Skip to main content

Dylan Wiliam

I enjoyed one of the best training days in my career yesterday. Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, did a lengthy presentation which had the following structure: firstly, he laid out a wide range of research evidence which leads to the firm conclusion that to raise standards you should focus on improving individual teachers, rather than schools. Secondly, he arued that teachers get better by using assessment for learning more effectively. He prefers the term formative assessment. Thirdly, he went on to present a range of ideas or tricks which can improve formative assessment and therefore pupil achievement.

Much of this will be familiar to those who have read any of Dylan Wiliams' articles or books. It was nonetheless a convincing argument which chimes with a gut feeling I have held for years, namely that it is not systems, organisation, academies, selection and the like which hold the key to improvement; it is getting teachers to be more effective.

A couple of observations, however: the current emphasis on assessment for learning is very useful, but it is not the only way of looking at teacher effectiveness. In the past there have other attempts to pin down what makes a good teacher. You can analyse, for example, the intervention types of teachers as well as the role of teacher personality. Ultimately, as Wiliam acknowledged, you cannot distill what makes a good teacher.

Another observation I would make is this: Wiliam relies on his vast knowledge of research and data to make his arguments. He compares education researchers to climate scientists and argues that our knowledge on pupil achievement is as settled as climate change science. I am not so sure about this. Is social science research as reliable as hard science? No. In twenty years from now we shall be saying more or less the same about climate change; I bet the same will not be true of education.

I recommend Dylan Wiliam's site:

http://www.dylanwiliam.net

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,