Reflections on pedagogy Dylan Wiliam Pedagogy, Space, Place Conference November

Overview  Some simple analytics of school quality The two most important numbers in education  Three perspectives on pedagogy

Impact of background on development (Feinstein, 2003)

Meaningful differences  Hour-long samples of family talk in 42 US families  Number of words spoken to children by adults by the age of 36 months In professional families: 35 million In other working-class families:20 million In families on welfare:10 million  Kinds of reinforcements: positivenegative professional500,00050,000 working-class200,000100,000 welfare100,000200,000 (Hart & Risley, 1995)

5 How much do students learn in a year? Source: Leverhulme Numeracy Research Programme =?

CSMS (Hart, 1981)

Important number #1  One year’s average growth in achievement NAEP (US): 0.25 standard deviations per year TIMSS (US, UK):0.36 standard deviations per year NC (UK)0.40 standard deviations per year  The precise value depends on the nature of the assessment being used (and specifically its sensitivity to instruction) but, for all but the youngest students, it is almost certainly less than 0.5.

So the overlap between cohorts is large… 8 The spread of achievement within each cohort is greater than generally assumed

…and differences between schools are small  Proportion of 16-year olds gaining 5 GCSE grades at grade C or higher 7% of the variability in the proportion achieving this is attributable to the school, so 93% of the variability in the proportion achieving this is nothing to do with the school  So, if 15 students in a class get 5 A*-C in the average school: 17 students will do so at a “good” school (1sd above mean) 13 students will do so at a “bad” school (1sd below mean)

Private schools perform better Public schools perform better % █ Raw scores █ Controlling for social class

The school effect is really a teacher effect  One standard deviation of school quality equates to one-third of a grade per subject  One standard deviation of teacher quality equates to one-third of a grade per subject  So school quality appears to be simply teacher quality

Differences between teachers are large Barber & Mourshed, 2007

Important number #2  Correlation between teacher quality and student progress Woodhead: 0* Hanushek et al0.1 (at least) Rockoff0.2 (Reading) Rockoff0.25 (Mathematics)  Differences in teacher quality have a substantial impact on how much students learn.

Teachers make the difference  The commodification of teachers has received widespread support: From teacher unions (who understandably resist performance- related pay) From politicians (who are happy that the focus is on teacher supply, rather than teacher quality)  But has resulted in the pursuit of policies with poor benefit to cost (e.g., class size reduction)  To see how big the difference is, take a group of 50 teachers Students taught by the best teacher learn twice as fast as average Students taught by the worst teacher learn half as fast as average  And in the classrooms of the best teachers Students with behavioral difficulties learn as much as those without Students from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as those from advantaged backgrounds

Class size reduction  Reducing class sizes by 30% (from 30 to 20) results in an extra 4 months of learning per year At a cost of £20,000 per classroom per year Plus the cost of building 150,000 new classrooms And only if the teachers are on average as good as the teachers we have  Adding 150,000 weak teachers to the system will reduce student learning by 5 months a year.  So we could spend an extra £5bn and lower student achievement…

…so we have two choices…  A classic labour force issue with 2 (non-exclusive) solutions Replace existing teachers with better ones Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers

Impact on achievement  If every TeachFirst teacher is as good as the average Finnish teacher, the net impact on GCSE would be one-four-hundredth of a grade in each subject.  If we could replace the least effective 15,000 teachers with average teachers, the net impact on student achievement at GCSE would be an increase of one- fortieth of a grade in each subject.  Raising the bar for entry into the profession so that we no longer recruit the lowest performing 30% of teachers would increase achievement at GCSE by one grade—by 2030.

Or make the teachers we have better…  Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers The “love the one you’re with” strategy It can be done o Provided we focus rigorously on the things that matter o Even when they’re hard to do

Effective learning environments  Key concept: Teachers do not create learning Learners create learning  Teaching as engineering learning environments  Key features: Create student engagement (pedagogies of engagement) Well-regulated (pedagogies of contingency) Develops habits of mind (pedagogies of formation)

Why pedagogies of engagement?  Intelligence is partly inherited So what?  Intelligence is partly environmental Environment creates intelligence Intelligence creates environment  Learning environments High cognitive demand Inclusive Obligatory

Motivation: cause or effect? competence challenge Flow apathy boredom relaxation arousal anxiety worry control high low high (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

Why pedagogies of contingency? Contingencies in education A.LA science adviser using test results to plan professional development workshops for teachers B.Teachers doing item-by-item analysis of key stage 2 maths tests to review their Y6 curriculum C.A school tests students every 10 weeks to predict which students are “on course” for GCSE Cs D.Three quarters of the way through a unit test E.Exit pass question: “What is the difference between mass and weight?” F.“Sketch the graph of y equals one over one plus x squared on your mini-white boards.”

Wilson & Draney, 2004 Why pedagogies of formation? The ball sitting on the table is not moving. It is not moving because: A. no forces are pushing or pulling on the ball. B. gravity is pulling down, but the table is in the way. C. the table pushes up with the same force that gravity pulls down D. gravity is holding it onto the table. E. there is a force inside the ball keeping it from rolling off the table

Comments? Questions?