Professor Dylan Wiliam

Speaker Summary

Professor Dylan Wiliam is the first and the last word in formative assessment, and one of education’s most celebrated experts and critically acclaimed authors. His best-selling book, Inside the Black Box (1998), did not change the status quo. It shattered it. Now 22 years later, no matter where you are in the world, your school’s assessment policy has almost certainly been influenced by Dylan’s industry-defining work. For the last 10 years, he has travelled extensively, sharing his unique knowledge of research-driven, effective teaching practice with teachers across the globe.

Areas of Expertise

Assessment – Curriculum – Leadership and Management – Whole School Improvement

Full Profile

Dylan Wiliam is Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London.

With 7 years of teaching experience in inner-city schools, coupled with multiple degrees in mathematics and mathematics education, Dylan joined Chelsea College, UCL (now King’s College London) in 1984. During this time, he developed innovative assessment schemes in mathematics before taking charge of the mathematics teacher education program.

Between 1989 and 1991 he was the Academic Coordinator of the Consortium for Assessment and Testing in Schools, which developed a variety of statutory and non-statutory assessments for the national curriculum of England and Wales.

From 1996 to 2001 he was the Dean and Head of the School of Education at King’s College London, and from 2001 to 2003, he served as Assistant Principal of the College. In 2003 he moved to the USA, as Senior Research Director at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. In 2006 he returned to the UK as Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, University of London, a post he held until he stepped down in 2010 to focus more on directly supporting teachers worldwide.

A 2010 two-part BBC series, “The Classroom Experiment,” follows Dylan’s work at a school, demonstrating how his formative assessment strategies motivate students, increase learning engagement, and shift classroom responsibility from teachers to their students so that they become self-directed agents of their own learning.

Publications

Dylan has written over 300 books and publications, including numerous best-sellers. Some of these include:

– Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment (1998)

– Embedded Formative Assessment: Strategies for Classroom Assessment That Drives Student Engagement and Learning (2017)

– Creating the Schools our Children Need (2018)

– Leadership for Teacher Learning (2016)