The importance of (learning and) teaching to the Institute of Education Dylan Wiliam

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The importance of (learning and) teaching to the
Institute of EducationDylan Wiliam
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A brief history of HE funding

• Integration of funding pre-1992 and post-1992
  universities
• Research
• Quality based mechanism (RAE)
• QR supports a maximum of 50 of academic staff
  salary
• Teaching
• Quality-independent mechanism (tolerance bands)
• Fee caps too low for discrimination between
  providers
• Commodification of teaching

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Future developments

• Quality-related student contributions to tuition
  costs
• Need to achieve, and demonstrate, increased
  quality
• The death of distance
• for distance learning students
• but also for students attending full-time
• To secure its future, the Institute needs to
  become as demonstrably excellent for its teaching
  as it is for its research

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Enrolment on modules in 2008
Policy minimum 23 students per module
2006 2008 Mean 15 18 Median 12 16 Mode 11 15
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Teaching a scarily complex activity
(Denvir Brown, 1986)
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and we are largely on our own

• Two extremes
• Teachers doing the learning for the learners
• Teachers facilitating learning
• Key concept
• Teachers do not create learning
• Learners create learning
• But all teachers can do is teach (learning vs.
  teaching)
• Teaching is the engineering of effective learning
  environments
• Psychology underdetermines pedagogy
• Teaching is fundamentally a creative activity
• Creativity is very widely distributed, but often
  suppressed

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Principles of curriculum design

• Curriculum a selection from culture
• Balanced
• Rigorous
• Vertically integrated
• Focused

The test of successful education is not the
amount of knowledge that a pupil takes away from
school, but his appetite to know and his capacity
to learn. If the school sends out children with
the desire for knowledge and some idea how to
acquire it, it will have done its work. Too many
leave school with the appetite killed and the
mind loaded with undigested lumps of information.
The good schoolmaster is known by the number of
valuable subjects which he declines to
teach. (Sir Richard Livingstone, President of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1941)
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Signature pedagogies
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In Law
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In Medicine
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Effective learning environments

• Create student engagement
• pedagogies of engagement
• Well-regulated
• pedagogies of contingency
• Develop habits of mind
• pedagogies of formation

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Pedagogies of engagement

• Intelligence is partly inherited
• So what?
• Intelligence is partly environmental
• Environment creates intelligence
• Intelligence creates environment
• Dual-pathway theory (Boekaerts)
• Well-being
• Growth
• Learning environments
• Inclusive
• Varied
• Efficient

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Active learning roles?

• The TIMSS video studies of middle-school
  mathematics classrooms looked at the proportion
  of teacher words to student words in randomly
  selected examples of classroom practice
• USA 8
• Japan 13
• Hong Kong 16

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Hinge-point question

• On average, across all the award-bearing teaching
  at the Institute,how many teacher words are there
  per student word?
• More student words than teacher words
• About equal numbers of teacher words and student
  words
• Three times as many teacher words as student
  words
• Five times as many teacher words as student words
• More than five times as many teacher words as
  student words

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Motivation cause or effect?
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)
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Pedagogies of contingency

• Learning is unpredictable
• Learners do not learn what we teach
• It is only through assessment that we can connect
  what we do as teachers to its outcomes (like so
  many bottles thrown out into the sea Perrenoud
  1998)
• Assessment is therefore the bridge between
  teaching and learning, and thus the central
  process of teaching (as opposed to lecturing)
• A large, and growing literature providing
  evidence of the beneficial effects of formative
  assessment

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Formative assessment
An assessment functions formatively when evidence
about student achievement elicited by the
assessment is interpreted and used to make
decisions about the next steps in instruction
that are likely to be better, or better founded,
than the decisions that would have been made in
the absence of that evidence. Formative
assessment therefore involves the creation of,
and capitalization upon, moments of contingency
(short, medium and long cycle) in instruction
with a view to regulating learning (proactive,
interactive, and retroactive).
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Dealing with diversity

• Ignore it (one-size-fits-all)
• Individualize instruction (made-to-measure)
• Personalization
• Mass customization (rather than mass production
  or individualization)
• Diversity becomes a valuable instructional
  resource

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Hinge-point question

• An experimental study of a new method of teaching
  reading reports that a result was significant
  (plt0.05). This means that
• The experimental group out-performed the control
  group by 5
• There is a 5 chance that the experimental group
  did not out-perform the control group
• There is a 5 chance that there is no difference
  between the experimental group and the treatment
  group
• There is only a 5 chance that the observed
  result would have happened if the experimental
  and control groups had the same achievement

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Hinge-point question

• Which of the following is the most important
  difference between the theories of Piaget and
  Vygotsky?
• Piaget places greater importance on the role of
  conservation in cognitive development.
• Vygotsky places greater importance on the role of
  cultural artifacts in cognitive development.
• Vygotsky did not believe in distinct stages of
  cognitive development.
• Piaget was a social constructivist while Vygotsky
  placed greater emphasis on cultural-historical
  activity theory

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Other supports for contingency

• All-student response systems
• ABCD cards
• Exit-pass questions

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Hinge-point question

• Summarize the key principles of the following
  schools of psychology on the appropriate coloured
  card
• Associationism (blue)
• Information processing (orange)
• Constructivism (red)
• Situated approaches (green)

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Pedagogies of formation

• Instilling disciplinary habits of mind
• History
• Philosophy
• Statistics
• Instilling critical perspectives
• Values

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Improving our practice
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The limitations of consciousness
(Nørretranders, 1998)
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Knowledge transfer and creation
After Nonaka Tageuchi, 1995
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Improvements in pediatric cardiac surgery
Senning
Transitional
Switch
Early death rate Senning 12 Transitional 25
Bull, et al (2000). BMJ, 320, 1168-1173.
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Impact on life expectancy
Life expectancy Senning 46.6
years Switch 62.6 years
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• No excuse for making the same mistakes over and
  over again
• But no excuse for not making mistakes
• Make new mistakes (Esther Dyson)

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Summary

• Excellence in teaching is vital to the future
  success of the Institute
• Every single one of us needs to improve as a
  teacher
• Not because we are not good enough
• But because we can be better
• The Institute needs to play a leading role in
  developing signature pedagogies for Education and
  related Social Science

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Closing thoughts

• In a completely rational society, the best of us
  would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us
  would have to settle for less, because passing
  civilization along from one generation to the
  next ought to be the highest honor and highest
  responsibility anyone could have.
• Lee Iacocca

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond
measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that
most frightens us. Marianne Williamson, A return
to love