Dylan Wiliam

Dylan Wiliam Student Free Day

Published by Nick

Just to remind all teaching staff at PBAS about our student free day in week 2 (Wed 5th February) I thought I would post some information about the international speaker we are going to be listening to – Dylan Wiliam. I am aware that Dylan Wiliam is known to most of you but I thought providing some information about him prior to listening to him speak on the 5th of February would be useful.

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Dylan Wiliam

Dylan Wiliam’s work focuses on the power of formative assessment in improving student learning. I recently came across a post which explained his current book Embedded Formative Assessment. The book outlines 5 key formative assessment strategies to improve student learning and also provides over 50 practical techniques for classroom formative assessment. My understanding is that as part of the cost for the day this book will be provided to each person who attends. Below is an outline of the 5 key strategies thanks to the post I mentioned earlier by Kelly Goodrich. Her full article can be read here.

Embedded Formative Assessment

1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success – getting the students to really understand what their classroom experience will be and how their success will be measured.

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning – developing effective classroom instructional strategies that allow for the measurement of success.

3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward – working with students to provide them the information they need to better understand problems and solutions.

4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another – getting students involved with each other in discussions and working groups can help improve student learning.

5. Activating learners as owners of their own learning – We wrote a recent blog on this topic: self-regulation of learning leads to student performance improvement.

The following two slides are from a presentation Dylan Wiliam gave in Austin, Texas in 2013. The two slides are an overview of the five key strategies for formative assessment. If you would like to view the whole presentation that these slides came from as well as other presentations given by Dylan Wiliam click here.

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Finally here is a short video of Dylan Wiliam discussing his book Embedded Formative Assessment.

Dylan Wiliam – The Classroom Experiment

Published by Nick

This is a two part series called The Classroom Experiment. Each video is an hour. I realise this is a large amount of time and that the end of term 2 is not the best time to watch them. However I highly recommend these videos. So if you do choose to watch them you can probably count them towards your time for week 10 term 4. You may wish to download the videos from You Tube and watch them in smaller chunks over a longer period of time. Perhaps through term 3?

One of the purposes of this blog is to share educational theory and research. I think that these two videos are a valuable and give the opportunity to view practical educational ideas (at least one of which is being implemented already at PBAS by Ed – coloured cups).

In this two-part series education expert Professor Dylan Wiliam sets up an experimental school classroom. For one term, he takes over a Year 8 class to test simple ideas that he believes could improve the quality of our children’s education. The concepts and ideas presented have implications from R-12.

Some of the concepts/issues in the experiment include:

  • No hands up – names on lollipop sticks.
  • Coloured cups.
  • Use of mini white boards (1 per student) – everyones in the spotlight/instant student response system (low tech version).
  • Removing grades from work. To help students focus on the comments on their work. High achieving students struggled with this. Whay do we need to give students grades?
  • Student feedback to teachers. Student observers.
  • Daily exercise – 10 minutes in the morning to prepare students for learning.
  • The second episode shows some good stuff about high achieving girls and making mistakes and their struggle with this.
  • Secret Student – improving student behaviour through peer pressure. The class earns points through positive behaviour. A Secret Student is picked each day (students don’t know who). The Secret Student for that day is the only one that can earn the points through behaving in a positive way.

The videos can also be found on the Pedagogy page under TfEL Domain 2.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Does ‘Hands Up’ in a classroom have a negative impact for some?

Published by Nick

Love the faces of the teachers in the video when Dylan Wiliams is talking to them about ‘hands up’. I can’t believe how worried they look and apprehensive they are to something as small as using a different method for getting students to answer questions.

It would be interesting to hear what staff think about the concept of ‘hands up’ being detrimental to student learning (for those that don’t engage). I know Ed is having a go at this so it would be interesting to hear his perspective on how he thinks it is helping (or not) in his class.

Part 1

Part 2