Teacher podcast: Dylan Wiliam on effective questioning in the classroom. This podcast from Teacher magazine is supported by the Australian Student Wellbeing Framework, now live on the Student Wellbeing Hub! There are five interconnected elements, which together, promote better safety, wellbeing and learning. The new Framework is designed to be useful, accessible and easy to apply to your school context.
Visit www.studentwellbeinghub.edu.au Thank you for downloading this podcast from Teacher magazine, I’m Jo Earp. My guest today is Dylan Wiliam – Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London. He’s a former school teacher (more of that later), over the last 15 years his academic career has been focused on the use of assessment to support learning, and he now works with teachers all over the world on developing formative assessment practice.
I caught up with him in Melbourne to talk about effective questioning in the classroom. Jo Earp: Hi Dylan it’s always great to catch up with you. DW: Yes. JE: That’s a great way of looking at it. A Diagram Of 21st Century Pedagogy - A Diagram Of 21st Century Pedagogy by TeachThought Staff The modern learner has to sift through a lot of information.
That means higher level thinking skills like analysis and evaluation are necessary just to reduce all the noise and establish the credibility of information. There is also the matter of utility. Evaluating information depends as much on context and circumstance as it does the nature of the data itself. Context matters, and the diagram from edorigami below captures this, though not from the perspective of the student and content knowledge, but the teacher and various pedagogical components themselves, including Higher-Order Thinking Skills, Peer Collaboration, and Media Fluency. (See also our framework on the 6 channels of 21st century Learning.)
A body-based approach to teaching maths. Imagine a classroom where creativity and movement is used not just in the arts, physical education and drama lessons, but in mathematics. That is the goal of the Creative Body-Based Learning (CBL) Project. Developed by youth arts organisation Carclew, the South Australian education department, University of South Australia, University of Texas at Austin and Arts Rich Together, the project sees artists working alongside teachers in the classroom in order to encourage students to take a more creative and physical approach to learning mathematics. Teacher recently spoke to Assistant Professor Katie Dawson, Director of Drama for Schools at the University of Texas at Austin, who successfully established the program in the United States and is now overseeing the pilot program in Australian schools.
The pilot program was trialled last year at West Lakes Shore School and Modbury Primary School in Adelaide, across all year levels with a handful of teachers. Inside a CBL classroom. Getting Better At Personalized Learning. Here’s a startling statistic: 40% of high school students are chronically disengaged in school. There are enough reasons to go around, and I’d agree that many of them are outside of a teacher’s direct control. But some of them aren’t.
As we pursue a set of skills, I have a great deal of control over how that happens in my classroom, so going into this school year I asked myself: How can student-interest and inquiry drive the learning? Out of these questions came my Getting Better Together project focused on pursuing personalized learning and customized instruction. These are big questions. The following videos capture our efforts toward a more personal learning experience: Structuring Personal Learning: A Day in the Workshop One of the first days of our workshop model is captured in Making Learning Personalized and Customized. Grades 9-12 / ELA / Workshop Please enable Javascript to watch this video Customizing Feedback and Instruction Courageous Conversations to Improve Instruction. Insanity In Education: Making The Same Mistakes. Insanity In Education: 52 Mistakes We Make Over And Over Again by Terry Heick The context for this one is simple enough–what mistakes do we constantly make in education that hold us back from the best versions of ourselves?
From realizing our collective potential as a construct, field, and industry? What mistakes do we make over and over and over again, expecting a different result each time? Probably a lot, but 52 is enough for now. Forget learning should be fun.Stigmatize failure.Think of children like little adults.Gamify compliance to institutional policies instead of social change and disruptive creativity.Place students on the periphery when we design, plan, and respond to their learning. The Definition Of Insanity In Education: 52 Mistakes We Make Over And Over Again.
How To Teach With The Concept Attainment Model. How To Teach With The Concept Attainment Model by TeachThought Staff In 1956, psychologist Jerome Bruner published a book called “A Study of Thinking.” Being a psychologist, Bruner was interested in cognitive processing–how people think, and how those tendencies might be used to inform teaching and learning processes.
He developed a new way of introducing learners to new concepts called Concept Attainment. What Is Concept Attainment? The image above from this document via Beyond Monet/Barrie Bennet/Carol Rolheiser is a useful example of how Concept Attainment works. It can be thought of as game of “find the rule.” Linda Neff at Northern Arizona University adds that Concept Attainment is a “close relative to inductive thinking (Joyce and Weil 1967:15), (and) focuses on the decision-making and categorization processes leading up to the creation and understanding of a concept.” How Does Concept Attainment Work? What Are The Benefits Of Concept Attainment? Examples Of Concept Attainment. Library: 10 Learning Models & Frameworks. TeachThought Library: 10 Learning Models & Frameworks by TeachThought Staff For professional development around these ideas, contact us. As with any publication, blogs and websites are only as thoughtful as their design.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, no matter how “good” the content is, it’s useless. And sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for, and don’t know what you don’t know. This is part of the limitation of a blog, and the allure of social media sites like facebook and pinterest. For now, we’ll keep trying new ideas, which is where this collection comes in. The Utility Of Learning Models One of the things that sets TeachThought apart from other education publishers is our focus on and development of learning models and frameworks–new ways of teaching and learning and schooling that others can use.
Models like these embed certain (new?) This is where the models and frameworks come in–visuals that clarify possibility, sequence, characteristics, and more. Edutopia. In the education world, the term student-centered classroom is one we hear a lot. And many educators would agree that when it comes to 21st-century learning, having a student-centered classroom is certainly a best practice. Whether you instruct first grade or university students, take some time to think about where you are with creating a learning space where your students have ample voice, engage frequently with each other, and are given opportunities to make choices. Guiding Questions Use these questions to reflect on the learning environment you design for students: In what ways do students feel respected, feel valued, and feel part of the whole group?
In what ways do students have ownership of the classroom? Balancing Teacher Roles So let's talk about that last question, and specifically, direct instruction versus facilitation. How do you decide on how much of one role and not enough of another? 50 Alternatives To Lecturing. 50 Alternatives To Lecturing by TeachThought Staff Ed note: This post is promoted by SEU’S online masters in education programs.
SEU simply asked us to write about how learning is changing and the updated kinds of things teachers need to know, and to let you know about their program. So here we are. As teachers, when we lecture, we have the best of intentions. So explaining things isn’t “bad,” so how about beginning with some clarification. Everyone loves a story, and unless you’re awful, your students probably like you and want to hear from you. Or in a “flipped classroom” setting where the “lecture” is designed to be consumed at the student’s own pace (using viewing strategies, for example).
Or when students have mastered a core set of understandings, and are ready–in unison–to hear something from an honest-to-goodness expert who only has an hour to unload what he/she knows. …then lecture can be moderately effective, but even then it depends on what we mean by “effective.” A few notes:
The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model. The Inside-Out School: A 21st Century Learning Model by Terry Heick As a follow-up to our 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning we developed in 2009, we have developed an updated framework, The Inside-Out Learning Model. The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy. By design this model emphasizes the role of play, diverse digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence between communities and schools.
The attempted personalization of learning occurs through new actuators and new notions of local and global citizenship. An Inside-Out School returns the learners, learning, and “accountability” away from academia and back to communities. No longer do schools teach. The 9 Domains Of the Inside-Out Learning Model 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Changing What We Teach. Changing What We Teach: Shifting From A Curriculum Of Insecurity To A Curriculum Of Wisdom by Terry Heick Increasingly, the idea of computer coding is being pushed to the forefront of “things.” In movies, on the news, and other digital avatars of ourselves, coders are increasingly here. In Hollywood, computer coders are characterized as aloof and spectacle geniuses in green army jackets who solve (narrative) problems in a kind of deus ex machina fashion.
Hack the mainframe, change the school grades, save prom, etc. So we should totally teach it in schools, right? Teaching Skills vs Teaching Content Too often bits and pieces are tacked onto curriculum as yet another perfectly-reasonable-sounding-thing to teach. Yet in the ecology of a school, they behave differently in the classroom where the rubber hits the road. There is nothing wrong with changes in priority. To try to address this problem, let’s consider a more macro question: What is school? When Standards Aren’t Standards Yes, yes, yes. Deeper Learning Video Series (Deeper Learning) Are Schools Prepared For Great Teachers? Are Schools Prepared For Great Teachers? By Terry Heick In On The Road, Jack Kerouac describes the “purity” of movement–the juxtaposition of a singular here, and a plural everywhere that create a kind of serenity. This is a purity, and most notably an enthusiasm, that we can learn from as educators. After decades of disagreement and perceived waywardness in education, recent efforts in school improvement have focused less on movement and more on standardization (a sibling of industrialization, but not necessarily a twin).
Among the tactics at use here is a “guaranteed and viable curriculum, which has been recognized not just as crucial to progress, but the most crucial, with Robert Marzano calling it “the first factor, having the most impact on student achievement” among all other improvement strategies in his oft-quoted What Works in Schools. Among other ideas, the words same, skills, concepts, taught, common, and pacing stand out to give us a sketch of what’s at work here. A fit.