Dylan Wiliam Quotes

A bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum. Or more precisely, pedagogy is curriculum, because what matters is how things are taught, rather than what is taught.

The greatest impact on learning is the daily lived experiences of students in classrooms, and that is determined much more by how teachers teach than by what they teach.

The first fundamental principle of effective classroom feedback is that feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.

Feedback functions formatively only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in improving performance.

As soon as students get a grade, the learning stops. We may not like it, but the research reviewed here shows that this is a relatively stable feature of how human minds work.

Most of what our students need to know hasn’t been discovered or invented yet. “Learning how to learn” used to be an optional extra in education; today, it’s a survival skill.

the shorter the time interval between eliciting the evidence and using it to improve instruction, the bigger the likely impact on learning.

feedback should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor. Indeed, the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning,

The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. The only way we can do this is through assessment. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.

If we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they are not good enough but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.—Dylan Wiliam

there is a significant body of research that shows that one hour students spend devising questions about what they have been learning with correct solutions is more effective than one hour spent completing practice tests

It has long been known that learners remember responses they generate themselves better than those responses that are given to them, and this is now often called the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In particular, one hour students spend writing test questions on what they have been studying results in more learning for them than one hour spent working with a study guide, answering practice tests, or leaving the students to their own devices (Foos, Mora, & Tkacz, 1994).

If having a valued skill no longer guarantees employment, then the only way to be sure of being employable is to be able to develop new skills, as Seymour Papert (1998) observed: So the model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.

After studying the extensive research of experts like Dylan Wiliam (2011), Thomas Guskey (2011), Alfie Kohn (2011), and John Hattie (2007), I knew that replacing grades with narrative feedback would be a central piece of transitioning from a traditional to a student-centered classroom,

Emeritus Professor John Sweller, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, conceived of the theory of CLT and published a paper on it in April 1988.2 Sweller himself says that after this his work was largely ignored for the next 20 years! Dylan Wiliam’s tweet suggests that the theory had remained largely confined to narrow academic fields, and was certainly not at home in the pedagogical discourse with which normal classroom teachers were familiar.

What sort of things might constitute an agenda for further professional improvement? Beyond the sharing of the good, bad and the ugly in conversations in staff meetings and at professional development sessions, new vistas are opened up when we read about considered practice. Books such as Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence, Graham Nuthall’s The Hidden Lives of Learners, Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby’s Making Every Lesson Count, David Didau’s The Secret of Literacy, Gordon Stobart’s The Expert Learner, Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School, Shirley Clarke’s Outstanding Formative Assessment and Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment. For starters. Then there are the educational blogs which provide quick insights into new thinking.