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Dylan Wiliam

Everything we've been told about teaching is wrong, and what to do about it!

2014-03-09T11:19:44+00:00March 9th, 2014|myths|

It was great to be back at the IOE for Pedagoo London 2014, and many thanks must go to @hgaldinoshea & @kevbartle for organising such a wonderful (and free!) event. As ever there's never enough time to talk to everyone I wanted to talk to, but I particularly enjoyed Jo Facer's workshop on cultural literacy and Harry Fletcher-Wood's attempt to stretch a military metaphor to provide a model for teacher improvement. As I was presenting last I found myself unable to concentrate during Rachel Steven's REALLY INTERESTING talk on Lesson Study and returned to the room in which I would be presenting to catch the end [...]

Getting feedback right Part 1 – Why do we give it?

2014-04-02T01:34:07+01:00March 4th, 2014|assessment|

It's become a truism that feedback is the most important activity that teachers engage in. Feedback, we are repeatedly told, is tremendously powerful and therefore teachers must do more of it. Certainly Hattie, the Sutton Trust and the EEF bandy about impressive effect sizes, but the evidence of flipping through a pupil's exercise book suggests that the vast majority of what teachers write is ignored or misunderstood. Teachers' feedback can certainly have a huge impact but it's a mistake to believe that this impact is always positive. I written in detail about marking and the power of Directed Improvement Reflection Time. I've  also considered [...]

An inconvenient truth? The surplus model of school improvement

2014-02-23T16:59:17+00:00February 23rd, 2014|leadership|

Schools often seem to be run on a 'deficit model': "this attributes scepticism or hostility to a lack of understanding, resulting from a lack of information. It is associated with a division between 'experts' (school leaders, Ofsted inspectors, consultants etc.) who have the information and non-experts (classroom teachers) who do not. The model implies that communication should focus on improving the transfer of information from experts to non-experts." But what if we ran our schools on a surplus model? What if we assumed that teachers were basically trustworthy, hard-working, and knew what they were doing? What it were agreed that school leaders [...]

Practical differentiation: high expectations and the art of making mistakes

2014-02-03T20:18:38+00:00February 1st, 2014|Featured, learning|

Differentiation? I hate the word as I hate Hell, all ludicrous bureaucracy, and thee! Er... Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Differentiation is one of the darkest arts in teaching. The generally accepted position is that differentiation is wholly good, and this is the cause of the wracking guilt felt by harrowed teachers: it may well be good, but it's bloody hard work. My bottom line is this: any policy predicated on the idea that teachers should work harder is doomed to failure. Thankfully, teaching's enforcement arm seem, at long last, to agree: "It is unrealistic ... for inspectors to necessarily expect that [...]

Force fed feedback: is less more?

2014-01-26T20:14:25+00:00January 26th, 2014|Featured, learning|

It is commonly and widely accepted that feedback is the best, brightest and shiniest thing we can be doing as teachers, and the more of it the better. Ever since Prof Hattie published Visible Learning in 2009 we have had conclusive proof: according to Hattie's meta-analyses, feedback has the highest effect size of any teacher invention. QED. And this has led, unsurprisingly, to an avalanche of blogs (many of which I've been responsible for) on how to give feedback more efficiently, frequently and effectively. Teachers the world over have rejoiced. But perhaps we've been a little uncritical on just how best we [...]

Old Hat(tie)? Some things you ought to know about effect sizes

2014-05-17T17:39:45+01:00January 24th, 2014|myths|

Ever since Hattie published Visible Learning back in 2009 the Effect Size has been king. For those of you who don't know, an effect size is a mechanism for comparing the relative merits of different interventions. Hattie pointed out that everything that a teacher does will have some effect but that there will also be an opportunity cost: if you're investing in time in one type of intervention you will be neglecting other types of intervention which might have a greater impact. He therefore used effect sizes to try to establish what has the greatest influence on student learning so that we [...]

Principled curriculum design: the English curriculum

2014-07-29T21:27:26+01:00December 16th, 2013|English, Featured|

The tragedy of life is that one can only understand life backwards, but one must live it forwards Søren Kierkegaard Back in March 2013, I wrote about the principles underlying my redesign of a Keys Stage 3 English curriculum. It received a mixed response. Since then Joe Kirby and Alex Quigley have published their ideas on redesigning this area of the curriculum and have, in different ways, influenced my thinking. Recently, I've presented my ideas on the English curriculum to over 100 English teachers and the consensus seems to be that there is no consensus. Having thought quite a bit about [...]

What 3 things would you do to help a teacher improve?

2013-12-04T22:54:12+00:00December 3rd, 2013|training|

If there was no OfSTED, no league tables, no SLT... just you and your class. What would you choose to do to make it GREAT? Do that anyway... Tom Sherrington Every teacher needs to improve. Not because they're not good enough but because they can be even better. Dylan Wiliam It's been said before but, I think, bears repeating: Ofsted have a lot to answer for. No one wants failing schools going unchecked but the medicine is often worse than the cure. I spent the morning at a lovely primary school who have just been 'done'. And they really do feel [...]

Is failure just a lack of practice?

2014-04-13T11:06:31+01:00September 28th, 2013|Featured, learning|

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho! You must learn to fail intelligently. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. One fails forward towards success.  Thomas Edison Show me a teacher who doesn’t fail every day and I’ll show you a teacher with low expectations for his or her students. Dylan Wiliam I've written a fair bit over the past couple of years on the need to allow pupils (and teachers) to fail, learn from their mistakes and do better. This ability to learn from mistakes is, along with [...]

A model lesson? Part 1: routines vs gimmicks

2014-08-19T15:24:12+01:00September 8th, 2013|leadership, learning, planning, training|

It's been a busy week this week. What with starting at a new school, getting up before 5 to drive two hours on Monday morning, living an Alan Partridge-esque existence in a particularly horrific Travelodge, and risking whatever credibility I might have by teaching a 'model' lesson in front of colleagues I'd barely met to kids I'd never met. That this was in any way successful is largely down to the efforts of co-conspirator, Fiona Aris: due to a series of unlikely but banal events, we were unable to meet up (or even meet) beforehand and she (Kindly? Foolishly?) agreed to plan said [...]

AfL: cargo cult teaching?

2015-12-10T13:53:58+00:00August 31st, 2013|assessment, Featured, learning|

OK, so here's a quick summary of the story so far: A few days ago I suggested in a blog post that maybe AfL 'wasn't all that'. Lots of lovely people kindly got in touch to point out that I clearly hadn't got a clue what AfL actually was, and then Gordon Baillie wrote a really rather good response in defence of AfL on his blog. Right? Right. At this point I'm going to tediously catalogue what I know about AfL so no one's confused about what I might and might not be suggesting. Here's a collection of posts I've written on feedback [...]

Motivation: when the going gets tough, the tough get going

2014-02-06T17:47:22+00:00August 26th, 2013|learning, planning|

If ever you get embroiled in a discussion on Learning Styles you may well be confronted with the chestnut of motivation. Learning styles, it seems to me, are all about motivation and management, and nothing whatsoever to do with learning. There is of course a correlation between learning and motivation but often they get conflated. Much of what goes on in classrooms is predicated on the belief that if kids are sufficiently engaged in an activity, they will learn from it. But it doesn't take a genius to spot that we can really enjoy something without learning a whole lot from [...]

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