Creating the Schools Our Children Need: Why What We are Doing Now Won't Help Much

by Dylan Wiliam

Research shows school improvement initiatives are most effective when they come from the district level, rather than the state. While there is no one solution to school improvement that holds true in every classroom every time, there are two clearly identified aspects that improve the odds of school implementing a curriculum focused on developing knowledge, and supporting a culture where every teacher improves.In Creating the Schools Our Children Need, Dr. Dylan Wiliam outlines a framework for evaluating new district initiatives, and guides school boards, administrators, and district leaders through a breakdown of why what we're doing right now isn't working, and what we need to be doing instead.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

213 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 29, 2018

Reviews

[Ian Tymms · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not surprisingly Wiliam's key advice to those with the pursestrings in education is to invest in teachers and particularly in improving their abilities to use formative assessment. For those who've read anything else by Wiliam, this isn't going to be new. What is new and well worth reading are the chapters leading up to this conclusion. Wiliam carefully and systematically works his way through the many other possibilities for investing in school improvement and explains why either they don't work or they aren't cost effective or we don't have good evidence.

The overarching theme that came out of the first two thirds of the book was a reminder that teaching and learning are complex and, like any complex system, when you tweak one element, the effects ripple in often unpredictable ways. Treating education as some kind of linear machine where turning a dial will have a predictable result is simplistic and silly and yet we still continue to do it. Human learning is probably the most complex system that has ever existed in our universe and yet those outside the profession continue to treat it as though it is a sausage machine. The single most complex mechanism we have for engaging in this system is a professional teacher and Dylan Wiliam reminders us that investing in teachers and supporting them to become increasingly professional is the cleverest thing we can do. More complex and able than a single teacher is a collaboration between teachers and more powerful than that would be a professional collaboration between teachers and the community. We are, after all, all part of the evolution of learning that creates our culture. Wiliam's book provides a lot of carefully considered evidence to help us do a better job as a profession and as a community.

[Seán Mchugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the first half intriguing (5 stars), but by the end was feeling quite despondent about the overall trajectory of the book, hence my overall rating of 3 stars... The overall tone feels disappointingly regressive; I'm all for embracing traditional values and teaching practices that did work and still work, but so much of the book (particularly chapter 10) really feels like advocacy for 'the good old days' that is oblivious of the very different world that exists now. I found much of his thinking here quite reductive and wilfully ignorant of the complex nature of the world outside schools where true learning and intelligence is applied; not based on a naive empiricism that assumes that high performances in written tests are sufficient to deem a teaching methodology to be worthwhile—a world that assumes that the measures of intelligence and capacity using standardised tests that are relied upon by researchers is the only evidence we need.

Dylan Wiliam’s passive acceptance of testing as a reliable metric for determining the efficacy of teaching and learning to me undermines many of his arguments throughout his book. He even ignores the insightful highlight of this point by Willingham in his own foreword, “we ignore the possibility that the high test scores have nothing to do with that feature of schooling or little to do with the educational practice in that country at all. Test-takers may not be a representative sample of students.” Has he never read the stinging critique of PISA et al by luminaries such as Yong Zhao? http://zhaolearning.com/2014/03/16/ho... I find that hard to believe. These draconian, high stakes assessment systems need to be resisted, not kowtowed to. This book effectively describes an approach to teaching that assumes that focusing on test preparation and performance as the overall goal for schools is acceptable.

The overarching question that was at the forefront of my mind as I read this book, particularly his emphasis on bringing back a focus on good old content knowledge was a loss to understand why he appears to go to such great lengths to avoid using the term “concept“ or ‘concept based’ or ‘concept driven'. Surely the ability to connect disparate facts effectively and meaningfully is the epitome of conceptual understanding, something which is at the heart of many authoritative curricula globally—and yet he wilfully avoids this term, preferring to use something that (as he acknowledges at the start of the chapter), is much more likely to be misconstrued as a return to Victorian/Dickensian educational models.

I found this book very instructive, but his passive and uncritical acceptance of test based assessment metrics that dominate the literature for determining the efficacy of learning and teaching throughout this book quite disappointing. Time and time again he describes the effectiveness of teaching in terms of additional months of learning within a year, without any attempt to determine what the metric that was used by those studies in order to determine efficacy, if the test was a multiple-choice test, or if it included performance tasks, the outcomes and the rigour would be extremely influential, but this is not something he ever feels he needs to address. This to me is a critical flaw that undermines many of his arguments. Tests are not a good enough standard for appraising the breadth and depth of what makes education effective, and it’s about time that assumption was challenged, all Wiliam does in response (on Twitter) is a virtual shrug of the shoulders with sarcastic ‘’well what other measures would you use?... but there are voices who are prepared to face this issue, such as:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergre...

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/08/03/...

http://zhaolearning.com/2018/10/07/wh...

At the very least he could have at least addressed the issue that assessing the effectiveness of learning is extremely difficult to do, and we at least need to look at what the typical types of tests/metrics are that are used in these studies, and then weigh up the extent to which we feel these are valid measures. Considering this book is clearly pitched at an American audience, this point is even more salient—my experience of American standardised tests has been disappointing to say the least, dominated by very shallow requirements in terms of reasoning such as those reflected in multiple-choice questions, emphasis appearing to be more upon the ease of marking then on the efficacy of assessment.

[Marek Lisý · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dylan William wrote a short, easily understandable book on which educational reforms at the current time seem to bring the most value in terms of student achievement. While student achievement alone tested on standard assessments is not the only outcome we want to improve in our schools, it is the basic one, and also it has the greatest impact on the students in their life (health, income, happiness, all are linked strongly to school achievement). It's based solely on American context of schools so some of the topics are not as relevant as others, but most of it is useful for the Czech republic, too.

The key lessons are really simple: while there is a big discrepancy between the best and the worst teachers, it is really hard to measure it individually and firing or rewarding the best teachers is problematic. The best strategy money and efficacy wise is to "love the one you're with" and invest in all teachers. That means not only paying them well (the minimal "dignified" wage), but also creating an environment in which every teacher not only can but also has to be improving their practice.

Left to their own devices, teachers generally don't improve much past their first couple years teaching. The suggested frameworks of professional learning communities (PLCs) is model used in the Czech context successfully in some projects (Pomáháme školám k úspěchu) or individual schools, but it's not a widely used practice.

The area where the most improvement can be made is the formative assessment, in terms of learning from standardized assessment as a benchmark for teacher's own progress, but better yet to use the short-cycle feedback assessment in their instruction and during teaching itself to adapt the teaching to what the students actually know.

The second recommendation is the more controversial one, especially in our context in the Czech republic, which calls for knowledge rich curriculum. Currently there is a trend of teaching transferable skills, rather than "hard facts", such as critical thinking, cooperation, problem solving, reading and math literacy etc., but all those skills are in fact best developed by incorporating rich network of interconnected facts from many different areas (aka general knowledge).

Definitely worth the read!

[Chris Wejr · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important read

Wiliam makes it fairly clear what we need to focus on in schools in his latest book. Using research to support his statements (something can be lacking in education), he brings to light the importance of a knowledge-based curriculum and the need for ongoing formative assessment in every classroom to create the schools kids need. I would recommend this book to other educators... especially those with formal leadership roles in schools and districts .

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good overview of 'everything that Dylan Wiliam normally says'... but that is worth reading, and if you don't know what he normally says then an important read. I found myself thinking 'every Governor of a school should read this'. It provides a neat overview of how to make the learning better and provides plenty of research to establish the arguments.

I still think he is missing concept-based education... and half way towards realising how important it is - but otherwise a great book.

[Eduardo Hoppenstedt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the ideas are brilliant, and the systematic analysis of what works and what doesn’t is great.
I have some issues with the conclusions as I think the author does not criticize cultural aspects of education that would enable us to redesign the system in a more radical way. But it is a good book with solid research that will bring more benefits than harm to any educator, administrator or school leader that chooses to implement the author’s recommendations.

[Deborah Quazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book - perpetual formative assessment that is invisible to the student is the answer to driving learning outcomes for all students and supporting teachers of all levels of ability. And Dylan comes at his argument with facts and by elevating the role of teachers and thoughtfully debunking other strategies as lacking essential scale for the most part.

[André Henriques · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that offers a straightforward perspective on many essential education topics, like curriculum, teachers' training, etc. Dylan Wiliam always offers a sustained view without too much scientifical jargon.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Respectfully disagree with the premise. Creates a hire-and-fire culture based on data which undermines the heart of teaching as you continue to teach to exams rather than create genuine subject specialism.

[Robert Pondiscio · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://edexcellence.net/articles/dyl...

I owe Education Gadfly readers an apology. Dylan Wiliam’s excellent and eminently sensible book was published nine months ago and has been sitting on my desk since then. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Creating the Schools Our Children Need deserves your immediate attention.

An authority on assessment, a former ed school dean, and researcher at ETS, Wiliam is something of an education celebrity in the U.K. and internationally. But he remains comparatively unknown and underappreciated in America, where he has lived on and off for fifteen years. Creating the Schools Our Children Need, which is aimed directly at American readers and written for non-experts, should change that. Wiliam’s goal is to help school board members, administrators, and others who are concerned with raising broadly the performance of U.S. schools to become “critical consumers of research.” His straightforward prose, blessedly free of jargon and unerringly practical, is uniquely well suited to his purpose. “Research will never tell school board members exactly what they need to do to improve their schools,” Wiliam writes, since districts vary too much for the same thing to work everywhere. One of his most trenchant observations is that the reason it is so hard to improve education in America is “because it doesn’t have an education system. It has 13,491 of them.”

He puts forth three proposals about how to think of any ideas that are suggested to improve education. First, he advises, “get away from the idea of what works in education, and instead ask, ‘How well does it work?’” It’s one thing to say, for example, that an intervention is “statistically significant.” If the effect size is tiny, efforts might be better directed elsewhere. (Wiliam is particularly persuasive on weighing the “opportunity costs” of misdirected focus in education.)

Second is that, in evaluating ideas, “we also need to take into account the cost of interventions.” For example, class size reduction might work and often does, particularly in early grades, but its effectiveness depends on the availability of large numbers of strong teachers—and it’s very expensive. “Costs and benefits are meaningless if studied separately,” Wiliam explains. “Any educational policy needs to be evaluated in terms of the balance of benefit to cost.”

Third, it’s not enough to say a policy or program is “evidence-based” unless you’re sure it’s likely to work in a particular district. “This might seem obvious,” he observes, “but many educational innovations work in small-scale settings but when rolled out on a wider scale are much less effective.” As Wiliam notes early in the book, “Everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere.” Given our propensity to follow fads—and follow them off a cliff—this is a worthy mantra for American education. Let’s hope it sticks.

Lest you get the impression that Wiliam is an education Eeyore, glumly insisting nothing works, or works well enough to justify the cost, the final section of Creating the Schools Our Children Need cites “two things that can improve educational achievement substantially, and with little additional cost.” The first is a knowledge-rich curriculum; the second is improving the teachers we have (not the teachers we wish we had).

Anyone looking for a quick explanation in layman’s terms of why it’s a fool’s errand to fetishize “Twenty-First-Century Skills” such as critical thinking and problem solving must read Professor Wiliam on the subject. “The big mistake we have made in the United States, is to assume that if we want students to be able to think, then our curriculum should give our students lots of practice in thinking,” he writes. “This is a mistake because what our students need is more to think with.”

He is equally clear-eyed on efforts to improve teacher effectiveness. We are not very good at predicting who will be an effective teacher, Wiliam points out. Neither are we as good as we think at identifying good and bad teachers through things like observations, surveys, or test scores. “For the foreseeable future, improving teacher quality requires investing in the teachers we already have,” or what Wiliam calls the “love the one you’re with” strategy: Almost all teachers, he insists, can reach elite levels of performance if they work hard at it for ten years. The key is creating a culture of improvement and focusing their improvement efforts on the things that benefit students most. “And the available research evidence suggests that is using assessment to adjust instruction to better meet students’ needs,” he concludes.

Ever since hearing him speak at one of the first U.S. ResearchED conferences, Dylan Wiliam has been on my radar screen. Please forgive me for taking so long to put him on yours.

[Andy Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book pretty much ends the debate about school improvement. Lots of ideas float out around about the best way to improve schools (e.g. school choice, more pay for teachers, better technology, smaller schools, etc.) and the author dutifully and thoroughly explains why most of the answers are wrong or insufficient. The answer: improve our current teachers. I appreciated the author's mathematical and statistical background, giving me confidence that he knew how to interpret the research correctly. It's great having a number of these issues settled, and knowing where to focus my own efforts or attention. The author correctly identifies that school board members need to read this book. There were a few ideas mentioned in the book that were also addressed in Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, and I think the latter does a better job of explaining and illustrating those concepts. But still, this book addresses a greater need for a correct perspective on schooling in general. My takeaway: work to improve teachers, and fire those who are unwilling to work on improvement.

[Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book - really accessible and thought provoking - do what you know works!!

[Michael Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful examination of the changes needed to improve learning in schools. A must read for senior teachers and those in all aspects of school leadership.