Wiliam, Dylan;
(2004)
What do leaders need to know about learning and teaching?
In:
Learning-centred Leadership pack.
National College for School Leadership: Nottingham.
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Abstract
In many ways, the idea that one can separate learning and teaching is very odd. There are many languages (for instance Russian and Welsh) in which one simply cannot do so —the same verb is used for both, so that ‘I am teaching’ comes out the same as ‘I am learning’. Ofsted’s framework for the inspection of schools requires inspectors to distinguish between quality of learning and quality of teaching, but what are we to make of a lesson in which the quality of teaching was high, but the quality of learning was low? It is rather like claiming that an operation was a success, but the patient died. For this reason, it is neither possible nor helpful to separate learning and teaching. Teaching is any activity that is intended to produce learning. And learning? Well, it turns out to be rather difficult to define. The MIT Encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences defines learning as “a change in an organism’s capacities or behaviour brought about by experience”, but immediately acknowledges that this definition includes increases in muscular strength brought about by exercise, which would not normally be thought of as learning. Over the last hundred or so years, a variety of theories of learning have been proposed, but the relationship between these different theories is not at all clear. In the physical sciences we expect each new theory to incorporate the theories it replaces (as Einstein’s theory of gravitation subsumed Newton’s). The same is not so for theories of learning. Each new theory tends to be quite good at explaining the things that the previous theories did not, but is generally quite bad at accounting for the things that the previous theory explained well.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | What do leaders need to know about learning and teaching? |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/nation... |
| Additional information: | This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1507194 |
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