Formative Assessment is an important building block of all Montessori environments. Because Maria Montessori relied upon the principles of human development to inform her work, we describe it as formative. As an introduction to Dylan Wiliam's keynote, we will review ways in which we already embrace formative assessment as Montessori professionals. This short overview will discuss observation, the three-period lesson, friendliness with error and other Montessori tools as a warm-up to the exploration of formative assessment in the broader educational context. 

Over fifty years ago, David Ausubel suggested that the most important principle in effective education was to start from where the learner is, rather than where we would like them to be. While this sounds easy, every teacher knows that the sense that learners make of their educational experiences is often unpredictable.

What this means is that to create effective learning environments, educators need to find ways of eliciting evidence about what is going on in learners’ minds, and use this evidence to adjust or adapt the learning environment to better meet learners’ needs—in other words, formative assesment.

In this presentation, Dylan Wiliam will outline how teachers can elicit evidence of learners’ thinking, provide feedback to learners that is aimed at improving, rather than evaluating learning, and activate learners both as owners of their own learning, and as learning resources for their peers. The presentation will conclude by showing how school leaders can support teachers in developing their formative assessment practice by setting up, and supporting, school-based, teacher learning communities, focused on the simple idea that the best way to improve children’s development is to support the development of their teachers.