So myself and some leaders from my school will be presenting at the 2018 ACEL conference. Our topic is “Cultivating growth: our assessment revoution”. In it we will talk about how our school implemented developmental rubrics, as developed by the Assessment Research Centre. We are going to talk about the project, what, when and how, and then what lessons we learned about program implementation.

In a nutshell, we learnt:

1. To do a project well, focus on it for 3-4 years
2. Resource it well (with staff time), especially in the early stages
3. planning fallacy – there will always be ‘unknown unknowns’ in any project implementation and this is okay. You don’t need to have everything perfect before you start the project.
4. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough
5. it is a constant PR challenge to sell the ideas to staff, perhaps more of a challenge than selling to students or parents