Another perfect example of a selective reading of science, especially from the government.
Click here to see the full PowerPoint presentation by Dylan Wiliam
So, if you have missed out following Twitter for some time then you might want to consider this one: yes, it is in fact correct. It takes 11 consecutive years of faulty, biased and flawed, eschewed data to see some kind of point.
What makes a good teacher? Well, we know a lot about that actually. But, here is the kicker: we don’t exactly know how to tell whether someone is a good teacher or not. I mean, sure we think we do. Okay, I get it, you are not convinced. That is actually good, I did not expect you to be at first. So, here, let me present to you the reasoning behind Dylan Wiliam’s ideas (Wiliam, 2015) :
In this essay, Dylan Wiliam reflects on the importance of upping the expertise of teachers. There is a lot of talk about Wiliam’s other work in Sweden, but very few have actually ever read this, nor really, I think, pondered the implications of it. Why do I dare say so? Well, because the Swedish School Agency (Skolverket) had the brilliant idea to implement a new career path for “particularly skilled teachers”, namely, first teachers (förstelärare). This has been active since 2013, so yeah, sure, Wiliam’s summary was not available at its creation, but the other findings were. Was this a problem? Yes, because, you guessed it, if there are first teachers, what are the rest then?
Second-hand teachers? Grunts? Not as good? Now, please get me right, I am not writing this because I am mad for having been turned down such a job (even though I actually have been turned down my one and only application so far for it). It just boggles my mind how this has somehow gone unnoticed. I will get back to this grudge, *coughs*, I mean, this reasoning further down, but for now, let us go some of the thus far, accumulated reasoning and evidence for Wiliam’s point.
Firstly, there is the main difficulty of really knowing you have done your job: time.
“As John Mason has noted, “Teaching takes place in time, but learning takes place over time” (Griffin, 1989). What may appear to be effective practice when observed may not lead to longer-term retention.”
Then, secondly, there is this line of reasoning where he goes into how much of a difference there is between the most effective teachers and the least:
“The best currently available observation systems, such as Charlotte Danielson’s (1996) Framework for Teaching, do predict student progress – if you are taught by a teacher rated as “distinguished” you will learn 30 percent more than if you are taught by a teacher rated as “unsatisfactory” (Sartain et al., 2011). But the best teachers are 400 percent more effective than the least effective (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006) […]”
So, case closed? I guess… Right? Someone that the kids like will make all the difference and that’s the end of that, I suppose? Like, obviously since there is a noticeable difference, then surely we must be able to see it? It would be so, if not for the fact that there are a few aching problems, namely, because, even with that sort of gold standard of measuring the best teachers, it still falls short:
“[…]which suggests that the Danielson framework captures only around one-tenth of the variation in teacher quality. The idea that some teachers are 400 percent more productive than others may seem to be at variance with the fact that only 7 percent of the variation in student achievement is attributable to the school, but the distribution of teachers in the system is fairly random, so that all schools have a broad mix of more effective and less effective teachers. More observations would, of course, probably improve the relationship between observations and student progress, but Hill, Charalambous, and Kraft (2012) estimated that using observations of practice to produce ratings of teacher quality with a reliability of 0.9 would require seeing a teacher teaching five different classes and having each lesson observed by six independent observers, which would probably be unmanageable across the system.”
I am not sure if you just don’t grasp or don’t want to grasp this revelation. I’ll spell it out clearly what it at face value means: figuring out teacher quality is a waste of time and money.
So what’s next then? Throw all notions of quality out and replace it with a postmodern system filled with no actual values or targets? Hell no! I am not sure if you just don’t grasp or don’t want to grasp this revelation. I’ll spell it out clearly what it at face value means: figuring out teacher quality is a waste of time and money. Let me develop what this in fact means when we go further with William’s presentation: figuring out who is a good teacher and who is bad is a waste. But… Improving teacher quality is always a win! However, you won’t clearly see the impact of such improvements because of the first point.
Wow, mind blown…
We got ourselves into a big, whooping rabbit hole. I don’t know about the status of other countries’ teacher career paths and improvement plans, but, here in Sweden, that is totally causing a massive 9,9 earthquake, bottoming out and erasing all of the groundwork which the Swedish school system is currently resting on, with regards to special jobs as a “first teacher”, as it is called.
The first teachers are exceptional teachers with exceptional results who are appointed by the school leadership. There is no transparency as to how that happens or any kind of quality control. Also, as mentioned in the previous point, in case you had forgotten, it takes 11 years to see whether someone is a good teacher or not. How long would it take to see if someone is exceptional then? Oh, you are still on about the earthquake? I meant that figuratively.
Yes, I sure do, I might seem a bit too literal at times, but this time? No.
Eying Education 