What Gets Tested Gets Taught

I remember sitting in a windowless meeting room back in 2014, staring at a colour-coded spreadsheet that supposedly proved our “impact,” while my actual Year 9s were currently tearing the classroom apart. The leadership team was obsessed with these high-level data dashboards, completely ignoring the fact that we had no idea if the kids actually understood the concept we’d taught forty minutes prior. We were taught that how assessment shapes teaching is a linear, data-driven process of tracking progress against benchmarks, but that’s a lie told by people who haven’t stood in front of a restless class on a rainy Tuesday. In reality, assessment isn’t a spreadsheet; it’s the frantic, messy, and often silent way you adjust your lesson mid-sentence because you can see the look of total confusion on the third row.

I’m not here to talk you through some shiny new pedagogical framework that requires three hours of planning you don’t have. Instead, I want to talk about the practical, gritty reality of using what you see in the room to actually drive your next move. I’ll be sharing what it looks like to use assessment when you’re already drowning in marking and how to make it work for your students without losing your mind in the process.

Formative vs Summative Assessment Impact When Time Is Running Out

When the term is winding down and you’re staring at a mountain of books, the tension between formative vs summative assessment impact becomes incredibly real. On paper, formative assessment is this beautiful, continuous loop of checking for understanding and adjusting your pace. In reality, when you’ve got three classes to prep for and a meeting that’s run forty minutes over, “continuous” feels like a luxury. You start to wonder if you’re actually teaching or just racing to finish the syllabus so they can at least sit the end-of-unit test.

The danger is that we let the summative stuff—the big, scary, “data-driven” exams—dictate everything we do. We fall into the trap of teaching to the test because it feels safer than trying to facilitate meaningful instructional design and feedback loops that we simply don’t have the time to manage. But if we only care about the final grade, we miss the chance to fix the misconceptions happening right in front of us. I’ve learned that even a five-minute, low-stakes check is better than a massive end-of-term exam that only tells you what they didn’t learn.

Curriculum Alignment and Testing Without Losing the Plot

We’ve all been there: you’ve spent six weeks meticulously building a unit on the Tudors, only to find the departmental end-of-term test focuses heavily on the Stuarts. It’s a classic case of broken curriculum alignment and testing, where the map doesn’t match the actual terrain you’ve been walking. When the assessment doesn’t reflect what you’ve actually had the capacity to teach, you end up in a defensive loop, rushing through content just to “cover” the spec rather than letting the students actually grasp it.

The real danger here is that we start teaching to the test rather than teaching the subject. When the pressure of upcoming evaluations starts dictating your lesson plans, the instructional design and feedback loops that actually help a child learn get bypassed in favour of exam technique drills. It becomes a hollow exercise. We shouldn’t be sacrificing the depth of a good history lesson just to satisfy a spreadsheet. If the test doesn’t respect the journey you’ve taken the students on, then the test is the problem, not your teaching.

Five Ways to Make Assessment Work (Without Losing Your Soul)

• Stop chasing the data and start looking at the room. If your assessment tells you half the class failed a concept, don’t just move on to the next unit because the scheme of work says so; pivot. A piece of data is useless if it doesn’t change what you do in the next twenty minutes.
• Prioritise ‘low-stakes’ over ‘high-drama.’ We spend so much time prepping for the big end-of-term tests that we forget the small, messy checks—the quick whiteboard scribbles or the “thumbs up/down”—are what actually tell you if they’ve grasped the thread before the big exam makes it permanent.
• Ditch the marking mountain for meaningful feedback. If you’re three weeks behind on your marking pile, stop trying to write a novel in the margins of every book. A quick verbal check or a single targeted question at the bottom of a page often does more for their learning than a sea of green ink they won’t even read.
• Use assessment to fix your seating plan, not just your spreadsheets. If the assessment shows a particular group is consistently hitting a wall, that’s your cue to move them. Assessment shouldn’t just live in a digital gradebook; it should dictate where people sit and how they work.
• Guard your planning time against ‘initiative creep.’ Don’t let a new assessment framework force you into a cycle of constant testing that leaves you no time to actually teach. If a new way of checking progress takes an hour to prep but only gives you five minutes of insight, bin it.

Three Things to Take Into Your Next Lesson

Stop treating assessment like a post-mortem. If you’re waiting until the end of the term to find out they didn’t get it, you’ve already lost the battle. Use the small, messy, five-minute checks while you’re actually walking the rows—even if it’s just a thumbs up or a quick look at a scrap of paper—to pivot before the lesson becomes a write-off.

Prioritise “good enough” over “perfectly data-driven.” You don’t need a complex spreadsheet to tell you that half the class looked blank during the explanation. Trust your eyes and your experience; the most valuable assessment is often the instinctive adjustment you make mid-sentence because you can see the confusion setting in.

Protect your sanity by choosing assessment that actually informs your next move. If a task doesn’t tell you what to teach tomorrow, or if it’s just “busy work” to fill a gap, bin it. We have far too little time to be collecting data that we’ll never have the capacity to act upon.

The Assessment Trap

We pretend assessment is a way to measure what they’ve learned, but in a real classroom, it’s actually the thing that dictates what we dare to teach; we stop chasing the big, ambitious ideas the moment the data tells us they haven’t grasped the basics, and suddenly, we’re just teaching to the gaps rather than the potential.

Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

The Reality Check

At the end of the day, assessment isn’t about the neat little spreadsheets or the color-coded data walls that look great in a leadership meeting. It’s about the messy, real-time decision you make when you realize half the class didn’t grasp the concept you spent forty minutes explaining. We’ve talked about balancing the pressure of summative exams with the necessity of formative checks, and why keeping your curriculum aligned matters more than chasing every new testing fad. It boils down to this: assessment should be a compass, not a hammer. It’s meant to guide your next move in the classroom, not just to punish the students (or yourself) for what wasn’t learned the first time around.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of marking and the constant demand for “evidence of learning,” just remember that the most powerful assessment happens in the quiet moments between you and a student. It’s that quick question during a walk-around, or noticing the look of confusion on a face in the back row. Don’t let the paperwork swallow the actual teaching. You aren’t a data processor; you’re a teacher. Focus on the small, meaningful insights that actually help those kids move forward, and let the rest of the noise fade into the background. You’re doing the hard work, and that’s what actually counts.

About Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

Most educational advice is written for a classroom that does not exist — twenty motivated pupils, unlimited preparation time, no behaviour to manage. I write for the room you are actually in. What retrieval practice looks like when marking is already three weeks behind, why the seating plan matters more than the starter activity, and which of the last decade's initiatives left anything behind. Nineteen years taught me that the good ideas survive contact with a wet Wednesday and the rest do not.