Investing in Teacher Quality: Assessment and Learning Communities, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Engineering

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Taking Assessment for

Learning to scale

Dylan Wiliam

OECD CERI 40th anniversary conference

www.dylanwiliam.net

Overview of presentation

Why investing in teachers is important

Why assessment for learning should be the focus

Why teacher learning communities should be the mechanism

How we can put this into practice

Teacher quality

What causes classroom level differences?  Weak influences  class size  between- and within-class grouping strategy  Strong influence  Teacher quality A labour force issue with 2 (non-exclusive) solutions  Replace existing teachers with better ones?  Important, but very slow, and of limited impact  Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers  The “love the one you‟re with” strategy  It can be done  Provided we focus rigorously on the things that matter  Even when they‟re hard to do

Total “explained” difference 20-25%

Further professional qualifications (MA, NBPTS) <5%

Pedagogical content knowledge 10-15%

Advanced content matter knowledge <5%

The „dark matter‟ of teacher quality

Teachers make a difference

But what makes the difference in teachers?

In real classrooms, over extended periods, using distal measures of achievement, adoption of AfL practices increases student achievement by 0.3 standard deviations.

One standard deviation of increased teacher quality is associated with an increase of 0.2 sd of student achievement

Therefore the range of teacher quality (4 sd) is associated with 0.8 sd of student achievement.

AfL practices would therefore seem to be equivalent to half of the “unexplained” difference

Types of assessment for learning

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

Aspects of assessment for learning

Where the learner is going Where the learner is^ How to get there

Teacher (^) learning intentionsClarify and share

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

Learner (^) learning intentionsUnderstand^ Activating students as ownersof their own learning

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)

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

Putting it into practice

Teacher learning takes time

To put new knowledge to work, to make it meaningful and accessible when you need it, requires practice.

A teacher doesn‟t come at this as a blank slate.

Not only do teachers have their current habits and ways of teaching— they‟ve lived inside the old culture of classrooms all their lives: every teacher started out as a student!

New knowledge doesn‟t 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 everyone‟s 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

Designing for scale

“In-principle” scalability

A single model for the whole school

But which honours subject-specificities

Understanding what it means to scale (Coburn, 2003)

Depth

Sustainability

Spread

Shift in reform ownership

Consideration of the diversity of contexts of application

Clarity about components, and the theory of action

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

“Tight but loose”

… 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.

Some reforms are too loose (e.g., the „Effective schools‟ movement)

Others are too tight (e.g., Montessori Schools)

The “tight but loose” formulation