Transcript The role of assessment in driving up standards IFS

What difference does teacher
quality make to social class
inequalities?
LERN/IoE/DEBRe Conference:
Socio-economic status, social class and
education; London, UK: May 2009
Dylan Wiliam
www.dylanwiliam.net
Overview: science and design
We need to improve average student achievement
We need to narrow achievement gaps
Both require improving teacher quality
Improving the quality of entrants takes too long
So we have to make the teachers we have better
We can change teachers in a range of ways
Some will benefit students, and some will not.
Those that do tend to involve changes in teacher practice
Science
Changing practice requires new kinds of teacher learning
And new models of professional development.
Design
Looking for answers in the wrong place…
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
20
0
-60
-80
40
Iceland .
Finland .
Norway .
Sweden .
Poland .
Denmark .
Ireland .
Canada .
Spain .
New Zealand .
Australia .
United States .
Mexico .
Portugal .
Luxembourg .
Switzerland .
Greece .
Slovak Republic .
Korea .
Czech Republic .
Netherlands .
Austria .
Germany .
Italy .
Belgium .
Japan .
80
Hungary .
Turkey .
100
Within schools
60
-20
-40
Between schools
Within schools
Betw een schools explained by social background of schools
Betw een schools explained by social background of students
Betw een schools not explained by social background
OECD PISA data from McGaw, 2008
Teachers matter…
In many countries, classroom variability is at least 4 times school level variability
 It’s not class size or the between- or within-class grouping strategy
It’s the teacher
 The commodification of teachers has received widespread support:
 From teacher unions (who understandably resist performance-related pay)
 From politicians (so the focus is on teacher supply, rather than teacher quality)
 Having a good rather than weak teacher (±1sd) increases performance by more
than one GCSE grade
 Being taught by the best teacher from a group of 50 means that a student will learn
at four times the rate of a student taught by the worst teacher in that group
 And the gains for the lowest attainers are greater than for average students
 So that in the classrooms of the best teachers
 Students with behavioural difficulties learn as much as those without
 Students from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as those from advantaged
backgrounds (Hamre & Pianta, 2005)
… more for some than others
Impact of teacher quality on student outcomes (Hamre & Pianta, 2005))
Achievement gaps
Disadvantaged background
(mother’s education)
Poor behavior
Teacher’s provision
of instructional
support
High
No (good)
Average No (good)
Low
Yes (bad)
High
Teacher’s provision
of emotional support
High
Yes (bad)
Average Yes (bad)
Low
Yes (bad)
High
Yes (bad)
Average Yes (bad)
Low
Yes (bad)
No (good)
Average Yes (bad)
Low
Yes (bad)
Two ways to make teachers better…
Replace existing teachers with better ones
Important, but very slow, and of limited impact
Teach for America/Teach First (at most 1% of teaching force)
Raising the bar for entry to teaching
Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
Not because they are not good enough, but because they can be better
(so ‘good enough’ is not good enough)
The “love the one you’re with” strategy
It can be done
Provided we focus rigorously on the things that matter to students
Even when they’re hard to do
Raising the bar for entry to
teaching…
Mean: 50
Mean: 55 (0.5 sd increase)
1000
1000
800
800
600
600
400
400
200
200
0
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Teacher quality
Lowest 30%
removed
0
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Teacher quality
…is too slow…
The correlation between teacher quality and student progress is around 0.2
This means that raising teacher quality by one standard deviation will increase
student progress by 0.2 standard deviations
Raising the bar for entry into the profession so that we no longer recruit the
lowest performing 30% of teachers would over twenty to thirty years, increase
average teacher quality by 0.5 standard deviations.
This would increase student achievement by 0.1 standard deviations
 an increase of the speed of student learning of 25-30%, or, put another way
 an increase in the average score on a typical test of one point (e.g. from 50 to 51)
 A small, but valuable effect (annual value of £8bn)
So our policies need to be more specific
The dark matter of teacher quality
Teachers make a difference
But what makes the difference in teachers?
Advanced content matter knowledge
Pedagogical content knowledge
Further professional qualifications (MA, NBPTS)
Total “explained” difference
<5%
10-15%
<5%
20-25%
Cost/effect comparisons
Intervention
Extra months of
learning per year
Cost/classroom/yr
Class-size reduction (by 30%)
4
£20k
Increase teacher content
knowledge from weak to strong
2
?
Formative assessment/
Assessment for learning
8
£2k
The formative assessment hi-jack…
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
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
…and one big idea
Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet
student needs
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
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 good 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
Looking at the wrong knowledge…
The most powerful teacher knowledge is not explicit
 That’s why telling teachers what to do doesn’t work
 What we know is more than we can say
 And that is why most professional development has been relatively ineffective
Improving practice involves changing habits, not adding knowledge
 That’s why it’s hard
 And the hardest bit is not getting new ideas into people’s heads
 It’s getting the old one’s out
 That’s why it takes time
But it doesn’t happen naturally
 If it did, the most experienced teachers would be the best, and we know that’s not so
(Hanushek, 2005)
 We need to create systematic approaches to, and spaces for, teacher learning
Two competing drivers in design
Some reforms are too loose
e.g., the ‘Effective schools’ movement
Allows customization to the local context
But can suffer from ‘lethal mutations’
Some reforms are too tight
e.g., Montessori Schools
Undoubtedly effective
Not possible to implement everywhere
Fails to capitalize on affordances in the local context
Designing for scale: tight but loose
“In-principle” scalability requires
A single model for the whole school
But which honours the specifities of each subject and age-range
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
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.
So what do we need?
What is needed from teachers
A commitment to:
the continuous improvement of practice
focus on those things that make a difference to student outcomes
What is needed from leaders
A commitment to:
creating expectations for the continuous improvement of practice
ensuring that the the focus stays on those things that make a difference
to student outcomes
providing the time, space, dispensation and support for innovation
supporting risk-taking
What is needed from the system
A “signature pedagogy” for teacher learning
Signature pedagogies
In Law
In Medicine
A “signature pedagogy” for teacher
learning?
Monthly meetings of ‘teacher learning communities’ (TLCs) of 8-10
teachers that follow the same structure and sequence
Activity 1: Introduction & Housekeeping (5 minutes)
Activity 2: How’s It Going (35 minutes)
Activity 3: New Learning about formative assessment (20 minutes)
Activity 4: Personal Action Planning (10 minutes)
Activity 5: Summary of Learning (5 minutes)
Peer observations between TLC meetings
Run to the agenda of the observed, not the observer
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
Formative assessment + Teacher learning communities
A point of (uniquely?) high leverage
A “Trojan Horse” into wider issues of pedagogy, psychology, and curriculum