Assessment for learning:
why, what, and how?
Dylan Wiliam
Overview of presentation
Why raising achievement is important
Why investing in teachers is the answer
Why formative assessment should be the focus
Why teacher learning communities should be the mechanism
How we can put this into practice
Why, what & how?
Raising achievement matters
For individuals
Increased lifetime salary
Improved health
Longer life
For society
Lower criminal justice costs
Lower health-care costs
Increased economic growth
Why?
Where’s the solution?
Structure
 Smaller high schools
 Larger high schools
 K-8 schools
Alignment
 Curriculum reform
 Textbook replacement
Governance
 Charter schools
 Vouchers
Technology
 Computers
 Interactive white-boards
Why?
School effectiveness
Three generations of school effectiveness research
Raw results approaches
Different schools get different results
Conclusion: Schools make a difference
Demographic-based approaches
Demographic factors account for most of the variation
Conclusion: Schools don’t make a difference
Value-added approaches
School-level differences in value-added are relatively small
Classroom-level differences in value-added are large
Conclusion: An effective school is a school full of effective classrooms
Why?
It’s the classroom
Variability at the classroom level is up to 4 times that at school level
It’s not class size
It’s not the between-class grouping strategy
It’s not the within-class grouping strategy
It’s the teacher
Why?
Teacher quality
A labour force issue with 2 solutions
Replace existing teachers with better ones?
No evidence that more pay brings in better teachers
No evidence that there are better teachers out there deterred by
burdensome certification requirements
Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
The “love the one you’re with” strategy
It can be done
We know how to do it, but at scale? Quickly? Sustainably?
Why?
Cost/effect comparisons
Intervention
Extra months of
learning per year
Cost/yr
Class-size reduction (by 30%)
4
£20k
Increase teacher content
knowledge from weak to strong
2
?
Formative assessment/
Assessment for learning
8
£2k
Why?
The research evidence
Several major reviews of the research
Natriello (1987)
Crooks (1988)
Kluger & DeNisi (1996)
Black & Wiliam (1998)
Nyquist (2003)
All find consistent, substantial effects
Why?
Formative assessment
Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in
its design and practice is to serve the purpose of promoting pupils’
learning. It thus differs from assessment designed primarily to serve the
purposes of accountability, or of ranking, or of certifying competence.
An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be
used as feedback, by teachers, and by their pupils, in assessing
themselves and each other, to modify the teaching and learning activities
in which they are engaged.
Such assessment becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is
actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs.
Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall & Wiliam, 2002
Types of formative assessment
Long-cycle
 Span: across units, terms
 Length: four weeks to one year
 Impact: Student monitoring; curriculum alignment
Medium-cycle
 Span: within and between teaching units
 Length: one to four weeks
 Impact: Improved, student-involved, assessment; teacher cognition about learning
Short-cycle
 Span: within and between lessons
 Length:
 day-by-day: 24 to 48 hours
 minute-by-minute: 5 seconds to 2 hours
 Impact: classroom practice; student engagement
What?
Unpacking formative assessment
Key processes
Establishing where the learners are in their learning
Establishing where they are going
Working out how to get there
Participants
Teachers
Peers
Learners
What?
Aspects of formative assessment
Where the learner
is going
Teacher
Peer
Learner
Where the learner is
Engineering effective
Clarify and share discussions, tasks and
activities that elicit
learning intentions
evidence of learning
How to get there
Providing feedback
that moves learners
forward
Understand and
share learning
intentions
Activating students as learning
resources for one another
Understand
learning intentions
Activating students as owners
of their own learning
Five “key strategies”…
Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
curriculum philosophy
Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that
elicit evidence of learning
classroom discourse, interactive whole-class teaching
Providing feedback that moves learners forward
 feedback
Activating students as learning resources for one another
 collaborative learning, reciprocal teaching, peer-assessment
Activating students as owners of their own learning
metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution, self-assessment
(Wiliam & Thompson, 2007)
…and one big idea
Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet
student needs
What?
Keeping Learning on Track (KLT)
A pilot guides a plane or boat toward its destination by taking constant
readings and making careful adjustments in response to wind, currents,
weather, etc.
A KLT teacher does the same:
Plans a carefully chosen route ahead of time (in essence building the track)
Takes readings along the way
Changes course as conditions dictate
What?
Putting it into practice
Why research hasn’t changed teaching
The nature of expertise in teaching
Aristotle’s main intellectual virtues
 Episteme: knowledge of universal truths
 Techne: ability to make things
 Phronesis: practical wisdom
What works is not the right question
 Everything works somewhere
 Nothing works everywhere
 What’s interesting is “under what conditions” does this work?
Teaching is mainly a matter of phronesis, not episteme
How?
Knowledge ‘transfer’
to
Tacit knowledge
Explicit knowledge
Dialogue
Tacit knowledge
from
Explicit knowledge
Socialization
Externalization
sympathised knowledge
conceptual knowledge
Networking
Sharing experience
Internalization
Combination
operational knowledge
systemic knowledge
Learning by doing
After Nonaka & Tageuchi, 1995
How?
Implementing FA/AfL requires
changing teacher habits
Teachers “know” most of this already
So the problem is not a lack of knowledge
It’s a lack of understanding what it means to do FA/AfL
That’s why telling teachers what to do doesn’t work
Experience alone is not enough—if it were, then the most experienced
teachers would be the best teachers—we know that’s not true
(Hanushek, 2005; Day, 2006)
People need to reflect on their experiences in systematic ways that build
their accessible knowledge base, learn from mistakes, etc. (Bransford,
Brown & Cocking, 1999)
How?
A model for teacher learning
Content, then process
Content (what we want teachers to change)
Evidence
Ideas (strategies and techniques)
Process (how to go about change)
Choice
Flexibility
Small steps
Accountability
Support
How?
Strategies and techniques
Distinction between strategies and techniques
Strategies define the territory of AfL (no brainers)
Teachers are responsible for choice of techniques
Allows for customization/ caters for local context
Creates ownership
Shares responsibility
Key requirements of techniques
embodiment of deep cognitive/affective principles
relevance
feasibility
acceptability
How?
Examples of techniques
Learning intentions
“sharing exemplars”
Eliciting evidence
“mini white-boards”
Providing feedback
“find it and fix it”
Students as owners of their learning
“coloured cups”
Students as learning resources
“pre-flight checklist”
How?
Design and intervention
Our design process
cognitive/affective
insights
synergy/
comprehensiveness
set of
components
Teachers’ implementation process
set of
components
synergy/
comprehensiveness
cognitive/affective
insights
Teacher learning takes time
To put new knowledge to work, to make it meaningful and accessible
when you need it, requires practice.
A teacher doesn’t come at this as a blank slate.
Not only do teachers have their current habits and ways of teaching—
they’ve lived inside the old culture of classrooms all their lives: every
teacher started out as a student!
New knowledge doesn’t just have to get learned and practiced, it has to go
up against long-established, familiar, comfortable ways of doing things that
may not be as effective, but fit within everyone’s expectations of how a
classroom should work.
It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at
new ones. Thus…
 Professional development must be sustained over time
How?
That’s what teacher learning
communities (TLCs) are for:
TLCs contradict teacher isolation
TLCs reprofessionalize teaching by valuing teacher expertise
TLCs deprivatize teaching so that teachers’ strengths and struggles
become known
TLCs offer a steady source of support for struggling teachers
They grow expertise by providing a regular space, time, and structure
for that kind of systematic reflecting on practice
They facilitate sharing of untapped expertise residing in individual
teachers
They build the collective knowledge base in a school
How?
King’s-Medway-Oxfordshire
Formative Assessment Project
“Polyexperiment” design
24 teachers, each developing their practice in individual ways
Each teacher chose which class to explore these ideas with
Each teacher chose how to measure success
Different outcome variables, so no possibility of standardized controls
Synthesis by standardized effect size
Impact on student achievement
0.3 standard deviations (i.e., about 8 months extra learning per year)
Other small-scale replications (Hayes, 2003; Clymer 2007) find similar
effects
How?
Taking it to scale
Designing for scale
“In-principle” scalability
A single model for the whole school
 But which honours subject-specificities
Understanding what it means to scale (Coburn, 2003)
 Depth
 Sustainability
 Spread
 Shift in reform ownership
Consideration of the diversity of contexts of application
Clarity about components, and the theory of action
How?
Logic model for KLT
Teacher Outcomes
Teachers use
evidence of
learning to adapt
instruction to
meet studentÕ
immediate
learning needs
KLT COMPONENTS



Introduct ory Assessment
for Learning and TLC
Leader Workshops
On-going support from
ETS consultants, peers,
and an online community
and materials
On-going monthly
meetings that support and
hold teachers accountable
t o make changes in their
classroom
1
Teachers elicit evidence
of student understanding.
6
7
2
3
4
5
Teachers identify and
share learning intentions
and criteria for success
with their students.
Teachers provide
structure and create
opportu nities for students
to take ownership of their
own learning.
Teachers provide
structure andcreate
opportunit
ies to activate
students as instructional
resources for one another.
Teachers provide stude
nts
with feedback that
identifies what they need
to do to improve
Student
Outcomes
8
Students are
more engaged
with the lesson,
content, and
activities
13
Improve d
stu de n t
le arn in g
14
9
15
10
11
12
Students support
each other and
take
responsibility for
their own
learning within
shared
frameworks
16
Students act on
feedback to
improve
assignments
(Leahy, Leusner & Lyon, 2005)
How to set up a TLC
Plan that the TLC will run for two years
Identify 8 to 10 interested colleagues
Should have similar assignments (e.g. early years, math/sci)
Secure institutional support for:
Monthly meetings (2 hrs each, inside or outside school time)
Time between meetings (2 hrs per month in school time)
Collaborative planning
Peer observation
Any necessary waivers from school policies
How?
A ‘signature pedagogy’ for teacher learning?
Every monthly TLC meeting should follows the same structure and
sequence of activities
Activity 1: Introduction & Housekeeping (5 minutes)
Activity 2: How’s It Going (50 minutes)
Activity 3: New Learning about AfL (50 minutes)
Activity 4: Personal Action Planning (10 minutes)
Activity 5: Summary of Learning (5 minutes)
How?
The TLC leader’s role
To ensure the TLC meets regularly
To ensure all needed materials are at meetings
To ensure that each meeting is focused on AfL
To create and maintain a productive and non-judgmental tone during
meetings
To ensure that every participant shares with regard to their implementation
of AfL
To encourage teachers to provide their colleagues with constructive and
thoughtful feedback
To encourage teachers to think about and discuss the implementation of
new AfL learning and skills
To ensure that every teacher has an action plan to guide their next steps
But not to be the AfL “expert”
How?
Peer observation
Run to the agenda of the observed, not the observer
Observed teacher specifies focus of observation
Observe teacher specifies what counts as evidence
e.g., teacher wants to increase wait-time
provides observer with a stop-watch to log wait-times
How?
“Tight but loose”
Some reforms are too loose (e.g., the ‘Effective schools’ movement)
Others are too tight (e.g., Montessori Schools)
The “tight but loose” formulation
… combines an obsessive adherence to central design principles (the
“tight” part) with accommodations to the needs, resources, constraints, and
particularities that occur in any school or district (the “loose” part), but only
where these do not conflict with the theory of action of the intervention.
Tight about
 Teacher choice
 Strategies
 “How’s it going?” & action planning
 Size of TLC
Loose about
 Timing and location of meetings
 Techniques
 New learning about AfL
 Make-up of TLC
How?
Implementations
Successful pilots in:
Cleveland Municipal School District, OH
Austin Independent School District, TX
Chico Unified School District, CA
Mathematics and Science Partnership of Greater Philadelphia, PA/NJ
St. Mary’s County Public Schools, MD
State-wide pilot in 10 schools in Vermont
Impact on student achievement similar to KMOFAP
Summary
Raising achievement is important
Raising achievement requires improving teacher quality
Improving teacher quality requires teacher professional development
To be effective, teacher professional development must address
What teachers do in the classroom
How teachers change what they do in the classroom
AfL/FA + TLCs
A point of (uniquely?) high leverage
A “Trojan Horse” into wider issues of pedagogy, psychology, and curriculum
Why, what & how?