“Always in the back of my mind has been this idea that we can actually do a better job of making our teaching more responsive to the needs of our students.” – Dylan Wiliam

Dylan Wiliam, PhD, is one of the world’s foremost education authorities. He has helped to successfully implement classroom formative assessment in thousands of schools all over the world, including the United States, Canada, Singapore, Sweden, Australia, and the United Kingdom. A two-part BBC series, “The Classroom Experiment,” tracked Wiliam’s work at one British middle school, showing how formative assessment strategies empower students, significantly increase engagement, and shift classroom responsibility from teachers to their students so that students become agents of and collaborators in their own learning.

Wiliam is professor emeritus of educational assessment at UCL Institute of Education (IOE), London, UK. After a first degree in mathematics and physics, Wiliam taught in urban public schools for seven years, during which time he earned further degrees in mathematics and mathematics education.
 
He has served as dean and head of the School of Education (and later assistant principal) at King’s College London, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ and deputy director (Provost) of the Institute of Education, University of London. Since 2010, he has devoted most of his time to research and teaching.

Wiliam’s most recent publication, Creating the Schools Our Children Need: Why What We’re Doing Now Won’t Help Much (And What We Can Do Instead), analyses the approaches that American schools have taken in order to improve student achievement, and shows why they are unlikely to succeed, while at the same time, providing clear advice about the steps that schools need to take to raise student achievement and close achievement gaps. His other works focus on the profound impact strategic formative assessment has on student learning. He is co-author of Inside the Black Box, a major review of the research evidence on formative assessment, as well as Embedding Formative Assessment, the Embedding Formative Assessment Professional Development Pack, and Leadership for Teacher Learning.