Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam

Powerful quotes:

Curriculum v Pedagogy
“A bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum.”

Textbooks
“Textbooks play an important role in mediating between the intended and the achieved curriculum, and as a result, there has been great interest in finding out whether some textbook programs are more effective than others. Reviews of random-allocation trials of programs for reading in the early grades and for programs in elementary, middle and high school math concluded that there was little evidence that changes in textbooks alone had much impact on student achievement. It was only when the programs changed teaching practices and student interactions that a significant impact on achievement was found.”

SSOs
“As a final example of an effort to produce substantial improvement in student achievement at scale, it is instructive to consider the impact of teachers’ aide in England. One Large-scale evaluation of the impact of support staff on student achievement found that teachers’ aides actually lowered the performance of the students they were assigned to help. Of course, this does not mean that the use of teachers’ aides cannot increase student achievement – merely that they have not.”

Teacher quality – Performance pay doesn’t work
“The desire of teacher unions to treat all teachers as equally good is understandable, because it generates solidarity among their members, but more importantly because performance-related pay is in principle impossible to determine fairly. Consider a district that tests its students every year from third through eighth grade and then uses the test score data to work out which teachers have added the most value each year. This looks straightforward, but there is a fatal flaw: no test can capture all that is important for future progress. A fourth-grade teacher who spends a great deal of time developing skills of independent and collaborative learning, who ensures that her students become adept at solving problems, and who develops her students’ abilities at speaking, listening, and writing in addition to teaching reading may find that her students’ scores on the fourth-grade maths and reading tests are not as high as those of other teachers in her school who have been emphasizing only what is on the test. And yet, the teacher who inherits this class in fifth grade will look very good when the results of the fifth-grade tests are in, not because of what the fifth-grade teacher has done, but because of the firm foundations that were laid by the fourth-grade teacher.”

“The fact that teaching is so complex is what makes it such a great job.”

“The only teachers who think they are successful are those who have low expectations of their students.”

Formative assessment:
“the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning.”
“assessment carried out during the instructional process for the purpose of improving teaching or learning”
“frequent, interactive assessments of students’ progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately”

A process – not a tool!
Requires 5 elements to be in place:

  1. The provision of effective feedback to students
  2. The active involvement of students in their own learning
  3. The adjustment of teaching to take into account the results of assessment
  4. The recognition of the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, both of which are crucial influences on learning
  5. The need for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve

An example of formative assessment

 

An English teacher has been working of figurative language:

Each student has 6 cards with the letters A, B, C, D, E, F

On the board she displays the following

A. Alliteration

B. Onomatopoeia

C. Hyperbole

D. Personification

E. Simile

F. Metaphor

She then reads a series of statements:

  • This backpack weighs a ton.
  • He was as tall as a house.
  • The sweetly smiling sunshine melted all the snow.
  • He honked his horn at the cyclist.
  • He was a bull in a china shop.

After the teacher reads each statement, she asks the class to hold up a letter card or cards to indicate which kind(s) of figurative language features in the statement.

 

5 Key Strategies of Formative Assessment

  1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success
  2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
  3. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
  4. Activating learners as the owners of their own learning
  5. Where the learning is going Where the learner is right now How to get there
    Teacher Clarifying and sharing learningintentions and criteria for successUnderstanding and sharing learning intentions and criteria for successUnderstanding learning intentions and criteria for success Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities and tasks that elicit evidence of learning Providing feedback that moves learning forward
    Peer Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
    Learner Activating learners as the owners of their own learning
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