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Reflections on pedagogy
Dylan Wiliam
Pedagogy, Space, Place Conference
November 2010
www.dylanwiliam.net
Overview
Some simple analytics of school quality• The two most important numbers in education
Three perspectives on pedagogy
Meaningful differences
Hour-long samples of family talk in 42 US families Number of words spoken to children by adults by the
age of 36 months• In professional families: 35 million• In other working-class families: 20 million• In families on welfare:10 million
Kinds of reinforcements:positive negative
• professional 500,000 50,000• working-class 200,000 100,000• welfare 100,000 200,000
(Hart & Risley, 1995)
Important number #1
One year’s average growth in achievement• NAEP (US): 0.25 standard deviations per year• TIMSS (US, UK): 0.36 standard deviations per year• NC (UK) 0.40 standard deviations per year
The precise value depends on the nature of the assessment being used (and specifically its sensitivity to instruction) but, for all but the youngest students, it is almost certainly less than 0.5.
So the overlap between cohorts is large…
8
The spread of achievement within each cohort is greater than generally assumed
…and differences between schools are small
Proportion of 16-year olds gaining 5 GCSE grades at grade C or higher
• 7% of the variability in the proportion achieving this is attributable to the school, so
• 93% of the variability in the proportion achieving this is nothing to do with the school
So, if 15 students in a class get 5 A*-C in the average school:• 17 students will do so at a “good” school (1sd above mean)• 13 students will do so at a “bad” school (1sd below mean)
LuxembourgJapan
ItalySwitzerland
FinlandDenmark
Czech RepublicSwedenHungary
AustriaPortugal
United StatesNetherlands
Slovak RepublicKorea
IrelandSpain
CanadaMexico
New ZealandGermany
OECD averageUnited Kingdom
0 20 40 60 80 100
Government schoolsGovernment dependent privateGovernment independent private
-150 -100 -50 0 50 100
Private schools perform better
Public schools perform better
%
█ Raw scores█ Controlling for social class
The school effect is really a teacher effect
One standard deviation of school quality equates to one-third of a grade per subject
One standard deviation of teacher quality equates to one-third of a grade per subject
So school quality appears to be simply teacher quality
Important number #2
Correlation between teacher quality and student progress• Woodhead: 0*• Hanushek et al 0.1 (at least)• Rockoff 0.2 (Reading)• Rockoff 0.25 (Mathematics)
Differences in teacher quality have a substantial impact on how much students learn.
Teachers make the difference
The commodification of teachers has received widespread support:• From teacher unions (who understandably resist performance-
related pay)• From politicians (who are happy that the focus is on teacher
supply, rather than teacher quality) But has resulted in the pursuit of policies with poor benefit
to cost (e.g., class size reduction) To see how big the difference is, take a group of 50 teachers
• Students taught by the best teacher learn twice as fast as average• Students taught by the worst teacher learn half as fast as average
And in the classrooms of the best teachers• Students with behavioral difficulties learn as much as those
without• Students from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as those
from advantaged backgrounds
Class size reduction
Reducing class sizes by 30% (from 30 to 20) results in an extra 4 months of learning per year• At a cost of £20,000 per classroom per year• Plus the cost of building 150,000 new classrooms• And only if the teachers are on average as good as the
teachers we have Adding 150,000 weak teachers to the system will
reduce student learning by 5 months a year. So we could spend an extra £5bn and lower student
achievement…
…so we have two choices…
A classic labour force issue with 2 (non-exclusive) solutions• Replace existing teachers with better ones• Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
Impact on achievement
If every TeachFirst teacher is as good as the average Finnish teacher, the net impact on GCSE would be one-four-hundredth of a grade in each subject.
If we could replace the least effective 15,000 teachers with average teachers, the net impact on student achievement at GCSE would be an increase of one-fortieth of a grade in each subject.
Raising the bar for entry into the profession so that we no longer recruit the lowest performing 30% of teachers would increase achievement at GCSE by one grade—by 2030.
Or make the teachers we have better…
Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers• The “love the one you’re with” strategy• It can be doneo Provided we focus rigorously on the things that mattero Even when they’re hard to do
Effective learning environments
Key concept:• Teachers do not create learning• Learners create learning
Teaching as engineering learning environments Key features:
• Create student engagement (pedagogies of engagement)• Well-regulated (pedagogies of contingency)• Develops habits of mind (pedagogies of formation)
Why pedagogies of engagement?
Intelligence is partly inherited• So what?
Intelligence is partly environmental• Environment creates intelligence• Intelligence creates environment
Learning environments• High cognitive demand• Inclusive• Obligatory
Motivation: cause or effect?
competence
challenge
Flow
apathyboredom
relaxation
arousal
anxiety
worry control
high
low
low high(Csikszentmihalyi,
1990)
Why pedagogies of contingency?
Contingencies in educationA. LA science adviser using test results to plan professional
development workshops for teachersB. Teachers doing item-by-item analysis of key stage 2 maths
tests to review their Y6 curriculumC. A school tests students every 10 weeks to predict which
students are “on course” for GCSE CsD. Three quarters of the way through a unit testE. Exit pass question: “What is the difference between mass
and weight?”F. “Sketch the graph of y equals one over one plus x squared
on your mini-white boards.”
Wilson & Draney, 2004
Why pedagogies of formation?
The ball sitting on the table is not moving. It is not moving because:
A. no forces are pushing or pulling on the ball.
B. gravity is pulling down, but the table is in the way.C. the table pushes up with the same force that gravity pulls downD. gravity is holding it onto the table. E. there is a force inside the ball keeping it from rolling off the table