Designing Teaching & Understanding Learners with Dylan Wiliam

For this episode, special guest Dylan Wiliam joins hosts Tom Sherrington and Emma Turner to discuss good teaching practices, theories of student learning, and implementation. 

The Challenge of Good Teaching

The conversation begins by exploring the concept of “good teaching.” The trio discusses differentiating good teaching from successful teaching, student engagement, humility, successful teaching strategies, research on the value added of good teaching, and the quality of different assessments. 

Equitable Classroom Practices

The conversation turns to a discussion of gearing classroom and content management towards equity. Dylan says that “I taught them & they didn’t learn it” is no longer excusable. He explores how assessment should be a bench marker for reteaching content. It is Dylan’s purview that curriculum and learning should be geared toward all students, not toward the highest-performing students. He would rather all students reach proficiency in the subject matter than all content covered in the curriculum. 

Assessment

Dylan is an expert on curriculum, from his leadership to scholarship. He gives some expert advice on clarifying the definitions of different assessments and how they impact student learning and ‘good teaching.’ 

Understanding Learners

In the second part of the episode, the trio discusses the background of effective learning. A primary focus of this discussion is understanding the purpose of data and the importance of cognitive load theory. A key insight in this conversation is tackling the disparate learning skills of students and how understanding the factors of learning can increase student achievement.

Cognitive Load Theory

As Dylan points out in the conversation, there is a difficult paradigm to understand in education that can only be explained by cognitive load theory. Students can independently complete a task and not remember the content two weeks later. This is a universal experience of teachers; many don’t know why it happens. Additionally, two students can have the same teaching, the same time on a subject, and the same motivation to learn and still not understand the subject. 

Dylan believes that cognitive load theory explains this gap. In both cases, the student struggling to recall information used the cognitive power to solve the problem; therefore, they had no cognitive power left to create long-term memories. 

Importantly, cognitive load theory isn’t a teaching strategy. You cannot grade teachers or students on their use of Cognitive Load Theory. Dylan points out that it gives you the constraints you must be aware of for your students. Dylan compares the theory to architecture. Understanding the tensile strength of steel does not help you creatively design a building, but it is required to build it properly. Dylan says, “Designing teaching is a fundamentally creative task, but you must consider the constraints of our cognitive architecture.” 

DeImplementation & Value Added

The episode closes with a discussion on Dylan’s upcoming book, Making Room for Impact: The 9p Deimplementation Guide for Educators, which will publish later this year. The book focuses on how implementation makes way for great teaching and learning.

As Dylan shares in the episode, teachers work as hard as they can. Almost everything teachers do affects student learning. If they can take on more development tasks, they need to take something off their plate. However, if they do remove some of their tasks, it hurts learning. With this understanding, the book looks at how the essence of effective leadership is to remove “good things” teachers do to give them time for “great things.”

Good vs. Great

Deimplementation recognizes that opportunity cost is the single most important concept of teaching improvement. Given that you have limited time to develop teachers, what professional development will have the most impact on student achievement? In deimplementing ‘good’ tasks/programs and implementing great ones, school leaders can focus on programs that offer the best value.

Watch more episodes of Mind The Gap to learn about making education work globally.