By Dylan Wiliam In 2010, a Guardian reporter quoted me as saying that “no skilled reader uses phonics.” Obviously, this was rubbish. What I actually told the journalist was that no skilled reader relies entirely on phonics. What is rather irritating was that I had a feeling that the journalist hadn’t understood what I was […]
By Dylan Wiliam There is a long-standing schism amongst people who write dictionaries. Some think dictionaries ought to provide the correct usage of words, while others think dictionaries should reflect how words are used. For example, the word meld, which used to mean show (as in the card game Bezique) is now used as if […]
By Dylan Wiliam The Panorama program “Can I sack teacher?”(broadcast on BBC on July 5, 2010) made a big play out of the fact that only a handful of teachers have been struck off for incompetence. Doctors and lawyers are generally struck off for negligence, not lack of competence, because proving that someone did something […]
By Dylan Wiliam Cherryholmes, Berlak, and others suggest that assessments are, inevitably, value-laden. Berlak says, “But as Cherryholmes argues, it is not only that subjective judgments are involved; it is also that constructs themselves are products of power and their use is an exercise of power.” I myself have written that there is no such […]
By Dylan Wiliam If you missed last month’s post, click here to see the first few questions I addressed. This month, I’ll answer a few more questions that readers have sent me recently. Question 4 As a school administrator for more than 20 years now, I find it is easier to support and help the weaker […]
By Dylan Wiliam Question 1 I know you’re from the UK and have spent a lot of time in various countries overseas. Can you share a little bit about your experiences and key accomplishments in the United States? Answer 1 In 2003, I started working as Senior Research Director at ETS in Princeton, NJ. My […]
By Dylan Wiliam, Ph.D. In May 2010, the members of the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee were asked to make a straight up-or-down decision about whether the Common Core State Standards met with their approval. Twenty members voted to approve the standards. One of the original 25 members had withdrawn from the committee a […]
By Dylan Wiliam In a 1984 paper, Benjamin Bloom reckoned that one-on-one tutorial instruction had an impact of two standard deviations on student achievement, but this claim is meaningless unless the sensitivity to instruction of the measure of achievement is specified. For example, standardized tests such as NAEP or TIMSS are relatively insensitive to instruction. […]
Content, Then Process In professional development, the details matter. And process should always come after content. In previous blog posts, I’ve written a lot about the content of formative assessment; namely the five key strategies and associated practical techniques. But now is the time to start thinking about the process. In other words, we have […]
By Dylan Wiliam Why I wrote my new book My latest book, written with Siobhán Leahy, is designed specifically to help individual teachers who want to develop their practice of formative assessment on their own or with small groups of colleagues. In this blog, I provide some suggestions for practical techniques you can try in […]
