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Title: Sustaining the development of formative assessment with teacher learning communities


1
Sustaining the development of formative
assessment with teacher learning communities
  • Dylan Wiliam
  • Keynote presentation
  • Bedfordshire Headteachers Conference, November
    2008
  • www.dylanwiliam.net

2
Overview of presentation
  • Why raising achievement is important
  • Why investing in teachers is the answer
  • Why formative assessment should be the focus
  • Why teacher learning communities should be the
    mechanism
  • How we can put this into practice

3
Raising achievement matters
  • For individuals
  • Increased lifetime salary
  • Improved health
  • Longer life
  • For society
  • Lower criminal justice costs
  • Lower health-care costs
  • Increased economic growth

4
but what is learned matters too
  • Which of the following categories of skill is
    disappearing from the work-place most rapidly?
  • Routine manual
  • Non-routine manual
  • Routine cognitive
  • Complex communication
  • Expert thinking/problem-solving

5
but what is learned matters too
Autor, Levy Murnane, 2003
6
now more than ever
Source Economic Policy Institute
7
Successful education
  • 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, 1941)

8
The only 21st century skill
  • So the model that says learn while youre at
    school, while youre young, the skills that you
    will apply during your lifetime is no longer
    tenable. The skills that you can learn when
    youre at school will not be applicable. They
    will be obsolete by the time you get into the
    workplace and need them, except for one skill.
    The one really competitive skill is the skill of
    being able to learn. It is the skill of being
    able not to give the right answer to questions
    about what you were taught in school, but to make
    the right response to situations that are outside
    the scope of what you were taught in school. We
    need to produce people who know how to act when
    theyre faced with situations for which they were
    not specifically prepared.
  • (Papert, 1998)

9
Wheres the solution?
  • Structure
  • Small secondary schools
  • Larger secondary schools
  • Alignment
  • Curriculum reform
  • Textbook replacement
  • Governance
  • Specialist schools
  • Academies
  • Technology
  • Computers
  • Interactive white-boards

10
School effectiveness
  • Three generations of school effectiveness
    research
  • Raw results approaches
  • Different schools get different results
  • Conclusion Schools make a difference
  • Demographic-based approaches
  • Demographic factors account for most of the
    variation
  • Conclusion Schools dont make a difference
  • Value-added approaches
  • School-level differences in value-added are
    relatively small
  • Classroom-level differences in value-added are
    large
  • Conclusion An effective school is a school full
    of effective classrooms

11
Teacher quality matters
Barber Mourshed, 2007
12
Teacher quality
  • A labor force issue with 2 (non-exclusive)
    solutions
  • Replace existing teachers with better ones?
  • Important, but very slow, and of limited impact
  • Teach First
  • Gradually raising the bar for entry to teaching
  • Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
  • The love the one youre with strategy
  • It can be done
  • Provided we focus rigorously on the things that
    matter
  • Even when theyre hard to do

13
The dark matter of teacher quality
  • Teachers make a difference
  • But what makes the difference in teachers?

14
Cost/effect comparisons
Intervention Extra months of learning per year Cost/yr
Class-size reduction (by 30) 4 20k
Increase teacher content knowledge from weak to strong 2 ?
Formative assessment/ Assessment for learning 8 2k
15
The formative assessment hi-jack
  • Long-cycle
  • Span across units, terms
  • Length four weeks to one year
  • Impact Student monitoring curriculum alignment
  • Medium-cycle
  • Span within and between teaching units
  • Length one to four weeks
  • Impact Improved, student-involved, assessment
    teacher cognition about learning
  • Short-cycle
  • Span within and between lessons
  • Length
  • day-by-day 24 to 48 hours
  • minute-by-minute 5 seconds to 2 hours
  • Impact classroom practice student engagement

16
Unpacking formative assessment
  • Key processes
  • Establishing where the learners are in their
    learning
  • Establishing where they are going
  • Working out how to get there
  • Participants
  • Teachers
  • Peers
  • Learners

17
Aspects of formative assessment
Where the learner is going Where the learner is How to get there
Teacher Clarify and share learning intentions Engineering effective discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Peer Understand and share learning intentions Activating students as learning resources for one another Activating students as learning resources for one another
Learner Understand learning intentions Activating students as ownersof their own learning Activating students as ownersof their own learning
18
Five key strategies
  • Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning
    intentions
  • curriculum philosophy
  • Engineering effective classroom discussions,
    tasks and activities that elicit evidence of
    learning
  • classroom discourse, interactive whole-class
    teaching
  • Providing feedback that moves learners forward
  • feedback
  • Activating students as learning resources for one
    another
  • collaborative learning, reciprocal teaching,
    peer-assessment
  • Activating students as owners of their own
    learning
  • metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution,
    self-assessment

(Wiliam Thompson, 2007)
19
and one big idea
  • Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and
    learning to meet student needs

20
Keeping Learning on Track (KLT)
  • A pilot guides a plane or boat toward its
    destination by taking constant readings and
    making careful adjustments in response to wind,
    currents, weather, etc.
  • A KLT teacher does the same
  • Plans a carefully chosen route ahead of time (in
    essence building the track)
  • Takes readings along the way
  • Changes course as conditions dictate

21
Putting it into practice
22
Implementing formative assessment requires
changing teacher habits
  • Teachers know most of this already
  • So the problem is not a lack of knowledge
  • Its a lack of understanding what it means to do
    formative assessment
  • Thats why telling teachers what to do doesnt
    work
  • Experience alone is not enoughif it were, then
    the most experienced teachers would be the best
    teacherswe know thats not true (Hanushek, 2005
    Day, 2006)
  • People need to reflect on their experiences in
    systematic ways that build their accessible
    knowledge base, learn from mistakes, etc.
    (Bransford, Brown Cocking, 1999)

23
Teacher learning takes time
  • To put new knowledge to work, to make it
    meaningful and accessible when you need it,
    requires practice.
  • A teacher doesnt come at this as a blank slate.
  • Not only do teachers have their current habits
    and ways of teachingtheyve lived inside the old
    culture of classrooms all their lives every
    teacher started out as a student!
  • New knowledge doesnt just have to get learned
    and practiced, it has to go up against
    long-established, familiar, comfortable ways of
    doing things that may not be as effective, but
    fit within everyones expectations of how a
    classroom should work.
  • It takes time and practice to undo old habits and
    become graceful at new ones. Thus
  • Professional development must be sustained over
    time

24
Taking it to scale
25
Two opposing factors in any school reform
  • Need for flexibility to adapt to local
    conditions, resources, etc
  • Implies there is appropriate flexibility built
    into the reform
  • Need to maintain fidelity to core principles, or
    theory of action of the reform, if it is to
    achieve desired outcomes
  • Implies you have a well-thought-out theory of
    action

26
Tight but loose
  • Some reforms are too loose (e.g., the Effective
    schools movement)
  • Others are too tight (e.g., Montessori Schools)
  • The tight but loose formulation
  • combines an obsessive adherence to central
    design principles (the tight part) with
    accommodations to the needs, resources,
    constraints, and particularities that occur in
    any school or district (the loose part), but
    only where these do not conflict with the theory
    of action of the intervention.

27
Teacher learning communities
  • contradict teacher isolation
  • reprofessionalize teaching by valuing teacher
    expertise
  • deprivatize teaching so that teachers strengths
    and struggles become known
  • offer a steady source of support for struggling
    teachers
  • grow expertise by providing a regular space,
    time, and structure for that kind of systematic
    reflecting on practice
  • facilitate sharing of untapped expertise residing
    in individual teachers
  • build the collective knowledge base in a school

28
How to set up a TLC
  • Plan that the TLC will run for two years
  • Identify 8 to 10 interested colleagues
  • Should have similar assignments (e.g. early
    years, math/sci)
  • Secure institutional support for
  • Monthly meetings (75 - 120 minutes each, inside
    or outside school time)
  • Time between meetings (2 hrs per month in school
    time)
  • Collaborative planning
  • Peer observation
  • Any necessary waivers from school policies

29
Signature pedagogies
30
In Law
31
In Medicine
32
A signature pedagogy for teacher learning?
  • Every monthly TLC meeting should follows the same
    structure and sequence of activities
  • Activity 1 Introduction Housekeeping (5-10
    minutes)
  • Activity 2 Hows It Going (35-50 minutes)
  • Activity 3 New Learning about formative
    assessment (20-45 minutes)
  • Activity 4 Personal Action Planning (10 minutes)
  • Activity 5 Summary of Learning (5 minutes)

33
The TLC leaders role
  • To ensure the TLC meets regularly
  • To ensure all needed materials are at meetings
  • To ensure that each meeting is focused on AfL
  • To create and maintain a productive and
    non-judgmental tone during meetings
  • To ensure that every participant shares with
    regard to their implementation of AfL
  • To encourage teachers to provide their colleagues
    with constructive and thoughtful feedback
  • To encourage teachers to think about and discuss
    the implementation of new AfL learning and skills
  • To ensure that every teacher has an action plan
    to guide their next steps
  • But not to be the AfL expert

34
Peer observation
  • Run to the agenda of the observed, not the
    observer
  • Observed teacher specifies focus of observation
  • Observed teacher specifies what counts as
    evidence
  • e.g., teacher wants to increase wait-time
  • provides observer with a stop-watch to log
    wait-times

35
The synergy
  • Content formative assessment
  • Process teacher learning communities
  • Components of a model
  • Initial workshops
  • Monthly TLC meetings
  • Peer observations
  • Drip-feed resources
  • Writings
  • New ideas

36
Summary
  • Raising achievement is important
  • Raising achievement requires improving teacher
    quality
  • Improving teacher quality requires teacher
    professional development
  • To be effective, teacher professional development
    must address
  • What teachers do in the classroom
  • How teachers change what they do in the classroom
  • Assessment for learning Teacher learning
    communities
  • A point of (uniquely?) high leverage
  • A Trojan Horse into wider issues of pedagogy,
    psychology, and curriculum
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