Strategic school leadership insights for education leaders who want to drive meaningful change and build thriving school communities.
What if the most powerful leadership strategies were hiding in plain sight? Education Leaders uncovers the evidence-based approaches that separate truly effective school leaders from the rest. Through compelling interviews and strategic deep-dives, organisational coach Shane Leaning reveals the real challenges facing today's education leaders, and the practical solutions that actually work.
Every other Tuesday, discover how renowned educators and thought leaders tackle school improvement, staff development, and cultural transformation. You'll learn actionable strategies you can implement immediately to build confidence in your leadership and create lasting impact in your school community.
On alternate weeks, Shane delivers focused episodes that address the leadership challenges you face daily: managing diverse teams, driving innovation, building organisational identity, and implementing sustainable change. Each episode offers clear, research-backed frameworks for developing your leadership capacity.
Whether you're a department head questioning your next move, an assistant principal navigating complexities of a big team, or a superintendent driving district-wide change, Education Leaders provides the strategic insights you need to lead with confidence.
Consistently ranked #1 schools podcast in Education category across multiple regions.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Strategic school leadership insights for education leaders who want to drive meaningful change and build thriving school communities.
What if the most powerful leadership strategies were hiding in plain sight? Education Leaders uncovers the evidence-based approaches that separate truly effective school leaders from the rest. Through compelling interviews and strategic deep-dives, organisational coach Shane Leaning reveals the real challenges facing today's education leaders, and the practical solutions that actually work.
Every other Tuesday, discover how renowned educators and thought leaders tackle school improvement, staff development, and cultural transformation. You'll learn actionable strategies you can implement immediately to build confidence in your leadership and create lasting impact in your school community.
On alternate weeks, Shane delivers focused episodes that address the leadership challenges you face daily: managing diverse teams, driving innovation, building organisational identity, and implementing sustainable change. Each episode offers clear, research-backed frameworks for developing your leadership capacity.
Whether you're a department head questioning your next move, an assistant principal navigating complexities of a big team, or a superintendent driving district-wide change, Education Leaders provides the strategic insights you need to lead with confidence.
Consistently ranked #1 schools podcast in Education category across multiple regions.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.