People talk about assessment like it’s mainly a fairness problem… it is all about what a student ‘deserves’. If we can just get the rubric tighter, moderate harder, align grades across classes, then we’ve “fixed” it. I keep seeing teams put enormous effort into consistency, but still not being able to answer the classroom-based question: what changed, and what should we do next?

Here I’m going to contrast two models… hypothetical but I think you’ll see the difference… the standard model and the developmental model, influenced by Griffin. 😎

The ‘standard’ model is built to locate students against an external reference point. Age expectations, cohort averages, scaled scores, benchmarks. That can be useful, for sure. It helps leaders spot patterns and it gives systems a shared language. But it also pushes you toward sorting, not explaining. You end up with neat numbers that don’t actually tell you what the learner can now do in their work.

The developmental model, shaped by Patrick Griffin’s work at the University of Melbourne (the OG ARC), starts from a different place. Learning is movement within the thing you care about, and you map that movement using evidence from what people actually produce. Not vibes, not “seems capable”, not a percentage that means ten different things to ten different teachers. You write criteria that describe how performance changes over time, then you use student work to infer where they currently sit and what the next shift would look like. One of Patrick’s mantras was “evidence, not inference”.

A simple example… A Year 8 writing task comes back and the conversation immediately goes to the grade and whether it’s “about right”. Under a developmental lens, the conversation changes: what’s happening with the reasoning, the structure, the control of evidence, the sentence work? You can still report a grade if you have to, but you’re no longer trapped inside it. The grade becomes the headline, the developmental map is the actual explanation.

This is the line of work I’m grateful to be continuing. Patrick’s contribution wasn’t just a theory, it was a practical stance: assessment should make development visible. Once you take that seriously, a lot of what we currently do starts to look like busywork. And some of it is.

What’s even more exciting is that his model can be applied to waaaay more things than just educational assessment.

🦄

[Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash]