Dylan Wiliam
@dylanwiliam
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Teacher, researcher, writer, mostly interested in the power of education to transform lives and how to do it better.
Starke (FL)
Joined January 2009
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Research can't tell teachers what to do—classrooms are too complex for that ever to be likely. But research can identify "best bets" for improving practice, and the Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review is pretty much the state of the art in this regard:
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Sometimes, a graph is so eloquent that commentary is superfluous:
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Now this is very interesting, and I don't think at all obvious. Reading challenging texts aloud, and at a fast pace, improved the reading comprehension of all students, but for the lowest achievers, the gains were almost twice as great: .
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I have uploaded around 40 Powerpoint presentations that I have made for research studies I have read over the last couple of years, and they are available here under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. I will add more when I get time.
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328 studies over 50 years show that direct instruction (structured guidance for teachers, teaching discrete skills before application, daily checks on learning, regular testing for mastery) has consistent, large positive effects on student achievement: ($)
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A meta-analysis of 64 studies finds that self-explanation (e.g., asking students "Could you explain this to someone else") during instruction has a substantial impact on learning (g~0.55): ($)
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This may be the most important blog post I have read this year: "Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer."
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A study of 355k UK primary school students finds reading achievement in one year predicts maths achievement the next year more strongly than the other way round suggesting "acquiring good reading skills is highly relevant for developing mathematics skills"
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Just realized that I've never tweeted a link to the IES's 2007 Practice Guide on "Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning": . The checklist makes a much better placemat than most of the quick reference guides offered to teachers.
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A rare kind of study in education: a ten year follow-up of the long-term effects of Reading Recovery shows that the benefits are large, and the programme is highly-cost effective (£1 spent has a societal benefit of over £3): .
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Why value-added is useless for measuring teacher quality: good teachers develop non-academic qualities that do not show up in that year's test scores but are crucial to longer-term success: (pdf)
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A review of research on "flipped" classrooms finds that there is little evidence either way about impact on student achievement, and most studies are so poorly theorized that studies are difficult, if not impossible, to compare:
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I've just uploaded 3 short (~20 minute) videos on "Why we need to raise achievement", "What formative assessment is, and isn't", and "Teacher learning communities" to my YouTube channel: . As ever, they are available under a
@creativecommons
CC-BY license.
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The number of "conversational turns" parents have with children age 18 to 24 months is a stronger predictor of verbal comprehension and vocabulary 10 years later than total number of words spoken, even after controlling for socioeconomic status:
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Neuroscientist Reid Lyon offers 10 maxims about what we know about how children learn to read: . The research support for these claims is here: (pdf)
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If you teach (anybody, anything) now is your chance to get your own copy of one of this century's most important psychology of education articles. And then, of course, you need to read it...
"Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work" by
@P_A_Kirschner
, John Sweller & Richard E. Clark is one of our top trending
#education
articles on
@altmetric
this year:
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Cross-sectional analyses of PISA and NAEP data suggest little or no overall relationship between technology use and student achievement: . We need to stop asking "Does technology help?" and start asking "When does technology help?"
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I've come to the conclusion Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory is the single most important thing for teachers to know
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If you are engaged in emergency remote teaching, you will not find a better use of 20 minutes of your time than this video presentation by
@P_A_Kirschner
recorded last week for
@researchEdhome
: . The following Q&A is also pretty good.
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A video of my presentation "Formative assessment: Confusions, clarifications, and prospects for consensus" at the Assessment in Education 25th anniversary conference in Oxford last month is now available here: (slides here: )
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For those who think assessment for learning and formative assessment are "old hat", 25 years after Paul Black and I published our first joint paper, I recorded a video for
@aaiauk
to explain why I think it's still important:
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Elsevier offered me $100 to write a 4,000 to 8,000 word chapter for their International Encyclopedia of Education. I offered to waive the honorarium if they would make my chapter open access. They declined. A month ago, I made a similar offer to
@JohnCattEd
. They accepted.
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I've uploaded videos of some talks to DropBox and you can access them here: . Over the coming weeks I will add more and relevant Powerpoint files. NB some of the talks are old, so I may not agree with what I said. Made available under a CC BY-NC license
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When Stockholm University introduced anonymous scoring of student work, scores of female students rose relative to those of male students, especially when their work was scored by male professors: (pdf)
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Wouldn't it be great if there was a place where you could get reliable advice about teaching, leadership, hiring, PD and so on? Well, now there is. The best of the Marshall Memo—18 years of weekly syntheses of the best thinking in education—is here, free:
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If you have a spare half-hour or so, you could read
@pepsmccrea
's Memorable Teaching from cover to cover. I doubt you'll find an education book with more useful insights per minute of reading time:
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Arran Hamilton, John Hattie and I have just written a working paper on how
#ArtificialInteligence
is likely to change our world, and suggest 13 things we can do to minimize the damage: .
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Students taught math by highly qualified teachers learn more: . However, the effect is small. One standard deviation of teacher subject expertise increases student learning by two weeks per year. Subject expertise is only a small part of teacher quality
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A depressing number of commentators on today’s PISA results talk about countries’ ranks rather than how well they did. Ranks are a really bad metric for seeing what is going on, and are even worse for looking at trends over time as the countries participating in PISA change.
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I re-tweeted this (HT
@greg_ashman
) last week, but it's so important I am sending it round again. Sweller, van Merriënboer and Pass provide an open-access guide to cognitive load theory: its history, the state-of-the-art, and future directions:
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You may recall me tweeting that the only thing that matters with feedback is what students do with it. Now here's some advice from an
@AceThatTest
guest blog on helping students use feedback better:
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A meta-analysis of 56 studies found that writing about content material improved student achievement in math, science, and social studies, with similar gains in each subject, and similar gains for elementary, middle and high school students: ($)
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Here's why I didn't call formative assessment responsive teaching:
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@matthaig1
@C_Hendrick
Or as Frank McCourt once said, when asked "Why do we have to read this?" by one of his students: “You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons. So you won’t be a boring little shite the rest of your life.”
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@SteveStuWill
@mungowitz
Or, as Douglas Adams might have put it, a beluga whale performing a fiendishly clever experiment on a human...
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I have now uploaded more formative assessment videos to YouTube: . The first 3 videos that look like the picture below give an overview, and the other 6 go into more detail, including discussion questions for teachers. Details here:
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My chapter on "How to think about assessment" in
@s_donarski
's
@researchED1
Guide to Assessment published by
@JohnCattEd
can be downloaded free from here: . The rest of the book you'll have to buy...
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Here's an idea. Let's spend £10m to recruit PhDs and other professionals into teaching but let's not spend any money on evaluating their success, just in case they turn out to be no better than other teachers: —
#doomedtosucceed
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Having an outstanding (2sd>µ) teacher in Reception improves a child's achievement ten years later at GCSE by one-third of a grade per subject:
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Can't remember if I already tweeted this, but actually, it's so good that even if I did, it's worth retweeting. Here's
@rpondiscio
on "five damaging educational myths" that we should not allow to go unchallenged:
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Slides from today's presentation at the Assessment in Education 25th Anniversary conference in Oxford—"Formative assessment: Confusions, clarifications, & prospects for consensus"—available here:
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This is important. In 1999, "How people learn" provided an authoritative survey of research on learning. The latest edition adds research on neurological processes, individual and cultural variability, sociocultural factors and the role of technology:
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This is
@claudeai01
's first attempt at summarizing Paul Black's and my 1998 paper "Assessment and classroom learning"—pretty impressive in my view.
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Issue 18 of
@CharteredColl
's Impact magazine is out, which means, I think, that I can share the article I wrote for issue 17. It's called "Teacher quality - What it is, why it matters, and how to get more of it" and you can download it from here: (pdf)
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A slow-motion train-wreck: In England, the rate at which teachers are retained in government-funded schools has declined in each of the last seven years:
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Increased use of student-centered teaching methods is linked to increased student wellbeing but lower achievement, which in turn, link to increased adult life satisfaction, but lower earnings—the "achievement-wellbeing tradeoff", discussed by
@CfEdnEcon
:
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The UK's
@EducEndowFoundn
publishes a useful practice guide for teachers on metacognition and self-regulated learning:
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I've also added to my YouTube channel six short videos (15-20 mins each) originally prepared for South Australia. The idea is that each video provides some input, and a discussion question, that could be used for an hour's professional development:
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Wouldn't it be great if there was a review of all the different models of feedback, and of the empirical evidence supporting them? Well now there is, from
@ALipnevich
and
@ernestopanadero
. Even better, it's open access: .
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@oldandrewuk
I've said it before (e.g. in Hendrick & McPherson's "What does this look like in the classroom") but I'll say it again. Any school leader who says it is a good idea for teachers to mark everything their students do needs to think about what else could be done with that time.
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I've written a short article about the difference between assessment for learning and formative assessment: . If you read English, there's probably nothing new for you here, but it is available in 22 other languages, so there is that...
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This is truly disturbing...
10 misunderstandings of how we learn. Look at those percentages...yikes.
From Understanding How We Learn by
@doctorwhy
@DrSumeracki
@olicav
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Why do so many teachers still believe that learning styles exist, and that adapting instruction to mesh with a student's preferred learning style will be helpful?
@erikofgang
gets some useful insights from
@DTWillingham
:
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Watch me trying to explain Cognitive Load Theory in 5 minutes/20 slides at 2017's Wisconsin Math Council conference:
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In the future, STEM skills may be less useful without "non cognitive" skills such as listening, problem-solving, teamwork, integrity, and dependability:
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I particularly like the fact that this includes both descriptions of quality and examples of quality, so students can see what the success criteria mean in context.
@dylanwiliam
after 2 years of leading embedding formative assessment strategies, I walked into a colleague’s learning space to see this. It was fantastic to see how encouraging educators to teach students to be evaluators of their own success and set personal goals being realised
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Over 6 years, Developing Quality in Mathematics Education—an EU funded project—produced 4650 engaging maths activities that have been trialled with students in 11 countries (and 10 languages). Provided you register with DQME, you can get them all free here
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If you teach physics to 11 to 18 year olds then you absolutely need to get hold of a copy of Ben Rogers' superb new book "The big ideas in physics and how to teach them": . And that's not just my opinion. John Sweller describes it as "brilliant". Nuff said.
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Slides from my presentation at
#rEDPhil19
yesterday ("How is research supposed to improve education?") now posted here:
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Excellent article from
@DTWillingham
on teaching reading comprehension, and in particular, why teaching reading comprehension strategies is useful, but not enough:
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@Miss_Snuffy
A real problem with a lot of writing on creativity is that it ignores the second part of the standard defintion: having novel ideas that have value. Blowing through the wrong end of a trumpet is not creative; Miles Davis is. Creativity almost always requires disciplinary mastery
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Just got hold of
@researchED1
's Guide to Direct Instruction edited by
@adamboxer1
. It is truly excellent. Though written by UK teachers, the book is accessible to teachers world-wide. If you want to know more about DI (and you should), you need this book:
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What's the alternative to generic cross-curricular "themes" in the curriculum? Multi-disciplinary tasks in which the specific ways in which different disciplines create knowledge are honoured and developed (from Oliver Knight):
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@MissSDoherty
The thing that gets me is why people assume that teachers need to work on their weaknesses. In many cases, becoming outstanding at the things you’re already good at may benefit students more. For me, aim of PD is not to make every teacher into a clone of every other teacher…
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I am digitizing my archive of National Curriculum documents from the 1980s and 1990s and you can find them here:
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Rather awkwardly for the British government,
@sgorard
and Nadia Siddiqui find that grammar (i.e. selective) schools in England increase social stratification but do not increase achievement: . Oh well; never let the facts spoil a good theory...
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How much of what are termed "restorative" behaviour practices in schools begin with an absolute requirement that those causing harm to others acknowledge that harm? Asking for a friend.
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Slides from my keynote—"Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, in that order"—at ASCL's 2020 conference at the International Convention Centre, Birmingham, are now available here:
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My commentary on a special issue of Learning and Instruction—"Putting learners at the heart of the feedback process"—is available free here for 50 days:
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"Should teachers know the basic science of how children learn?" A typically thoughtful and helpful answer to the question from
@DTWillingham
in the AFT's "American Educator" magazine: (spoiler alert: the answer is "Yes, but...")
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"Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity" perhaps because handwriting adds desirable difficulties to the task of writing (although participants had to type with just one finger):
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A systematic review of 21 studies finds that differentiation can increase achievement under certain circumstances, while within- and between-class grouping has a negative impact on lower-achievers, and no significant effects either way on others: ($)
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The
@EducEndowFoundn
has just added a detailed review of research by
@ProfDanielMuijs
and
@cbokhove
to the guidance on metacognition and self-regulated learning that it published two years ago:
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When people work in groups, average performance increases, but the quality of the best solution tends to decrease. Making collaboration intermittent seems to reduce the decline in the quality of the best solution produced by members of the group:
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This is why I keep on pointing out that the main purpose of feedback is to improve the student and not the work...
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For those who ask me why I think learning styles are a waste of time, here's the evidence that convinced me:
http://t.co/5PIyAG2rST
(pdf)
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@C_Hendrick
@HealJim
Here's a slide that I have been playing around with over the last few months...
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@RogersHistory
When I taught full time, I taught to the very last lesson not out of virtue, but out of laziness—keeping control of a class was simply easier when the students were doing what they had done all year...
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3rd, 4th and 5th graders in North Carolina made more progress if they were taught by the same teacher for a second year, and the benefits were greater for minority students, and those taught by less effective teachers: ($)
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A new 38-minute
@EducEndowFoundn
podcast looks at the "Embedding formative assessment" programme that
@siobhanleahy50
and I developed, and which an
@NIESRorg
evaluation published last year showed had a significant impact on student achievement:
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@wizard5563
I don't think teachers should be trying to keep up with the latest research. There's too much of it, and many apparently exciting findings do not replicate. I would look for research syntheses (eg "Make it stick") and blogs by teachers who are trying to put research into practice
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"Growth mindset intervention delivered by teachers boosts achievement in early adolescence" particuarly for lower-achieving students: . Important, since many earlier studies have shown that teacher-delivered interventions were unsuccessful.
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An
@EducEndowFoundn
report finds that reading literacy has a greater impact on science achievement than IQ:
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Now this I like...
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@adamboxer1
You know, expertise in the profession might actually be accumulating. I can’t think of anything more positive for the future of education than the idea that each generation of teachers is better prepared than the previous one.
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Slides from my presentation this morning on collaborative and cooperative learning at the
@learningandtheb
conference on "Teaching Social Brains" in New York are here: .
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I may have to reconsider my skepticism about the benefits of paying good teachers more. In Dallas, TX, paying good teachers more to work in low-achieving schools produced immediate improvements that disappeared when the incentives stopped:
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Maybe not surprising to most but some still don't believe it. Spending more on pre/school helps poor children—a lot:
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Probably the easiest way to screw up an education system: Make teacher pay uncompetitive with comparable graduates:
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Teaching US middle-schoolers that feelings of anxiety and lack of belonging are common, short-lived, and due to external, temporary causes, improved attendance, behavior and academic achievement:
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Just sent returned the final proofs of my next book to the publisher. It will be out in April, here:
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I've uploaded the video and Powerpoint file for my talk on "Teacher quality" at Durrington School's
@researchEDDHS
event to a DropBox folder here: . As ever it's available under a
@creativecommons
Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license
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Didn't see this being shouted from the rooftops last week: The US leads the world in the ability of its students to distinguish fact from opinion: . Even more interesting, Finland, which claims to do this well, is pretty average...
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@MsJasmineMN
I think the idea that we should plan lessons rather than learning is responsible for quite a lot of sub-optimal practice.
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Just been re-reading Lant Pritchett's excellent "The rebirth of education" (HT Kim Marshall for reminding me about it).
"There is no successful educational system anywhere, of any kind, that attained excellence by being hostile to teachers." (Kindle location 2274)
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Schools are not like other workplaces: "the types of [Human Resource Management] practices that improve school performance are different from those that improve performance elsewhere in the economy."
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@primarypercival
As my friend
@rpondiscio
points out, we need teaching to be a job that ordinary humans can do. In my view any system in which teaching can only be done well by those with extraordinary ability and charisma is a system that will be failing its youth.
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@Everateacher
@primarypercival
As E.D. Hirsch points out, skill is content, and content is skill. The so called "21st century skills" like "creativity" aren't really skills. They are collections of skills that are specific to a discipline, and require massive amounts of content knowledge.
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This really is amazing...
One of my all-time favourites. Stare at the red dot on the woman's nose for 30 seconds, then look at an empty wall while blinking quickly. Promise it's worth it...
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