“Success is all around us!”
These encouraging words kicked off the keynote presentation by author/researcher John Hattie at the Learning Forward conference last month. As many of the educators in our networks know, Hattie is a professor and director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
He’s also author of the international bestsellers Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers. The Visible Learning findings and recommendations result from Hattie’s review of more than 1,100 meta-analyses (that involved 65,000 studies and 250 million students), probing the impact of various teaching strategies.
Despite Hattie’s opening exclamation, he was quick to note that almost everything tried in the classroom is successful at some level. “[Almost] everything works…all it takes is a pulse!” But which practices are worthy of the time and effort invested?
What is critical, Hattie says, is that educators become aware of and understand the “continuum of effectiveness” among all the possible teaching methods and strategies. Teachers should embrace and use only those practices which provide the greatest impact for students in the classroom. He pointed to the “hinge” effect (.40) discussed in the Visible Learning findings. It denotes a year’s growth in learning and is a key indicator of impactful practices.
How we see student learning
A huge lever, according to Hattie, occurs when teachers begin to see learning through the eyes of their students and when students see themselves as their own teachers.
On the flip side, Hattie noted, as students progress through school, they generally learn how to be passive. It is critical, he said, to shift them back to self-regulation so that they take ownership and accept responsibility for their own learning. ”Kids are very good at predicting their score. Your job is to mess it up by moving them to proficiency,” Hattie said.
An effective way to move students to proficiency is to constantly expose them to examples of excellent work and to focus on improvement and success. The key, Hattie added, is to move from “surface learning” to deep and enduring learning.
One of the slides that Hattie showed that particularly resonated was a list of actions/behaviors teachers could use to promote the language of learning:
Three questions leaders should ask
Hattie closed his presentation with three questions leaders should ask at their school to improve the culture and impact of learning:
(1) What is impact?
(2) What is the magnitude of your impact? and
(3) Is every student getting a year’s growth?
This led to his strong recommendation to move our debate about effective practice away from an exclusive focus on achievement toward a more blended approach that includes student progress, as he shows in this diagram:
Once again, an effective strategy to ensure students gain at least one year of growth is a “both-and” strategy rather than an “either-or” strategy. By measuring progress, teachers build motivation and self-efficacy among their students. When students experience success, they tend to try harder and feel more successful. As a result, achievement improves. Yes, yes, yes. Win, win, win.
A happier new year?
As I left Hattie’s presentation and headed home, I thought of the “knowing-doing” gap. Now that we have validated research about what works, why aren’t more of us paying attention to it? Now, that would be a worthwhile New Year’s Resolution!
