2. Overview of presentation
Why raising achievement is important
Why investing in teachers is the answer
Why formative assessment should be the focus
Why teacher learning communities should be the mechanism
How we can put this into practice
3. Raising achievement matters
For individuals
Increased lifetime salary
Improved health
Longer life
For society
Lower criminal justice costs
Lower health-care costs
Increased economic growth
5. School effectiveness
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
6. How important is teacher quality?
How much progress will an average student make when taught by a
great teacher (i.e., the best teacher in a group of 50)?
A. An extra month per year
B. An extra two months per year
C. An extra three months per year
D. An extra four months per year
E. An extra six months per year
7. Teacher quality
A labor force issue with 2 solutions
Replace existing teachers with better ones?
No evidence that more pay brings in better teachers
No evidence that there are better teachers out there deterred by
burdensome certification requirements
Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
The “love the one you’re with” strategy
It can be done
We know how to do it, but at scale? Quickly? Sustainably?
8. 20-25%
Total “explained” difference
<5%
Further professional qualifications (NBPTS)
10-15%
Pedagogical content knowledge
<5%
Advanced content matter knowledge
The ‘dark matter’ of teacher quality
Teachers make a difference
But what makes the difference in teachers?
9. Cost/effect comparisons
Intervention Extra months of
learning per year
Cost/yr
Class-size reduction (by 30%) 3 $30k
Increase teacher content
knowledge from weak to strong
1.5 ?
Formative assessment/
Assessment for learning
6 to 9 $3k
10. The research evidence
Several major reviews of the research
Natriello (1987)
Crooks (1988)
Kluger & DeNisi (1996)
Black & Wiliam (1998)
Nyquist (2003)
All find consistent, substantial effects
11. Types of formative assessment
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
12. 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
13. Aspects of formative assessment
Where the learner
is going
Where the learner is How to get there
Teacher
Clarify and share
learning intentions
Engineering effective
discussions, tasks and
activities that elicit
evidence of learning
Providing feedback
that moves learners
forward
Peer
Understand and
share learning
intentions
Activating students as learning
resources for one another
Learner
Understand
learning intentions
Activating students as owners
of their own learning
14. Sharing learning intentions
Explaining learning intentions at start of lesson/unit
Learning intentions
Success criteria
Intentions/criteria in students’ language
Posters of key words to talk about learning
eg describe, explain, evaluate
Planning/writing frames
Annotated examples of different standards to ‘flesh out’ assessment
rubrics (e.g. lab reports)
Opportunities for students to design their own tests
15. Eliciting evidence of achievement
Key idea: questioning should
cause thinking
provide data that informs teaching
Improving teacher questioning
generating questions with colleagues
closed vs. open or low-order vs. high-order
appropriate wait-time
Getting away from I-R-E
basketball rather than serial table-tennis
‘No hands up’ (except to ask a question)
‘Hot Seat’ questioning
All-student response systems
ABCD cards, Mini white-boards, Exit passes
16. Feedback that moves learning on
Key idea: feedback should
cause thinking
provide guidance on how to improve
Comment-only grading
Focused grading
Explicit reference to mark-schemes and scoring guides
Suggestions on how to improve
‘Strategy cards’ ideas for improvement
Not giving complete solutions
Re-timing assessment
(eg two-thirds-of-the-way-through-a-unit test)
17. Students as owners of their learning
Students assessing their own work
with rubrics
with exemplars
Self-assessment of understanding
Traffic lights
Red/green discs
Colored cups
18. Students as instructional resources
Students assessing their peers’ work
“pre-flight check-list”
“two stars and a wish”
Training students to pose questions/identifying group weaknesses
End-of-lesson students’ review
19. …and one big idea
Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet
student needs
20. 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 KLT 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
22. Implementing FA/AfL requires
changing teacher habits
Teachers “know” most of this already
So the problem is not a lack of knowledge
It’s a lack of understanding what it means to do FA/AfL
That’s why telling teachers what to do doesn’t work
Experience alone is not enough—if it were, then the most experienced
teachers would be the best teachers—we know that’s not true
(Hanushek, 2005; Day, 2006)
People need to reflect on their experiences in systematic ways that build
their accessible knowledge base, learn from mistakes, etc. (Bransford,
Brown & Cocking, 1999)
23. A model for teacher learning
Content, then process
Content (what we want teachers to change)
Evidence
Ideas (strategies and techniques)
Process (how to go about change)
Choice
Flexibility
Small steps
Accountability
Support
24. Strategies and techniques
Distinction between strategies and techniques
Strategies define the territory of AfL (no brainers)
Teachers are responsible for choice of techniques
Allows for customization/ caters for local context
Creates ownership
Shares responsibility
Key requirements of techniques
embodiment of deep cognitive/affective principles
relevance
feasibility
acceptability
25. Teacher learning takes time
To put new knowledge to work, to make it meaningful and accessible
when you need it, requires practice.
A teacher doesn’t come at this as a blank slate.
Not only do teachers have their current habits and ways of teaching—
they’ve lived inside the old culture of classrooms all their lives: every
teacher started out as a student!
New knowledge doesn’t just have to get learned and practiced, it has to go
up against long-established, familiar, comfortable ways of doing things that
may not be as effective, but fit within everyone’s expectations of how a
classroom should work.
It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at
new ones. Thus…
Professional development must be sustained over time
26. That’s what teacher learning
communities (TLCs) are for:
TLCs contradict teacher isolation
TLCs reprofessionalize teaching by valuing teacher expertise
TLCs deprivatize teaching so that teachers’ strengths and struggles
become known
TLCs offer a steady source of support for struggling teachers
They grow expertise by providing a regular space, time, and structure
for that kind of systematic reflecting on practice
They facilitate sharing of untapped expertise residing in individual
teachers
They build the collective knowledge base in a school
27. How to set up a TLC
Plan that the TLC will run for two years
Identify 8 to 10 interested colleagues
Should have similar assignments (e.g. early years, math/sci)
Secure institutional support for:
Monthly meetings (75 to 120 minutes each, inside or outside school time)
Time between meetings (2 hrs per month in school time)
Collaborative planning
Peer observation
Any necessary waivers from school policies
28. A ‘signature pedagogy’ for teacher learning?
Every monthly TLC meeting should follows the same structure and
sequence of activities
Activity 1: Introduction & Housekeeping (5-10 minutes)
Activity 2: How’s It Going (35-50 minutes)
Activity 3: New Learning about AfL (20-45 minutes)
Activity 4: Personal Action Planning (10 minutes)
Activity 5: Summary of Learning (5 minutes)
29. The TLC leader’s role
To ensure the TLC meets regularly
To ensure all needed materials are at meetings
To ensure that each meeting is focused on AfL
To create and maintain a productive and non-judgmental tone during
meetings
To ensure that every participant shares with regard to their implementation
of AfL
To encourage teachers to provide their colleagues with constructive and
thoughtful feedback
To encourage teachers to think about and discuss the implementation of
new AfL learning and skills
To ensure that every teacher has an action plan to guide their next steps
But not to be the AfL “expert”
30. Peer observation
Run to the agenda of the observed, not the observer
Observed teacher specifies focus of observation
Observe teacher specifies what counts as evidence
e.g., teacher wants to increase wait-time
provides observer with a stop-watch to log wait-times
31. Implementations
Current pilots in:
Cleveland Municipal School District, OH
Austin Independent School District, TX
Chico Unified School District, CA
Mathematics and Science Partnership of Greater Philadelphia, PA/NJ
St. Mary’s County Public Schools, MD
State-wide pilot in 10 schools in Vermont
Further details: www.ets.org/klt
32. 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
AfL/FA + TLCs
A point of (uniquely?) high leverage
A “Trojan Horse” into wider issues of pedagogy, psychology, and curriculum
Editor's Notes
Most of these strategies are self-explanatory. Planning and writing frames provide a structure to help students develop a response. While some teachers see such frames as constricting, for most students they provide valuable ‘scaffolding’ for their answers.
In many classrooms teachers use questions as a way of directing the attention of the class, and keeping students ‘on task’. This may keep students ‘on their toes’ but rarely helps learning. It may be better in a whole-class lesson, to have an extended exchange with a single student. This ‘hot seat’ questioning also has benefits for other students who appear to learn vicariously from the exchange. Other students may see extended exchanges between the teacher and another student as a chance to relax and go ‘off task’, but if theteacher asks them what they have learned from a particular exchange between another student and the teacher, their concentration is likely to be quite high!
How much time a teacher allows a student to respond before evaluating the response is also important. It is well known that teachers do not allow students much time to answer questions, and, if they don’t receive a response quickly, they will ‘help’ the student by providing a clue or weakening the question in some way, or even moving on to another student. However, what is not widely appreciated is that the amount of time between the student providing an answer and the teacher’s evaluation of that answer is much more important. Of course, where the question is a simple matter of factual recall, then allowing a student time to reflect and expand upon the answer is unlikely to help much. But where the question requires thought, then increasing the time between the end of the student’s answer and the teacher’s evaluation from the average ‘wait-time’ of less than a second to three seconds, produces measurable increases in learning (although increases beyond three seconds have little effect, and may cause lessons to lose pace).
In fact, questions need not always come from the teacher. There is substantial evidence that students’ learning is enhanced by getting them to generate their own questions. If instead of writing an end-of-topic test herself, the teacher asks the students to write a test that tests the work the class has been doing, the teacher can gather useful evidence about what the students think they have been learning, which is often very different from what the teacher thinks the class has been learning. This can be a particularly effective strategy with disaffected older students, who often feel threatened by tests. Asking them to write a test for the topic they have completed, and making clear that the teacher is going to mark the question rather than the answers, can be a hugely liberating experience for many students.
The research evidence suggests that feedback in terms of scores, grades and levels is unlikely to improve achievement, but that feeding back in terms of comments (whether written or verbal) is. This immediately raises the question “what kind of comments”, and although there is no specific research evidence on this point, it seems that, to be useful, a comment should cause thinking to take place.
This feature of ‘mindfulness’ is one of the crucial features of effective formative assessment—effective learning involves having most of the students thinking most of the time. This notion of ‘mindfulness’ also gives some clues about what sort of marking is most helpful. Many teachers say that formative feedback is less useful in mathematics, because an answer is either wrong or right. But even where answers are wrong or right, we can still encourage students to think. For example, rather than marking answers right and wrong and telling the students to do corrections, teachers could, instead, feed back saying simply “Three of these ten questions are wrong. Find out which ones and correct them”. After all, we are often telling our students to check their work, but rarely help them develop the skills to do so.
Other strategies that are useful are focused gradin—ie grading a particular piece of work for one aspect (such as sentence structure, expression or spelling) rather than trying to correct everything. This is particularly useful if the comments can be related directly to the assessment criteria for the work.
Of course, it is very difficult for feedback to function formatively at the end of a unit so rather than an ‘end-of-unit test’ it may be more useful to have a ‘two-thirds-of-the-way-through-a-unit test’. Those students who have understood something can then help those who haven’t. Many teachers sometimes worry that such strategies may hold back abler students, but the research evidence suggests that it is the students who give help who benefit most from such peer-tutoring. While this may not accelerate more able students through the curriculum, it does lead to better long-term retention.
Again, most of these strategies are self-explanatory. With ‘traffic-lights’ the teacher identifies a small number of objectives for the lesson (perhaps only one), which are made as clear as possible to the students at the beginning of the lesson. At the end of the lesson, students are asked to indicate their understanding of each objective by a green, yellow or red circle, according to whether they feel they have achieved the objective fully, partially or not at all. This provides useful feedback to the teacher at two levels—to see if there are parts of the lesson that it would be worth re-doing with the whole class, but also to get feedback about which students would particularly benefit from individual support (one technique here has been to ask ambers and greens to work together, while the teacher works with the reds). However, the real benefit of such a system is that it forces the student to reflect on what she or he has been learning. Other teachers have used ‘smiley faces’ which have the advantage, if drawn in pencil, of being modifiable when the student is more confident about their understanding.
The other strategy that may require explanation is that of ‘end-of-lesson’ reviews. The idea here is that at the beginning of the lesson, one student is appointed as a ‘rapporteur’ for the lesson. The teacher then teaches a whole-class lesson on some topic, and finishes the lesson ten or fifteen minutes before the end of the lesson. The student rapporteur then gives a summary of the main points of the lesson, and tries to answer any remaining questions that students in the class may have. If he or she can’t answer the questions, then the rapporteur asks members of the class to help out. What is surprising is that teachers who have tried this out have found that students are queuing up to play the role of rapporteur, provided this is started at the beginning of the school year, or even better, when students are new to the school.
Again, most of these strategies are self-explanatory. With ‘traffic-lights’ the teacher identifies a small number of objectives for the lesson (perhaps only one), which are made as clear as possible to the students at the beginning of the lesson. At the end of the lesson, students are asked to indicate their understanding of each objective by a green, yellow or red circle, according to whether they feel they have achieved the objective fully, partially or not at all. This provides useful feedback to the teacher at two levels—to see if there are parts of the lesson that it would be worth re-doing with the whole class, but also to get feedback about which students would particularly benefit from individual support (one technique here has been to ask ambers and greens to work together, while the teacher works with the reds). However, the real benefit of such a system is that it forces the student to reflect on what she or he has been learning. Other teachers have used ‘smiley faces’ which have the advantage, if drawn in pencil, of being modifiable when the student is more confident about their understanding.
The other strategy that may require explanation is that of ‘end-of-lesson’ reviews. The idea here is that at the beginning of the lesson, one student is appointed as a ‘rapporteur’ for the lesson. The teacher then teaches a whole-class lesson on some topic, and finishes the lesson ten or fifteen minutes before the end of the lesson. The student rapporteur then gives a summary of the main points of the lesson, and tries to answer any remaining questions that students in the class may have. If he or she can’t answer the questions, then the rapporteur asks members of the class to help out. What is surprising is that teachers who have tried this out have found that students are queuing up to play the role of rapporteur, provided this is started at the beginning of the school year, or even better, when students are new to the school.