Dylan Wiliam on Leaders and Assessment

Professor Dylan Wiliam is a renowned figure in world education. Partly this is because he has a gift for being both authoritative and succinct. Recently I attended a webinar he gave for Nurture on ‘The role of leaders in promoting more effective assessment’, and here are some notes from it.

Slide from Professor Wiliam via Nurture: www.dylanwiliam.net.

Three points which I comment briefly on, and then a summary of others:

Any school that says that every lesson has to begin with a learning intention copied by the teacher onto the board and copied into their exercise books actually is guaranteeing a kind of uninspired and uninspiring teaching … The teacher needs to be clear about learning intentions … but whether you share it with the students and if so at what point in the lesson is a professional judgment to be left to the teacher.

The pressure to do this is often from external authorities, like an inspectorate: it is a persistent unexamined idea in the Irish system that such intentions/outcomes/targets are displayed to pupils at the start of a lesson. Experienced teachers know that this is sometimes purposeless, useless or (worse) distracting and reductive.

It should be the most natural thing in the world for a principal to say to a teacher ‘What are you working on getting better at right now, and how can I help?’

This is a great question. If it can be asked openly and totally without prejudice, it shows that that school has the highest standards, and is a place where any teacher would want to work. In how many schools would a teacher feel that trust?

School leaders: commit to create that environment in which every single teacher gets better. Forget evaluating teachers: we can’t do it accurately enough to make any difference. What we need to be doing is to create a culture where even the best teachers accept they need to get better.

‘Forget evaluating teachers’: the very act of evaluation (as Wiliam says, it is inherently flawed anyhow) may well reduce their quality and effectiveness.

Some other points he made:

The price of admission into the world of work keeps going up; jobs are becoming more complex.
We want our pupils to leave school with the passion for learning every 4 year-old has.
Class size reduction does work, but it’s absurdly expensive for the effect: it’s better to do other things with the money.
Research can never tell teachers what to do - classrooms are far too complicated.
Opportunity cost is the single most important concept in educational reform.
The job of school leaders is to focus on the things which have the greatest cost-benefit for students, and the single best way to improve is through better classroom formative assessment. It has the biggest impact for the smallest cost.
Long-cycle formative assessment is a problem. The biggest impact is within and between lessons - rather than every six to 10 weeks, it should be six to 10 seconds.
We need a pedagogy of engagement and responsiveness - getting information from all students rather than just confident ones, and use that to respond to their learning needs.
As students get older, we should dispense with the baby talk, reducing the use of student-friendly language.
Feedback is challenging to take on board. Eight things can happen and six of them are bad! (see slide at end).
Counterintuitively, testing yourself on what you have been studying is probably single best way to make that learning stick.
Four-quarters marking: a mixture of individual feedback, whole class feedback, peer assessment and self-assessment.
For most teachers, effective teacher-learning is not a process of knowledge acquisition: it’s mainly a process of habit change.
We have to allow teachers time to transform techniques into habits (like extending wait time).
Support risk-taking by praising teachers when the risk is taken, when nobody knows the outcome, because then they might then take a genuine risk.
Q and A -
What about changes to/removal of high stakes exams? (re Secondary Schools). There’s pretty strong evidence that the presence of high-stakes assessment systems actually improves student achievement … If we got rid of such exams, we would magnify the advantages middle class children already have.
Assessments leading up to a final (terminal) assessment are for the purpose of improving that summative assessment, but also their side effect is that they clarify that the teacher is there to help the students rather than judge them. When the grades depend on the teachers’ judgment, the teacher can seem like the students’ enemy. The teacher’s role is like a coach in athletics. It is helpful if there are external assessments that the student and the teacher have to negotiate together.
Ultimately, self-assessment should be the goal of all the formative assessment strategies. Good feedback should work towards its own redundancy. Good feedback equips the learners with the skills to manage their own learning more effectively. But teachers should not rely on this as evidence that the students have learned.