Why Good Ideas Don’t Stick

A question from a conference participant led me to think more about how schools approach change.

At the Whakaoriori Kahui Ako conference this week in Masterton I spoke about the notion of ‘split screen’ assessment – term I was introduced to by Bill Lucas in a recent webinar I facilitated. Essentially, split screen assessment involves practices that hold in view both the development of foundational skills and knowledge and the cultivation of broader competencies, capabilities, and dispositions. It’s an approach grounded in strong evidence and, in my experience, one that resonates strongly with teachers when they encounter it.

After the session, a participant approached me with a question that got me thinking. Simply put, he asked “why is it that new assessment initiatives that have been introduced into schools in recent years don’t ‘stick’?” He specifically pointed to formative assessment – arguably one of the most thoroughly researched and widely promoted pedagogical shifts in recent decades – and said that in his experience, despite the investment in professional learning to support this initiative, whatever gains schools made tended to fade within a couple of years. The professional learning would happen, there’d be genuine enthusiasm, practices would shift. And then, gradually, things would drift back. He wanted to know why.

It’s a question I’ve been asked before – but his question has prompted me to think a little more about the ‘why’ and what we might do to counter this, particularly given the enormous amount of change being introduced in schools at the moment.

The Problem Isn’t Understanding – It’s Sustainability

The first thing to say is that the fade-out he described is real, and it’s not unique to New Zealand. It’s documented across school systems internationally, and it applies to a wide range of innovations – not just formative assessment.

The tempting explanation is that teachers don’t understand the approach well enough, or aren’t committed to it. But the evidence doesn’t support that. Research consistently shows that uptake is rarely the problem – sustainability is. Teachers often engage genuinely with new practices. The difficulty is that those practices fail to become embedded, habitual, or structurally supported over time.

I think a useful reframing of this conclusion might be to say; “the problem with formative assessment is not that teachers don’t understand it; it is that schools (or the system) often under-design the conditions needed for it to last.”

What the Evidence Says

Several recurring findings emerge from the implementation and school reform literature (see links at the end for some references):

1. Implementation takes years, not months. Many schools never move beyond initial adoption into full implementation and long-term sustainability. The timeline for genuine change in classroom practice is typically measured in years, but most professional learning programmes are funded and structured for months. Change like this rarely moves at the speed of an election cycle (to quote Mark Osborne, another speaker at the conference).
2. Training alone is rarely enough. Without follow-up coaching, ongoing support structures, and integration into everyday work, teachers are likely to revert to familiar practices – especially when under pressure. One-off workshops, however well-designed, leave too much to individual will and circumstance.
3. Innovation becomes an add-on rather than a transformation. Reform efforts frequently fail when they’re not well aligned with curriculum, assessment systems, and school routines. Formative assessment, for example, can remain something teachers do in addition to everything else, rather than something that is their practice. That additional cognitive and workload burden makes it one of the first things to go when pressures mount.
4. Professional identity and school culture matter enormously. Teachers’ enactment of any approach is shaped by who they understand themselves to be as educators, the culture of their team and school, and the signals sent by leadership. The same professional learning initiative can produce very different results across schools – and within the same school over time – because these conditions vary so much.
5. Fragmentation and shifting priorities are corrosive. Broader school reform research consistently shows that sustainability is achieved through coherence, shared language, and stable routines. What undermines it is the tendency – familiar to anyone who has worked in schools – to move on to the next initiative before the previous one has had time to become routine.

Formative Assessment as a Case Study

Formative assessment is a particularly instructive example because the evidence for its impact on learning is so strong. Meta-analyses and large-scale reviews have repeatedly found significant positive effects. And yet, as my conference participant observed, sustaining it beyond a short initial period remains persistently difficult.

For example, this study from ACER shows that formative assessment is widely advocated, but support is often inadequate, and curriculum reform that does not embed assessment is unlikely to succeed. Or this from School Leadership and Management that provides a broader explanation of why school reforms fail to sustain and what factors help or hinder long-term embedding.

Part of the explanation lies in the nature of the practice itself. Formative assessment is not a technique – it’s a way of seeing teaching and learning. It asks teachers to read what students understand in real time, adjust their practice accordingly, and give feedback that moves learning forward. That’s a complex, cognitively demanding disposition to develop, and it competes with workload pressures, accountability demands, and deeply held beliefs about what assessment is for.

In that light, the two-year fade-out becomes less surprising. New practices often survive only while they are being actively supported. Once formal structures are removed – the facilitator, the scheduled reflection sessions, the peer observation cycles – they depend entirely on individual motivation to sustain. And individual motivation, however genuine, is not a system.

What Actually Helps

If schools want innovations to stick, the implementation literature is reasonably clear about what’s needed. Here are some ideas that spring to mind when I think of that:

1. Build a multi-year plan, not a one-year rollout. Change in professional practice takes time, and the support structures need to reflect that. A three-year implementation plan with staged goals, regular check-ins, and built-in adaptation is more likely to produce lasting change than an intensive term of professional learning. Of course, the plan should be more of a road-map than a specific set of steps to follow, and should be monitored and reviewed regularly.
2. Prioritise coaching and peer inquiry over workshop PD. The evidence strongly favours ongoing, embedded professional learning – modelling, classroom observation, collaborative inquiry, and expert coaching – over one-off workshops, however well-designed. In the work I’ve been doing, for example, I may start with an initial workshop or two, but then move to regular coaching check-ins, often online. I also try to set up internal ‘buddy’ approaches or similar to keep the momentum going.
3. Narrow the focus and keep it stable. Trying to shift everything at once leads to shallow change everywhere. Focusing on a small number of high-leverage practices and sustaining that focus long enough for them to become habitual is more effective than broad coverage that never reaches depth.
4. Align the initiative with existing systems. Formative assessment practices are far more likely to persist when they’re woven into curriculum planning, moderation processes, and feedback cycles – part of what teachers ordinarily do – rather than sitting alongside ordinary teaching as an extra requirement.
5. Measure what matters. If schools track attendance at professional learning events but not actual changes in classroom practice, they’re measuring the wrong thing. Genuine implementation requires evidence of practice change, which means someone has to look at what’s happening in classrooms.
6. Invest in leadership continuity. Many initiatives die not because teachers abandon them but because staff turnover – at both teacher and leadership level – means the shared knowledge, language, and commitment that sustain the practice simply dissipates. Building leadership capacity around the approach, not just teacher capacity, is essential.
7. Celebrate what works. One of the most underused levers in sustaining change is also one of the simplest: noticing and naming what’s going well. An appreciative approach – one that actively seeks out examples of the new practice taking hold, surfaces them for the wider team, and treats them as evidence of what’s possible – does several things at once. It builds confidence among teachers who might otherwise feel they’re falling short of an ideal. It creates shared reference points and a common language for what good practice looks like in this school, with these students. And it shifts the emotional engagement in professional learning from compliance to genuine curiosity and pride. Those who’ve worked with me in the past will know I’m a fan of an appreciative approach. I’m convinced that schools that make a habit of celebrating small wins tend to sustain change better than those that only measure what isn’t working yet. Momentum, it turns out, is also a resource.

A Broader Point

The question my colleague asked about formative assessment is really a question about educational change more generally. Schools are complex, human organisations with competing demands, shifting priorities, and structural pressures that often work against the deep, slow work of changing practice.

That challenge is especially acute right now for teachers and school leaders in New Zealand. The current reform environment is unusually demanding – changes arriving on multiple fronts simultaneously, often with limited consultation, on timelines that leave little room for the kind of careful, grounded implementation the evidence calls for. Some of those changes come accompanied by questions about the strength of the research underpinning them, and educators who have been doing this work carefully and thoughtfully for years can be forgiven for feeling disoriented, or for wondering whether their professional judgement is still valued.

It’s worth naming that honestly, because it matters. Top-down, fast-moving reform is precisely the kind of context in which good existing practices get swept away – not because they stopped working, but because the noise and disruption of change makes it hard to hold onto anything with both hands.

And yet this is also the moment when it matters most to stay grounded. The research on what helps students learn doesn’t change with each policy cycle. The conditions that allow teachers to teach well – clarity of purpose, strong professional relationships, feedback-rich learning environments – remain what they were. The temptation in a reform-heavy period is to let go of what was working in order to make room for what’s coming. Resisting that temptation is, I’d argue, an act of professional leadership.

So if there’s an encouragement to take from this post, it’s this: the things that have been shown to make a real difference – formative practice, genuine professional inquiry, a shared language about learning – are worth protecting and sustaining, even when the system around them is in flux. Especially then.

That doesn’t mean closing the door to change. It means being clear-eyed about what’s worth holding onto, what genuinely needs to shift, and what the evidence actually supports – and having the confidence to say so.

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References

• McLure, F. I., & Aldridge, J. M. (2023). Sustaining reform implementation: a systematic literature review. School Leadership & Management, 43(1), 70–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2023.2171012
• Polesel, J., Rice, S., & Dulfer, N. (2018). Policy expectations and support for teacher formative assessment in Australia. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 25(6).[ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319661593_Policy_expectations_and_support_for_teacher_formative_assessment_in_Australian_education_reform]
• Sortwell, A., Trimble, K., Ferraz, R., Geelan, D., Hine, G., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Carter-Thuiller, B., Gkintoni, E., & Xuan, Q. (2024). A systematic review of meta-analyses on the impact of formative assessment on K-12 students’ learning: Toward sustainable quality education. Sustainability, 16(17).[ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383784113_A_Systematic_Review_of_Meta-Analyses_on_the_Impact_of_Formative_Assessment_on_K-12_Students’_Learning_Towards_Sustainable_Quality_Education]
• van der Kleij, F., Cumming, J. J., & Looney, A. (2018). Policy expectations and support for teacher formative assessment in Australian education reform. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 25(6). https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2017.1374924
• Wiliam, D., & Leahy, S. (2015). Embedding formative assessment: Practical techniques for K-12 classrooms. Solution Tree Press. [https://www.solutiontree.com/products/books/embedding-formative-assessment.html]

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