Valentina Devid
A former teacher and middle leader, Valentina has spent years as a trainer and adviser, in the Netherlands and, increasingly, across international contexts. She works at the level of implementation, leadership and whole-school development: how to make change durable rather than a project that fades within a year.
Since 2017 she has supported hundreds of teachers, school boards and leadership teams. Co-founder of The Formative Action School and Llearn, she built an online course on formative action that has reached over a thousand educators and developed a model for embedding change durably in schools. She works with the formative action loop and constructive alignment, and collaborates with educators including René Kneyber, Dominique Sluijsmans and Flemming van de Graaf.
Samuel Derkse
Samuel Derkse is a teacher of Dutch, a learning-support specialist and a daily practitioner of formative action. He teaches every day, so he knows what survives the moment an idea meets the realities of the classroom. At his school he invests heavily in educational quality, with one clear aim: genuinely improving teaching and learning.
He took an unusual route into education. Before the classroom he managed a rehabilitation clinic and worked as a psychosomatic physiotherapist, where he learned how change really takes hold in people and organisations, and what it takes to make it last. For Samuel, evidence-informed practice means more than applying research by the book. The best decisions bring three things together: expertise, the evidence, and the actual student(s) in front of you. Hold all three, and you make choices that work. Getting that balance right, and translating research into practice without losing what made it matter, is what professional practice is about.
His view of leadership is just as clear: the job is to unlock the capacity already present in your people and your organisation, and to draw it out so it can grow.
