The importance of
(learning and)
teaching to the
Institute of Education
Dylan Wiliam
A brief history of HE funding…
Integration of funding pre-1992 and post-1992 universities
Research
Quality based mechanism (RAE)
QR supports a maximum of 50% of academic staff salary
Teaching
Quality-independent mechanism (tolerance bands)
Fee caps too low for discrimination between providers
Commodification of teaching
Future developments
Quality-related student contributions to tuition costs
Need to achieve, and demonstrate, increased quality
The ‘death of distance’
for distance learning students
but also for students attending full-time
To secure its future, the Institute needs to become as demonstrably
excellent for its teaching as it is for its research
Enrolment on modules in 2008
Policy minimum: 23 students per module
50
40
30
20
2006
2008
Mean:
15
18
Median
12
16
Mode
11
15
10
0
25
50
Number of students
75
Teaching: a scarily complex activity
(Denvir & Brown, 1986)
…and we are largely on our own…
Two extremes
Teachers doing the learning for the learners
Teachers “facilitating learning”
Key concept
Teachers do not create learning
Learners create learning
But all teachers can do is teach (learning vs. teaching)
Teaching is the engineering of effective learning environments
Psychology underdetermines pedagogy
Teaching is fundamentally a creative activity
Creativity is very widely distributed, but often suppressed
Principles of curriculum design
Curriculum: a selection from culture
Balanced
Rigorous
Vertically integrated
Focused
The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that a pupil takes
away from school, but his appetite to know and his capacity to learn. If the school
sends out children with the desire for knowledge and some idea how to acquire it, it
will have done its work. Too many leave school with the appetite killed and the mind
loaded with undigested lumps of information. The good schoolmaster is known by
the number of valuable subjects which he declines to teach.
(Sir Richard Livingstone, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1941)
Signature pedagogies
In Law
In Medicine
Effective learning environments
Create student engagement
pedagogies of engagement
Well-regulated
pedagogies of contingency
Develop habits of mind
pedagogies of formation
Pedagogies of engagement
Intelligence is partly inherited
So what?
Intelligence is partly environmental
Environment creates intelligence
Intelligence creates environment
Dual-pathway theory (Boekaerts)
Well-being
Growth
Learning environments
Inclusive
Varied
Efficient
Active learning roles?
The TIMSS video studies of middle-school mathematics classrooms
looked at the proportion of teacher words to student words in randomly
selected examples of classroom practice
USA
8
Japan
13
Hong Kong
16
Hinge-point question
On average, across all the award-bearing teaching at the Institute,how
many teacher words are there per student word?
A. More student words than teacher words
B. About equal numbers of teacher words and student words
C. Three times as many teacher words as student words
D. Five times as many teacher words as student words
E. More than five times as many teacher words as student words
Motivation: cause or effect?
high
arousal
Flow
anxiety
challenge
control
worry
relaxation
apathy
boredom
low
low
competence
high
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)
Pedagogies of contingency
Learning is unpredictable
Learners do not learn what we teach
It is only through assessment that we can connect what we do as teachers
to its outcomes (“like so many bottles thrown out into the sea”; Perrenoud
1998)
Assessment is therefore the bridge between teaching and learning, and
thus the central process of teaching (as opposed to lecturing)
A large, and growing literature providing evidence of the beneficial
effects of formative assessment
Formative assessment
An assessment functions formatively when evidence about
student achievement elicited by the assessment is
interpreted and used to make decisions about the next steps
in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded,
than the decisions that would have been made in the
absence of that evidence.
Formative assessment therefore involves the creation of,
and capitalization upon, moments of contingency (short,
medium and long cycle) in instruction with a view to
regulating learning (proactive, interactive, and retroactive).
Dealing with diversity
Ignore it (“one-size-fits-all”)
Individualize instruction (“made-to-measure”)
Personalization
Mass customization (rather than mass production or individualization)
Diversity becomes a valuable instructional resource
Hinge-point question
An experimental study of a new method of teaching reading reports that
a result was significant (p<0.05). This means that:
A. The experimental group out-performed the control group by 5%
B. There is a 5% chance that the experimental group did not out-perform
the control group
C. There is a 5% chance that there is no difference between the
experimental group and the treatment group
D. There is only a 5% chance that the observed result would have
happened if the experimental and control groups had the same
achievement
Hinge-point question
Which of the following is the most important difference between the
theories of Piaget and Vygotsky?
A.
Piaget places greater importance on the role of conservation in
cognitive development.
B. Vygotsky places greater importance on the role of cultural artifacts in
cognitive development.
C. Vygotsky did not believe in distinct stages of cognitive development.
D. Piaget was a social constructivist while Vygotsky placed greater
emphasis on cultural-historical activity theory
Other supports for contingency
All-student response systems
ABCD cards
“Exit-pass” questions
Hinge-point question
Summarize the key principles of the following schools of psychology on
the appropriate coloured card
Associationism (blue)
Information processing (orange)
Constructivism (red)
Situated approaches (green)
Pedagogies of formation
Instilling disciplinary habits of mind
History
Philosophy
Statistics
Instilling critical perspectives
Values
Improving our practice
The limitations of consciousness
Sensory
system
Eyes
Ears
Skin
Taste
Smell
Total bandwidth
(in bits/second)
10,000,000
100,000
1,000,000
1,000
100,000
Conscious bandwidth
(in bits/second)
40
30
5
1
1
(Nørretranders, 1998)
Knowledge ‘transfer’ and creation
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
Improvements in pediatric cardiac surgery
Senning
Early death rate
Senning
12%
Transitional
25%
Transitional
Switch
Bull, et al (2000). BMJ, 320, 1168-1173.
Impact on life expectancy
Life expectancy:
Senning: 46.6 years
Switch:
62.6 years
No excuse for making the same mistakes over and over again
But no excuse for not making mistakes
“Make new mistakes” (Esther Dyson)
Summary
Excellence in teaching is vital to the future success of the Institute
Every single one of us needs to improve as a teacher
Not because we are not good enough
But because we can be better
The Institute needs to play a leading role in developing signature
pedagogies for Education and related Social Science
Closing thoughts
“In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire
to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for less,
because passing civilization along from one generation to the
next ought to be the highest honor and highest responsibility
anyone could have.”
Lee Iacocca
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest
fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light,
not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
Marianne Williamson, A return to love