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School leaders are often most comfortable providing feedback on what they can see. We observe questioning strategies, classroom management, student engagement, and instructional delivery. We can align observations to indicators, gather evidence, and provide feedback with relative confidence.

Assessment, however, presents a different challenge.

Some of the most important assessment work never occurs during an observation. It happens when teachers design assessments, anticipate misconceptions, analyze student responses, identify patterns, adjust instruction, and determine whether those adjustments improved learning. These are the professional decisions that shape student outcomes, yet much of this work remains invisible to observers.  

This creates important questions for instructional leaders: How do we provide effective feedback on processes and thinking we cannot directly observe? And, more importantly, how do we use feedback to develop teachers who become increasingly skilled at gathering evidence, interpreting learning, and making instructional decisions?

Moving Assessment Conversations Beyond Compliance

Too often, assessment conversations focus on compliance:

• Was an assessment administered?
• Was data collected?
• Were scores entered?
• Did the teacher attend the data meeting?

While these actions might be necessary, they do not always indicate assessment expertise. A teacher can complete every requirement and still struggle to understand what the evidence is telling them about student learning.

Assessment-capable teachers do much more than collect data. They use evidence to make instructional decisions. They continually ask:

• What do students understand?
• What misconceptions are emerging?
• What patterns are visible?
• What should I do next?
• How will I know if my response worked?

These questions represent the real work of assessment. The role of feedback should be to strengthen a teacher’s ability to answer them independently.

Observing Assessment Artifacts and Outcomes

One of the challenges with many assessment indicators is that they involve professional judgment rather than visible behaviors.

A leader cannot directly observe a teacher analyzing evidence or identifying misconceptions. Those cognitive processes occur internally.

What leaders can observe are the artifacts and outcomes of that thinking:

• Assessment tasks
• Student work samples
• Progress monitoring documents
• Data analysis protocols
• Small-group plans
• Intervention strategies
• Adjusted lesson plans
• Follow-up evidence of student learning

These artifacts allow leaders to make reasonable and defensible judgments about assessment practices without pretending they can see inside a teacher’s thinking. The conversation shifts from evaluating invisible processes to examining the evidence those processes produce.

Looking at Assessment Through the Lens of Growth

One of the most powerful shifts leaders can make is moving from evaluation language to developmental language.

Instead of asking: “Did the teacher analyze the data?”

Ask: “How is the teacher using evidence to make instructional decisions?”

Instead of asking: “Was data reviewed?”

Ask: “What did the teacher learn from the evidence?”

This shift changes feedback from a compliance conversation into a learning conversation. The goal is not to determine whether a teacher completed a process. The goal is to determine whether the process improved the teacher’s understanding of student learning and informed future instruction.

Giving Feedback Mirrors Assessment Process

Interestingly, the feedback process for leaders should look very similar to the assessment process we expect teachers to use.

Effective feedback is:

• Timely and ongoing
• Specific and actionable
• Grounded in observable evidence
• Focused on impact
• Followed by a plan and continued support

In many ways, instructional leaders should model the exact assessment cycle they hope teachers will use with students. When giving feedback, leaders will:

1. Establish a focus.
2. Gather evidence.
3. Interpret evidence.
4. Determine next steps.
5. Monitor progress.

Using Questions to Develop Assessment Judgment

The strongest feedback often comes through thoughtful questioning rather than immediate recommendations.

A leader might observe that student responses have been organized into proficiency groups.

A compliance-oriented response might be: “You need a deeper data analysis.”

An assessment-capable response might include:

• “What patterns are you noticing within each group?”
• “What misconceptions appear repeatedly?”
• “What do these errors tell you about student thinking?”
• “Which students are making the same mistake for different reasons?”
• “What instructional adjustments are you considering?”
• “What evidence will help you determine if those adjustments were successful?”

These questions do more than solve an immediate problem. They develop a teacher’s capacity to think like an assessor of learning.

Connecting Assessment to Existing Indicators

Many indicators within the NEE Observation Scoring Rubric require assessment capability to achieve high levels of implementation.

For example, indicators associated with goal setting emphasize clear learning targets, student ownership, progress monitoring, and reflection. At higher levels of implementation, students use learning targets to adjust goals, engage in self-reflection, monitor progress, and assume ownership of learning.

Similarly, research-based instructional strategies include frequent assessment, clear feedback, goal setting, and monitoring learning. These are not isolated practices. They represent an interconnected system of evidence-gathering and instructional decision-making.

When leaders provide feedback on assessment processes, they are often strengthening multiple indicators simultaneously because assessment influences nearly every aspect of effective instruction.

Using Four Feedback Approaches for Assessment Conversations

Not every teacher requires the same type of feedback. NEE’s feedback framework identifies four pathways that can be useful when discussing assessment practices:

• Diagnostic Feedback: Use when teachers need a stronger understanding of assessment concepts. Help build foundational knowledge about evidence collection and data interpretation.
• Prescriptive Feedback: Use when teachers understand assessment concepts but are not implementing them effectively. Provide specific strategies and structures that improve practice.
• Descriptive Feedback: Use when teachers are having some success and need support reflecting on how to refine their assessment processes. Ask reflective questions that increase precision and effectiveness.
• Micro Feedback: Use with highly skilled teachers who can largely direct their own growth. Allow them to determine the focus of the conversation while serving as a thought partner.

Selecting the appropriate pathway helps leaders avoid over-directing experienced teachers while still providing meaningful support to those who need more guidance.

Keeping Sight of the Real Goal

The ultimate goal is not to become better evaluators of non-observable indicators.

The ultimate goal is to create teachers who can accurately assess their own impact.

When leaders provide feedback that focuses on evidence, thinking, interpretation, and instructional response, they help teachers become more reflective, more analytical, and more responsive to student learning.

The most powerful assessment feedback does not simply improve a data meeting or assessment cycle.

It develops teachers who continuously ask:

• What does the evidence tell me?
• What should I do next?
• How will I know if it worked?

When teachers consistently engage in that cycle, they become truly assessment-capable professionals, and student learning benefits as a result.

This blog was written with the support of AI to pull information from the NEE Observation Scoring Rubric and the Guide to Effective Feedback for Leaders documents.

Aaron Jones, Ed.D., is a trainer and field support representative for the Network for Educator Effectiveness. He joined NEE in 2024 after spending more than 30 years in K-12 education as a teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent.

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The Network for Educator Effectiveness (NEE) is a simple yet powerful comprehensive system for educator evaluation that helps educators grow, students learn, and schools improve. Developed by preK-12 practitioners and experts at the University of Missouri, NEE brings together classroom observation, student feedback, teacher curriculum planning, and professional development as measures of effectiveness in a secure online portal designed to promote educator growth and development.