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Building sustainable
learning communities
Dylan Wiliam
Institute of Education
30 November 2006
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Overview of presentation
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Why raising achievement is important
Why investing in teachers is the answer
Why assessment for learning should be the focus
How we can put this into practice
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Raising achievement matters
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• For individuals
– Increased lifetime salary
– Improved health
• For society
– Lower criminal justice costs
– Lower health-care costs
– Increased economic growth
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Where’s the solution?
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• Structure
– Small schools
– Big schools
• Alignment
– Curriculum reform
– Textbook replacement
• Governance
– Specialist schools
– Vouchers
• Technology
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It’s the classroom
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• Variability at the classroom level is up to 4 times
greater than 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
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Teacher quality:
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• 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 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?
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Cost/effect comparisons
Intervention
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Effect
(sd)
Cost/yr/
classroom
Class-size reduction (by 30%)
0.1
£20k
Increase teacher content knowledge by
1 sd
0.1
?
0.2~0.3
£2k
Formative assessment/
Assessment for learning
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Five key strategies…
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• Clarifying and understanding learning intentions and
criteria for success
• Engineering effective classroom discussions that
elicit evidence of learning
• Providing feedback that moves learners forward
• Activating students as learning resources for each
other
• Activating students as the owners of their own
learning
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…and one big idea
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• Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching to
meet student needs
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Putting it into practice
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Why research hasn’t
changed teaching
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• 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
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Teacher knowledge
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 do you grow expertise?
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• NOT by telling people what to do.
• Expertise grows over time, with experience and lots
of opportunities to think about those experiences
• But 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 et al., 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)
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That’s what TLCs are for:
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They grow expertise by providing a regular space, time, and
structure for that kind of systematic reflecting on practice
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They facilitate sharing of untapped expertise residing in individual
teachers
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They build the collective knowledge base in a school
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TLCs contradict teacher isolation, a major cause of teacher
turnover
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TLCs reprofessionalize teaching by valuing teacher expertise
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TLCs deprivatize teaching so that teachers’ strengths and
struggles become known
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TLCs offer a steady source of support for struggling teachers
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Teacher learning takes time
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• 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…
– TLCs must be sustained over time
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How to set up a TLC
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• Plan 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
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A structure for TLC meetings
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Every monthly TLC meeting should follows the same
structure and sequence of activities
Activity 1: Introduction & Housekeeping (5 mins)
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)
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Activities 1-2 & 4-5 (‘Bookends’)
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• The process for these activities is the same at each TLC
meeting.
• The content of these activities changes as assessment for
learning is established and integrated into teachers’ daily
routines.
• These activities are critical to teachers actually changing
their practice to embrace assessment for learning.
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Introduction & housekeeping
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• Time for participants to get their minds to the meeting
• The TLC leader presents the learning intentions for
the meeting
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How’s It Going?
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Every teacher gives a brief, informal report on his or
her latest AfL efforts, while colleagues listen and
respond appropriately, following a structured protocol.
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What does this mean for TLCs?
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• Routines need to be established, expectations
shared, and structure maintained.
• Similar expectations regarding preparation and
engagement.
– Come to the meeting knowing you will be sharing your own
AfL experiences.
– Be prepared to offer constructive, thoughtfully conceived
feedback to colleagues.
– Be prepared to challenge ideas that may be good classroom
practice but are not necessarily tightly related to formative
assessment.
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Supporting Each Other
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Questions to guide the routine:
Thinking about what you’ve tried
• If you tried a technique from your action plan:
– How did it go?
– Was it successful or unsuccessful? Why?
• If there is a technique that you planned to try, but have not:
– Why haven’t you tried it yet?
– What modifications to the technique might make it more appealing
for you to try out?
– What support would you need in order to try out this technique?
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Supporting Each Other
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Questions to guide the routine:
Thinking about what’s working
• If you tried a technique from your action plan:
– How did it go?
– Was it successful or unsuccessful? Why?
• If there is a technique that you planned to try, but have not:
– Why haven’t you tried it yet?
– What modifications to the technique might make it more appealing
for you to try out?
– What support would you need in order to try out this technique?
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Supporting Each Other
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Questions to guide the routine:
Thinking about difficulties
• If you or a colleague tried a technique, and it didn’t seem to
work,
OR
• If you or a colleague have been reluctant to try a particular
technique:
– What do you think is getting in the way?
– What help do you need to make this work?
– How could this technique be modified to work for you?
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How does “How’s It Going?”
improve teaching and learning?
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• Repetition
– Supportive structure for getting better together
– While the structure is constant, the “case studies” will vary-meetings not tedious or stale
– Time to problem solve
• Accountability
• Keeps the Focus
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New learning about AfL
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Magazine/journal articles
Book study
Official publications
Personal experiences
Video extracts
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Personal Action Planning
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• Each teacher updates his or her personal Action Plan
and arranges to get needed support from colleagues
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Make ideas more concrete
Provide a reference for future work
Create accountability for trying new things
Focus attention on a couple of areas
Provide a reminder to give up some things
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Summary of Learning
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• The group checks to see where they are with regard
to the learning intentions for the meeting
– If yes, great!
– If no, plan for addressing any gaps
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The TLC leader’s role
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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”
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Peer observation
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• Run to the agenda of the observee, not the observer
• Observee specifies focus of observation
• Observee specifies what counts as evidence
– e.g., teacher wants to increase wait-time
– provides observer with a stop-watch to log wait-times
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Summary
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• 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 + TLCs
– A point of (uniquely?) high leverage
– A “Trojan Horse” into wider issues of pedagogy, psychology, and
curriculum
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