Q&A with Dylan Wiliam at Embedding Formative Assessment SSAT/EEF Celebration Event

[@excitedaboutlearning1639]

"You should know this, [because] you're in year five." I've heard this saying so many times in my years as a pupil in school. And it basically comes down to the belief that you mention in the talk - that kids will learn what is taught - which is dead wrong. Because - as you say yourself and quote others - kids don't learn what they're taught.

[@freddyfriesen]

Not marking student work just tells the student that that piece of work was not worth doing. Acknowledging every scrap of work inspires every student to do more. Especially the whiz kids, because everything they do gets recognized. Sorry, my forty years in the classroom has warped my thinking, but it is so thrilling to have the entire class growing and pushing themselves to do more because you have everything marked and accredited by the next day. Hey, on day one I told them that the passing mark was 90%. I might get two students in a term not make it . The courses were set up with success built in. Mastery was our goal. Oh how I miss the thrill of teaching ! But you need good health, lots of energy, supportive administrators and parents. You gotta love making a difference in peoples lives and building great relationships. Yes, I miss the glory days of teaching, but lots of fond memories to warm the heart.

[@melissaschaub1875]

While I understand the notion of effort and value, I do wonder how much you have created a student to teacher dependency. They need you to give them a mark on everything which means that the place called school is all about the teacher giving assignments and then giving the final word on growth. Students need to engage in experiences that cause learning and do NOT lead to a grade. Feedback, self-assessment all matter just as much. You are very right, however, the relationships make a great difference!!!

[@freddyfriesen]

@@melissaschaub1875 Thank you for responding to my post. Space and time do not allow me to explain how I developed programming that allowed each student to demonstrate mastery in a manner that suited their learning styles and dominant intelligences. Unfortunately the methodologies that continue to dominate "education" are designed to measure and label producing winners and losers. William Glasser and Jane Bluestein had a very large influence on my teaching. I count myself fortunate for being able to teach in ways that allowed me to inspire my students to maximize their learning while under my care. I do not think I would survive in the "education" environment today. Dependency? The opposite. Each student was able to maximize their learning in their own way. Your comment caused me to bring back many great memories. Wishing you the joy of experiencing awesome energies and relationships.

[@EdTechGC]

Dylan: I wonder how much of the research on Dweck have you actually read? It is disappointing that you have a large group of teachers listening to your very traditional lecture and not questioning your views. 1. Have you posted your views on Dweck in a peer reviewed article? 2. Are you familiar with the The Feuerstein Method? There is a growing body of research on the fluid malleable intelligence that dispute your views, particularly in the field of catering for students with traumatic brain injuries. You are self-promoted as an eminent professor and leader in the field of formative assessment, yet you don't mention practical strategies for it's use in a typical class where students of five different ability levels are present. You also don't place your session in the context of a 21st century classroom and you don't discuss the links between formative and summative assessments and why formative assessments aren't being used summatively, as per the ideas of Bloom. Dylan: I think there are many great points you make in this traditional lecture, but I challenge you on many of the points you raise as contentious and based maybe on your research, but not based on a broad cross section of research that would disagree with what you say. You do not talk about the validity and reliability of formative assessments. You also seem to draw from research on what is effective in the classroom, but don't explicitly state what this research is. I would not put a thumbs down for your video, I would just challenge many of your beliefs not because they are incorrect, but because you haven't presented a balanced view, just your view based on your research.

[@dylanwiliam]

In answer to your questions, I have read in detail around 50 of Carol Dweck's publications, and am familiar with most of the others. I am also familiar with David Yeager's national scale-ups of growth mindset interventions, the large number of failed replications of her work, and with the meta-analysis conducted by Victoria Sisk and her colleagues that found that 86% of growth mindset interventions had effects that were not significantly different from zero. I am also familiar with the work of Reuven Feuerstein, which was introduced to me by Michael Shayer, my former colleague at King's College London, approximately 30 years ago. I am also very familiar with the work of Benjamin Bloom on mastery learning and formative assessment, which Paul Black and I discussed in detail in our 1998 review of research on "Assessment and classroom learning" although my reading of that work appears to be rather different from yours. Specifically, you seem to regard the terms formative and summative as kinds of assessment, which I regard as a category error, since the same assessment, and even the same assessment data, can be used both formatively and summatively. This idea, and the validity of formative assessment, is discussed in some depth in Wiliam and Black (1996). I notice that you did not specify any particular things that you disagreed with in my talk, so it is difficult to respond to your other points. If you think that there is anything that I said that is not supported by the preponderance of research evidence, then please let me know, and I will respond in due course.

[@soulfire77]

@@dylanwiliam Respectfully, you did not address D M's questions. You are also falsely summarizing Dweck. I too was browsing by for some help with formative assessment, and all I got was a lot of "my point is" without a whole lot of practical advice. For someone advocating so heartily for teachers needing a less restrictive evaluation process, you seem to be overly evaluating your own peers.

[@dylanwiliam]

@@soulfire77 In what ways am I falsely summarizing Dweck? As a long time fan of Carol Dweck's work I would be genuinely interested if you can find anything that I said that is incorrect. I would also be grateful if you could specify which of DM's questions you think I did not address. If you want practical help on formative assessment, I suggest you look at the presentations on my KZbin channel. The video that you are commenting on was a question and answer session in which I answered the questions posed by the people in attendance, and was therefore not intended to give practical advice on classroom formative assessment techniques.

[@darenmallett2563]

Dylan Wiliam I share your seminal piece written with Paul Black on dialogic assessment widely. It’s masterful and genius. Feurstein’s work on plasticity is revolutionary. His work in Israel has been well documented and researched and has withstood the rigours of peer review thus far. I personally believe that formative assessments do not meet the standards of validity and reliability that we might otherwise apply to summative assessments. Until we do this, the preponderance and over reliance on summative tests will continue. I’m a huge fan of your work, but haven’t yet seen the evidence that would argue against the plasticity of our neural networks, such as you suggest. Effect as you mention is applying the principles of “gold standard positivist research’ which cannot be applied in education. No two classrooms are the same. Hattie’s ideas are great, but they’re not the gold standard that are often attributed to them. Class sizes do matter in some contexts and when ability grouping is done well it’s effects are notable, but we cannot base our judgments on so called gold standard research when we are talking about highly varied classroom context.

[@fatheranthony4pope]

Bit of a childish comment, with poor formatting and paragraphing. 😔