More tips from Dylan Wiliam
Video transcript
hey dylan tip number three please so um in the in your conversation with adam boxer which i thought was absolutely brilliant um he talked a lot about many whiteboards and so he actually exemplified um one aspect of the fundamental principle of classroom formative assessment better evidence leads to better decisions leads to better learning now of course as david dyder has pointed out we can’t be sure that what they’ve been doing in the lesson results in long-term learning but you can be sure that if they’ve got the wrong end of the stick in the lesson you find out about it before the lesson ends and adam talked very eloquently about many whiteboards as a way of finding out what was what is going on and uh he was rightly critic critical of cold call cold call is better than asking the usual suspects you know if the smartest kid in the room gives you the correct answer it doesn’t mean that anybody else has got it and the staggering thing for me is how prevalent that practice is of relying on evidence from the smartest kid in the room to make a decision about the learning needs of the other 39 kids in the class in case of adam’s class and so you know cold call is better because you’re hearing from somebody who isn’t necessarily the smartest kid in the room but it’s still weak because you’re only hearing from one student so many whiteboards i actually prefer multiple choice questions and we’ve talked about this before because it makes the job simpler reading scanning for a two for b three for c four for d five three that makes it much simpler so multiple choice questions have the benefit of pre-processing that data analysis task for the teacher so adam talked eloquently about the breadth of the evidence i think to go with that we have to talk about the depth of the evidence so is this a question that is worth asking and what we’ve discovered in our work with teachers is that good questions are really hard to come up with yeah so the big idea here is you should plan the question as part of your lesson plan yeah if i was a head teacher and we had a policy of looking at teachers lesson plans which i’m not sure a very sensible idea but i’d be very happy with the teacher saying here’s the objectives of this lesson and here’s the questions i’m going to use to find out there’s no point in making teachers lay out the script they’re going to use because they’re going to they’re going to do what they’ve been doing for 20 years but i think that the question that they ask to find out if the students have been successful is crucial and many teachers ask questions where the student can get the right answer with the wrong thinking so the big idea here is make the questions that you’re going to be asking to check on understanding part of the lesson planning process the idea is you build up into the lesson you always build plan b into plan a i’m going to get to this point in the lesson i’m going to check to see whether the students are with me and here is the question i’m going to ask at that point and i script it word for word um one of the teachers in the kemofap project from medway dave tuffin he often if he had a sixth form class in the morning he would post up a question that he planned to use with his year eight class in the afternoon say and the class would often discuss whether that was a good question to be using so making these questions kind of things that you discuss and maybe changing the word here or there can make it work slightly more effectively the idea of refining and polishing your questions and including this part of the lesson plan that’s my third tip i like part of lesson planning i like it just two two things on that one i think we both agree it’s hard isn’t it as you you’ve said there it’s writing these questions is is tough and for many years as a teacher that was the last thing i thought of in my plan my plan was all about the activity all about the bright shiny paper wrapped around it and so on well one i very rarely check for understanding so let’s just put that on the table but then whenever when i did learn that checking for understand was a good thing i almost said well i’ll just make the question up on the spot it’ll be fine and again having written however many thousand diagnostic questions you realize how hard it is to write a good question and and how planning those in advance and working with perhaps more experienced colleagues and making a collaborative process is a really important part of it so that’s the first thing i wanted to reflect on secondly i was doing some work just yesterday actually um in a in a school and they were looking to improve their scheme of work and the classic thing they had on their scheme of work and you see this on every scheme of work it said like you know the two week in these two weeks we’re teaching percentages and these are the objectives you’ve got kids have got to be able to find a percentage of an amount without a calculator percentage of them out with a calculator reverse percentages blah blah blah and the point i was making with the head of department is it’d be so much more powerful if you have examples of the type of questions you wanted kids to be able to answer and they could be used as those hinge point questions so that every teacher at some point will ask that question and it may be at different points if kids are working faster and so on but there’s your well thought through hinge point question and if the kids do well at it okay we crack on if they don’t you’ve got this plan b as you speak about but i very rarely see i don’t know if you do it in schemes of working schemes of learning of examples of questions and for me it feels like one of the most important things to put in there absolutely what would it mean to be successful yeah and the thing is um this is a bit of a jargon phrase but one of my favorite phrases assessments operationalize constructs wow so we can talk about what it means to be able to add fractions but the question is which fractions do you mean yeah and so the assessments put flesh on the bones of those ideas you we we might think we agree about what it means to be able to rank fractions in order of magnitude but until we talk about the questions we’re going to use to determine that we don’t know that and in fact often we find out that we have very different ideas of what it would be to do that in practice so assessments forced you to get off the fence and say exactly you know if my teaching has been successful then my student will be able to answer this question correctly that’s why assessments are so powerful yeah i agree and definitely the last thing on this um is it helps the kids as well right because you have these lesson objectives they can’t teachers can’t interpret them the kids certainly don’t have a clue what’s going on with them whereas there’s something real concrete about the question can you answer this question or not and that’s that’s the kind of good hinge point no i love that dylan that’s great