Leadership for Teacher Learning: Creating a Culture Where All Teachers Improve So That All Students Succeed

by Dylan Wiliam

Leading education authority Dylan Wiliam explains how formative assessment, when applied properly, helps to create a structured and rigorous learning environment that increases student achievement. He also presents compelling research to give readers a clear picture ·       Changes in classroom practice that are likely to increase learning·       Differentiated instruction (DI) and response to intervention (RTI)·       Group leadership’s role in ensuring productive collaboration·       Strategies to integrate formative assessment into teacher evaluationWiliam also discusses why efforts to change classroom practice have been relatively unsuccessful—and explores specific classroom tactics that do tend to raise student achievement.

465 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 1, 2016

Reviews

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dylan Wiliam is a brilliant and well informed pragmatist. Pretty much everything in this book I have read or heard before from him in a combination of TES articles, books and lectures both at UWC a number of times and at the Festival for Education. Having said that, as he says about Focus, it is about doing the right thing with focus over a long period and not getting distracted - so it is hardly surprising that the text is extremely familiar.

Two things for the UWC context make this text slightly narrowly filtered: firstly it really strongly focuses on basic literacy and numeracy when it talks about 'learning'. In cultures where these are very strong, but more values based, dispositional and ethical outcomes are important, the text feels narrow. Likewise, there are a lot of assumptions about leadership that don't really reflect at UWC the practical expectation of autonomous, intelligent teams working within a sense making framework, nor leadership as sense making and coaching. We have this in many places in the school, whilst it seems narrow and aspirational when it is described by Dylan, as the audience for his text is unlikely to be a school that has some of our key features.

Dylan Wiliam is one of the clearest voices in modern education. His section on teacher evaluation is a masterful tear-down of the rubbish that has been constructed by those with limited understanding of teachers and the nature of teaching.

Some educators and leaders still struggle with the idea of putting individual learning gains at the centre of our practice; this seems a little absurd, but is true for reasons of efficacy, consciousness or just experiences in their past. Dylan's text is another strong wake up call to the profession: concentrate on classrooms; concentrate on practices and their impact on individual students and trends of their learning; and most of all concentrate on students' learning - it is what they turn up each day for! It's not about the programme - it's about the learners. Effective leaders help with this.

[Nicholas Little · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Dylan William. His approach to improving teaching is powerful and realistic. 'Leadership for Learning' is another well research and well written book starting with the context of the world current students will graduate into and a discussion of the purposes of education.