Margaret Heritage

Margaret Heritage is an education researcher and consultant whose work focuses on formative assessment, learning progressions, and the development of academic language, particularly for English learners. She has held long-term roles at the University of California, Los Angeles, including serving as principal of the UCLA laboratory school and as Assistant Director at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), and later worked as a Senior Scientist at WestEd. Prior to her work in the United States, she spent many years in schools in the United Kingdom as a practitioner, university teacher, and county inspector of education, and has taught graduate education courses at the University of Warwick, UCLA, and Stanford University.

Heritage has published extensively on formative assessment and language development. Her books include Formative Assessment: Making It Happen in the Classroom, which examines how teachers can use assessment evidence to guide instruction, and Progressing Students’ Language Day by Day, co‑authored with Alison L. Bailey, which introduces a Dynamic Language Learning Progression to support daily monitoring and advancement of students’ language proficiency. She is also the author or co‑author of other influential works such as *Formative Assessment in Practice: A Process of Inquiry and