it, the share is optional.
Find this under Increase participation · Inclusive practice: participation and response
Feedback That Moves Learning Forward
Comment Only Marking
Remove grades from work in progress. Research showed comments alone produced the greatest gains. Adding a score to a comment cancels it out: students read the grade and ignore the feedback entirely.
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Feedback Must Cause Thinking
Feedback must be more work for the recipient than the donor. Pose questions rather than writing corrections. If feedback requires no response from the learner, it is not feedback; it is merely information.
Build In Time to Act
Feedback with no time to act on it has no value. Begin the next lesson with students reading and responding to feedback before anything new. Time to act is where the learning happens.
Find this under Help pupils act on feedback · Inclusive practice: feedback and next steps
Whole Class Feedback
Record class patterns rather than individual comments: common strengths, recurring errors and two or three next steps. Teach to the gap, not to the individual paper. Workload stays manageable.
3 Questions, Not Corrections
Return work with three questions rather than corrections. Students must respond before moving on. Cognitive effort belongs with the learner. Feedback that corrects for them removes the struggle.
Find this under Help pupils act on feedback
Students as Learning Resources
Guided Practice Together
Independence is the destination, not the starting point. Before students work alone, have them practise with peers in structured steps, checking each other's responses at every stage before moving forward.
Student Generated Questions
Ask students to write questions that could appear in an assessment on this topic. Collate the best and use them for review. Generating questions demands higher order thinking than simply answering them.
Structured Peer Assessment
Peer feedback only works when students understand quality. Use exemplars first so students assess against shared criteria. Without shared criteria, peer feedback is opinion, not evidence.
Students as Owners of Their Learning
Spaced Retrieval Practice
Low stakes quizzing on prior content, not today's lesson. Returning to older material at increasing intervals is one of the most robust findings in memory research. Re-reading notes is not the same as retrieving.
Find this under Help pupils remember more · Help pupils connect prior and new learning
Test Before You Teach
Quiz students on material before you teach it. Triggering the feeling of not knowing primes attention and improves retention. Students who struggle before instruction remember the answer better.
The Muddiest Point
At lesson close, each student anonymously writes the one thing they are least clear about. The teacher addresses the most common muddy points publicly at the start of the next lesson. Two minutes; high value.
Find this under Check understanding · Inclusive practice: access and participation · Try this tomorrow
Review Little and Often
Begin every lesson with a brief review of prior content: yesterday's, last week's, last month's. The most effective teachers check understanding constantly. If most students cannot answer, adjust the pace of teaching.
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Spaced Self Quizzing
Teach students to quiz themselves rather than re-read notes. Re-reading feels productive but produces weak retention. Self quizzing feels harder but works. Retrieval effort drives long term memory.
Find this under Help pupils remember more
The thinking
If it does not change what you do next, it was not formative. It was just a test with a kinder name.
Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black’s work were obviously my ‘go to’ for this chapter, because it answers the only three questions assessment exists to serve: where is the learner going, where are they now, and what closes the gap. The strategies I’ve shared in this section aim to move assessment out of the marking pile and into the lesson itself, where it can help teaching in the moment.
The most difficult, and this is where technology can often help, is the most powerful: eliciting evidence from every student, not just the confident few.
In practice
Technology can make every learner visible at once. That is its real contribution to assessment.
The classic weakness of classroom questioning is that you hear from a handful of pupils and make assumptions about the rest. Polling tools, mini whiteboards and simple response systems help take much of that problem away by gathering a response from everyone at the same time. That turns a rough feel for the room into something much closer to evidence.
But evidence is only useful when you act on it. A tool that shows you a bar chart of misconceptions has done nothing until it changes what you do in the next five minutes because of what it shows.
Further reading and evidence
Where this thinking comes from
The wider evidence around this area, kept deliberately short. No single study validates all 24 strategies; these are the traditions the thinking comes from, and good places to read further. How this site uses evidence.
- Black & Wiliam (1998), Assessment and Classroom Learning, Assessment in Education. The review that put formative assessment on the map. The original effect sizes have been debated since; the direction of travel has held.
- Black & Wiliam, Inside the Black Box, Phi Delta Kappan. The short version written for teachers, still the clearest statement of the argument.
- Leahy, Lyon, Thompson & Wiliam (2005), Classroom Assessment: Minute by Minute, Day by Day, Educational Leadership. The five formative assessment strategies most schools now use, in their original form.
- Wiliam (2011), Embedded Formative Assessment. The book-length treatment, with the practical techniques behind many of these cards.
Use this for professional learning
A 30 minute activity for your team
How do you know what they know, lesson by lesson?. A 30 minute activity for a department, phase or professional learning group, using this guide as it stands.
- Read the thinking section above together.
- Each colleague brings one moment from this week where they discovered too late that students hadn't understood.
- Explore the strategies and pick two or three that would have caught it earlier.
- Discuss the mechanism: what makes evidence of understanding visible while there's still time to act?
- Consider your context: class sizes, subjects, the students who never volunteer.
- Ask whether technology helps here, a response tool perhaps, or whether whiteboards do the job.
- Choose one strategy to trial in the same class next week.
- Agree the evidence you'll compare: what you knew about their understanding before and after.
The model behind this, and how to run it across a school or trust, is on the professional learning page.