Course Code: DW28122

Leadership for Teacher Learning

Date: Fri 28 January 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

There is now substantial evidence that there is a “knowing-doing” gap in education. The problem is not that we do not know how to improve schools. The problem is implementing what is known to work in more classrooms. This is why approaches based on “sharing good practice” have been relatively ineffective. Teachers do not lack knowledge—rather they lack support in putting into practice changes in what they do in their classrooms, and this requires time. This is a particular problem in education because almost everything that teachers do in classrooms benefits their students. We cannot therefore create extra time by stopping teachers doing bad things—they aren’t doing any. The essence of effective teacher leadership is stopping people doing good things, to give them time to do even better things.

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Closing date for registration: 21 January 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW25222

Teacher Quality - What it is, why it matters, and how to get more of it

Date: Fri 25 February 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

Dylan will argue that the main reason that most system-wide educational reforms have failed is that they have ignored (1) the importance of teacher quality for student progress; (2) the fact that teacher quality is highly variable; and (3) that teacher quality has differential impact on different students. Teacher quality can be improved by replacing teachers with better ones, but this is slow, and of limited impact. This suggests that the future economic prosperity of each country requires improving the quality of the teachers already working in its schools. We can help teachers develop their practice in a number of ways; some of these will benefit students, and some will not. Developments with the biggest impact appear to be those that involve changes in practice, which will require new kinds of teacher learning, new models of professional development, and new models of leadership.

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Closing date for registration: 11 February 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW15322

Why Formative Assessment Needs to be the Priority for Every School

Date: Thu 2 June 2022, Time: 9.00 am to 10.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

Education matters, for individuals and for society. However, most of the policies that have been pursued have been directed at the kinds of schools that students attend—policies that, even when well implemented (which most are not) would have limited impact on student achievement. What matters for student achievement is what happens inside the classroom, and what matters most is the quality of interaction between students and teachers; teachers finding out what their students know, and making appropriate adjustments to their instruction as a result.

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Closing date for registration: 6 May 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW21422

Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment, in that order

Date: Thu 21 April 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

While different authors define the terms “curriculum” and “pedagogy” in different ways, there can be little doubt that we should decide what our students will learn before we decide how they should be taught and how they should be assessed.

Making these decisions will involve trade-offs—there is no perfect curriculum, no perfect pedagogy and no perfect assessment system. The best we can do, therefore, is to make these trade-offs explicit and planned, rather than as consequences of other decisions. In this presentation, Dylan Wiliam will explore some of the most important implications of recent research on memory.

• why allocating large block of time to particular topics is often less effective than doing things in smaller chunks
• why formative assessment—month by month, week by week, day by day, and minute by minute—should be at the heart of effective teacher
• why any assessment system needs to balance five desirable properties, namely that it needs to be synoptic, distributed, extensive, manageable, and trusted.

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Closing date for registration: 8 April 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW27522

How Do We Prepare Young People for a World We Cannot Imagine?

Date: Fri 27 May 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

Children beginning school this year are likely still to be working in the final quarter of the 21st century. This means that no matter how much they learn at school, it won't be enough, because most of what they need to know for their lives—both inside and outside the world of work—hasn't been discovered or invented yet. And while there are those that claim to be able to predict what kinds of skills will be needed in the future, the truth is we just don't know. The idea that children should learn how to learn used to be an optional extra; now it is a survival skill. Science, technology and mathematics will be important in the future, but so will subjects like music, drama, dance, and art, partly because they play a role in helping people live fulfilled lives, but also because these subjects emphasize creativity more than other subjects, and creativity is the one thing we know machines can't do. In this presentation, Dylan will outline the role of teachers and school leaders to ensure that young people take control over their lives, appreciate their culture, make a difference in the world, and find rewarding work.

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Closing date for registration: 13 May 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW30522

The Role of Leaders in Promoting More Effective Assessment and Evaluation

Date: Mon 30 May 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

The disruption to schooling caused by the coronavirus pandemic presents school leaders with a number of significant, and unfamiliar challenges. In this online presentation, Dylan Wiliam will explain why many of the solutions being offered to schools, such as widespread standardized testing, will be of little use, and will show why increased use of classroom formative assessment by teachers is likely to have the greatest benefit for pupils, both in the short and long term. The presentation will also deal in depth with how primary and secondary school leaders can best support teachers in developing their classroom formative assessment practice, through the establishment of school-based teacher learning communities.

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Closing date for registration: 13 May 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW31522

How to Sustain the Development of Formative Assessment with Teacher Learning Communities

Date: Tue 31 May 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

Teacher professional development has been a national priority in most developed countries for well over twenty years, and yet the results have been modest at best. Although the reasons for the failure of teacher professional development to increase student achievement are complex, the most significant factor appears to be that they have mis-diagnosed the problem. Teacher quality is assumed to be a matter of knowledge, and sessions of professional development have been focused on giving teachers the knowledge they are assumed to lack. Such sessions have been largely unsuccessful in increasing student achievement because the “problem” is not lack of knowledge—it is how to change practice. In this session, participants will learn about five key elements of effective professional development (choice, flexibility, incrementalism, accountability, and support), and how these can be enacted with building-based teacher learning communities.

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Closing date for registration: 13 May 2022 Friday  

Course Code: DW71122

Learning and Memory

Date: Mon 7 Nov 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

For many years, most teacher education programmes included substantial coverage of theories on the psychology of education. However, many pre-service teachers did not find these courses helpful, since they offered little more than bland platitudes, or, at the other extreme, provided findings that worked in laboratories, but were difficult or impossible to implement in real classrooms. As a result, many teacher preparation programmes now contain little in the way of educational psychology, which is unfortunate, because over the last thirty years or so, cognitive science has produced deep insights into how humans learn.

Dylan will introduce participants to the latest findings from cognitive science about how we learn, and the kinds of things we can do to help our students remember what they are taught for longer. Participants will learn why it is that students can be intensively and successfully engaged in worthwhile tasks and yet learn little as a result, and why forgetting is essential to remembering

They will leave with a variety of strategies for improving learning in their classrooms that can be immediately, and widely, applied.

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Closing date for registration: 28 October 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW141122

Understanding Meta-Analysis

Date: Mon 14 Nov 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

Meta-analysis has transformed how we use systematic reviews to synthesize research in medicine. However, meta-analysis is extremely difficult to do well in education, with the result that the results of many if not most educational meta-analyses in are difficult, if not impossible, to interpret. What this means is that while meta-meta-analysis—the idea of combining the results of different meta-analyses—as practiced by Marzano and Hattie are extremely attractive to teachers, administrators, and policy makers, they are poor guides to the best ways to improve educational outcomes. In this presentation, participants will learn about the seven major challenges in conducting meta-analysis in education (inappropriate comparisons, aptitude x treatment interaction, the “file drawer” problem, variations in intervention quality, variation in population variability, the selection of studies and the sensitivity of outcome measures) so that they can understand when, and when not, to trust the results of meta-analyses in education, and thus make more informed choices about educational priorities.

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Closing date for registration: 4 November 2022 Friday

Course Code: DW211122

Cognitive Load Theory

Date: Mon 21 Nov 2022, Time: 8.00 am to 9.30 am Singapore time GMT+8

Recent research on how learning takes place has shown that when a student’s cognitive resources are completely occupied in the completion of an instructional task, the student can successfully complete the task, but not learn what the task was designed to teach them. Cognitive Load Theory provides a proven and practical framework that helps teachers design instruction that minimizes irrelevant cognitive load, and thus maximizes the chances that successful completion of instructional tasks leads to long-term learning. In this presentation, participants will learn about the main ideas of Cognitive Load Theory, together with some of the key findings that can be used to strengthen instruction, such as the expertise reversal effect, the split-attention effect, the goal free effect, and the element interactivity effect.

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Closing date for registration: 4 November 2022 Friday