How to Lead Without Being Needed | A Conversation with Brett Griffin
What happens when you take a school leader who's used to timetables, structure, and constant visibility, and drop them into the chaos of…
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This conversation dives into what formative action is, why Valentina Devid and colleagues reframed formative assessment as an action-oriented practice, and why that reframing matters for school leaders trying to get useful classroom evidence turned into immediate, high-impact teaching moves. Valentina walks through the five-step action-oriented investigation process (orient & predict; think & generate; interpret, communicate & decide; informed follow-up; verify, reflect & predict), gives concrete classroom examples (history teachers checking the five causes of the First World War using mini whiteboards), and warns about common “mutations” — for example, when formative work is dumped into a learning management system as a grade with zero weight and loses purpose.
You’ll learn practical, leader-level actions you can take this term: how to check whether teachers are acting on evidence (not just collecting it), how to coach teams to set a sharp investigative focus so one question gives clear next steps, and how to avoid the three common implementation traps Valentina names (tool-focus, data overload, and handing premature decision-power to beginners). They discuss specific routines you can request in lesson observations (orient & predict statements, mirror questions for verification). Shane and Valentina give examples of immediate follow-ups you can expect to see in a classroom after a formative action check. If you want a straightforward way to tighten assessment practice so it actually improves learning, press play.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
Formative Action: From Instrument to Design — book page (The Formative Action School)
The Formative Action School (Toetsrevolutie) — main site
Hachette Learning — “Formative Action: From Instrument to Design” (publisher / buy)
OliCav — Oliver Caviglioli (visual designer of the model)
Inside the Black Box — Paul Black & Dylan Wiliam (PDF)
LLEARN Podcast (Valentina with René Kneyber & Flemming van de Graaf) — show page
Valentina Devid — LinkedIn profile
Episode Partners
International Curriculum Association
Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive
Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.
You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
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