In my first two posts (which you can read here and here), I argued for moving from instruments-based to outcomes-based assessment to make learning visible and then explored what that can look like inside everyday classroom practice. But there is another dimension to this shift that matters just as much: the environment around the classroom.
You can usually tell when a school has truly embraced outcomes-based assessment long before you see a report card. You hear it in the way teachers discuss student progress in meetings, in the examples displayed on hallway walls, and in the kinds of questions parents ask at home. When the shift really takes hold, assessment stops being only a classroom practice and starts becoming part of the culture of the institution itself.
Two groups play a particularly important role in making a culture of visible learning sustainable: school leaders and families. This post is mostly for school leaders, but the tips on how to involve families will strike a chord with teachers as well.
What administrators need to do
It is tempting to think schools adopt new approaches to assessment simply because leadership teams decide to. A memo is sent out, a workshop is organized, and everyone hopes classroom practice will gradually follow. In reality, change tends to happen much more slowly and much more socially.
John Hattie’s (2009) research on school leadership offers an important reminder here. Inspirational leadership certainly matters, but the leaders who seem to have the strongest impact on student learning are often the ones who keep returning to practical questions about teaching and learning: What are students actually learning? How do we know? What evidence are we looking at together?
Dylan Wiliam (2016) reaches a similar conclusion from another direction. Across years of work with schools implementing formative assessment practices, he repeatedly points to the importance of sustained collaborative time for teachers. Not occasional training sessions, but regular opportunities for teachers to look at student work together, compare interpretations, discuss evidence of learning, and gradually develop shared expectations over time.
So what does this look like in practice for a curriculum coordinator, principal, or director of studies? A few things, drawn both from research and from my own experience:
- Make learning the language of the institution. In meetings, newsletters, and conversations with families, talk more about what students are learning to do than about what was covered, completed, or scored. This may seem like a subtle shift, but over time it changes what people pay attention to. Hattie’s work consistently reminds us that school leaders need to think of themselves not simply as managers of teaching, but as evaluators of the impact teaching is having on learning.
- Protect teachers’ time to look at student work together. Outcomes-based assessment depends on teachers developing a shared understanding of what success looks like for a particular outcome. That only happens when teachers have time to sit together with student writing, speaking samples, projects, or performances and discuss the evidence collaboratively. If this work is treated as optional or squeezed into spare moments, it rarely becomes part of the culture.
- Resist the temptation to translate everything back into a number. One of the hardest parts of this transition is that families, regulators, and sometimes even school leaders themselves continue to look for a single score. Yet performance descriptors often tell a much richer and more accurate story of learning than a 0–100 scale can. In my own context, for example, descriptors such as fluent, progressing, developing, or little/no evidence have often generated much more meaningful conversations about student growth than numerical averages ever did.
- Make learning visible beyond the classroom. Many schools already display student work on classroom walls, and that is an important start. But learning can become visible throughout the wider school community too: in hallways, common areas, digital platforms, assemblies, exhibitions, or student-led presentations. If a school or language program uses a learning management system, student production can also become part of what families and other students regularly encounter. One of the clearest ways of demonstrating language development is simply to show what learners at different CEFR levels are actually able to do with language.
Bringing families into the assessment conversation
Of all the partners involved in a student’s education, families are often the ones most excluded from conversations about assessment, and also the ones most likely to interpret learning through the systems they themselves experienced as students.
If they grew up with percentages and rankings, those become the tools they naturally reach for when trying to understand their child’s progress. That isn’t resistance; it’s familiarity. Part of our role is to help families develop a broader picture of what learning can look like.
Joyce Epstein’s (2018) framework of school–family–community partnerships identifies six types of family involvement. Two of them sit right at the heart of assessment: communicating (how schools talk to families about progress) and learning at home (how families support what is being learned). When schools get these two right, parental involvement stops being a box to tick and becomes a genuine partnership. When they get them wrong, usually by communicating only through report cards and only when something has gone wrong, the partnership never forms.
Here are a few practices worth considering:
- Show, don’t just score. A portfolio, whether digital or physical, containing samples of student work over time often communicates progress much more clearly than a spreadsheet of marks. When families can compare a student’s speaking or writing from the beginning of a term with later work, growth becomes visible in a very concrete way.
- Organize Visible Learning Days. I’m intentionally using the plural here. Many schools already organize end-of-term exhibitions or presentations, but if we truly want to emphasize learning as a process rather than only a final product, students need opportunities to share work at different moments along the journey. In project-based learning contexts, for example, milestone presentations during the term can be just as valuable as the final showcase. There is something powerful about making unfinished learning visible too.
- Translate the language. Terms like can-do statements, formative assessment, success criteria, and outcomes are familiar to educators, but not necessarily to families. Besides, learning about them only when reports are issued makes it difficult for parents to follow the learning process itself. Before a learning cycle begins, schools can help families by sharing simple descriptions, in accessible language, of what students are expected to be able to do and what successful progress might look like.
- Shift the homework focus. The value of homework and whether it truly contributes to student success have been challenged recently. Rather than assigning traditional homework, the teacher can propose tasks for students to do with their parents. These can range from teaching the parents a song they learned in class to sharing five new words or facts from the day’s lesson, and then reporting back to the teacher and classmates the next day.
- Equip families with better questions. Many parents naturally ask things like “Did you get it right?” or “What grade did you get?” because those were the questions they themselves grew up with. Schools can help broaden that conversation by modelling alternatives: “What’s something you can do now that you couldn’t do a few weeks ago?”, “What did you find difficult today?”, or “What are you still working on?” These questions don’t always come naturally at first. Like anything else, they become more meaningful with practice.
- Rethink the parent–teacher conference. When families arrive expecting a verdict and leave with a verdict, the partnership easily becomes one of surveillance. But when the conversation focuses on what the student can now do, what is still developing, and what support might help next, the relationship changes. In some schools, students themselves help lead these conversations by presenting their own portfolios and reflecting on their progress. That shift can be surprisingly powerful: students stop being talked about and begin talking about their own learning.
One final note
I want to be honest about something: none of this happens quickly. Moving from an instruments-based culture to an outcomes-based one is a gradual project, especially when it involves not only classrooms, but also leadership structures and family expectations. There will be teachers who are tired, parents who are skeptical, regulators who still want a number, and seasons when the old habits creep back. That isn’t a sign of failure; it’s the shape of cultural change.
What helps, I’ve found, is to keep returning to a simple question: what do we actually want students to be able to do with language, and how will we recognize that growth when we see it?
The classroom is where outcomes-based assessment lives. The school and the home are where it lasts.
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References
Epstein, J. L. (2018). School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.
Wiliam, D. (2016). Leadership for teacher learning: Creating a culture where all teachers improve so that all students succeed. Learning Sciences International.
