Title: Sustaining the development of formative assessment with teacher learning communities
1Sustaining the development of formative
assessment with teacher learning communities
- Dylan Wiliam
- Keynote presentation
- Bedfordshire Headteachers Conference, November
2008 - www.dylanwiliam.net
2Overview 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
3Raising achievement matters
- For individuals
- Increased lifetime salary
- Improved health
- Longer life
- For society
- Lower criminal justice costs
- Lower health-care costs
- Increased economic growth
4but 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
5but what is learned matters too
Autor, Levy Murnane, 2003
6now more than ever
Source Economic Policy Institute
7Successful 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)
8The 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)
9Wheres the solution?
- Structure
- Small secondary schools
- Larger secondary schools
- Alignment
- Curriculum reform
- Textbook replacement
- Governance
- Specialist schools
- Academies
- Technology
- Computers
- Interactive white-boards
10School 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
11Teacher quality matters
Barber Mourshed, 2007
12Teacher 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
13The dark matter of teacher quality
- Teachers make a difference
- But what makes the difference in teachers?
14Cost/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
15The 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
16Unpacking 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
17Aspects 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
18Five 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)
19and one big idea
- Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and
learning to meet student needs
20Keeping 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
21Putting it into practice
22Implementing 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)
23Teacher 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
24Taking it to scale
25Two 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
26Tight 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.
27Teacher 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
28How 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
29Signature pedagogies
30In Law
31In Medicine
32A 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)
33The 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
34Peer 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
35The 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
36Summary
- 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