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John Hattie article on Collaborative Impact

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John Hattie article on Collaborative Impact

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This article briefly discusses teacher efficacy and teacher expectations. The video no longer exists. I especially love The Mindframes thinking.

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Professor John Hattie gave a keynote presentation on "Collaborative Impact" in front of school leaders and principals at Cognition Education's "Collaborative Impact: Research & Practice Conference 2017". Watch the video to get some important updates on the Visible Learning story. Read on for some quick takeaways. UPDATE: Thank you for your comments! Unfortunately all the videos have been deleted on Youtube. Nevertheless, you can read on about the previously available keynote video for some quick takeaways.
The Evidence Base

John Hattie constantly updates his Visible Learning research which is now based on the data of 300 million students. He has synthesized over 1400 meta-analyses and put together a list of 252 influences related to learning and achievement. The story underlying the data of Visible Learning remains unchanged although these numbers are up from 800 meta-studies synthesized in the Visible Learning meta-study (2009).

In his presentation, Hattie also gave a new explanation of the hinge-point d=0.4; the average effect size of all influences. Comparing the data of different education systems (Australia, UK, USA) he wanted to know how much growth students make over a year of schooling. Hattie found that in each of these countries it is exactly 0.40 in terms of effect size - "to the decimal point". Yet another evidence-based argument why students deserve at least one year of growth for one year of schooling.

New No. 1: Teachers' collective efficacy

At the top of the list of influences, there are some new entries since the first Visible Learning study was published in 2009. In his presentation, Hattie cites the new number one as "collective teacher efficacy". (NB: The top two entries are inverted in a paper published in 2015). The most important aspect of "collective efficacy" is making teachers believe: "I cause learning."Collective efficacy is not about making teachers feel good about themselves, it is more complicated than just believing you can make a difference collectively. Hattie's definition of "collective efficacy" is "collaborative conversation based on evidence". There are a couple of books about the subject but Hattie suggests that only some of them get the notion right, e.g. Jenni Donohoo's " Collective Efficacy: How Educators' Beliefs Impact Student Learning ".

New No. 2: Teacher expectations

Teacher expectations can have a huge impact on learning outcomes. How do teachers make learning challenging according to the Goldilocks principle: Not too hard, not too boring? Hattie cites Christine Rubie-Davies book and research: It is about "challenge" not about "doing your best". For further insights, you should read her book " Becoming a high expectations teacher ".

Know thy Impact and Hattie's Mindframes

When asked by teachers and school leaders "What does impact mean?" Hattie never answers the question. According to him, more important than a definition of "impact" is what teachers and students inside the school think that " impact" and "learning" looks like? Hattie got into trouble last year when TES published an interview with the title " Hattie is against teachers being researchers ". According to him, they missed the second half of the sentence: "I don't want to be educators to be researchers, I want them to be evaluators." Instead of asking why-questions teachers should ask so-what-questions: What is the impact?

Round-up: Collaboration and collective impact

To sum it all up Hattie provides some guidelines of how to reframe the conversation about teaching and learning in order to achieve collective impact.
"We need to move away...

from teaching to learning

from best practice to high impact

from looking at teachers teaching

to sharing observations of the impact

and collectively evaluating this impact

from prioritizing achievement to prioritizing progress."

Sources:

Further reading:

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Video: Watch John Hattie's Keynote On Collaborative Impact - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Professor John Hattie gave a keynote presentation on "Collaborative Impact" in front of school leaders and principals at Cognition Education's "Collaborative Impact: Research & Practice Conference 2017". Watch the video to get some important updates on the Visible Learning story. Read on for...Read more ›

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Quick video to explain John Hattie's 8 Mindframes.

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John Hattie’s Eight Mind Frames For Teachers - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Learn more about John Hattie’s eight mind frames in a great video scribe animation by Cheryl Reynolds. Watch the video.

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"Most of the feedback that students receive about their classroom work is from other students - and much of that feedback is wrong." (John Hattie)
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ( ASCD) is an international non-profit organization for teachers and educators. Its mission is "to develop programs, products, and services essential to the way educators learn, teach, and lead." The Educational Leadership Magazine is ASCD's flagship publication that is sent to its members eight times a year; subscriptions and individual issues are also available.

EL's issue on "Feedback for learning" (Vol. 70/1) brings together renowned experts in this field: Grant Wiggins, John Hattie, Susan M. Brookhart, Dylan William and many more. The educators and researchers share valuable insights about what feedback is (and isn't) and how feedback works to improve learning. As a quick takeaway EL has put together this handy infographic with an overview of seven things to remember about feedback. You can download the infograpic at www.ascd.org (PDF).

You can order your issue of Educational Leadership (Vol. 70/1) "Feedback for Learning" at shop.ascd.org.

Further reading about "Feedback for learning"

Here is a selection of books by Grant Wiggins, Susan M. Brookhart, Dylan William and John Hattie if you want to dive deeper into some of the aspects of effective feedback and formative assessment in the classroom.

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Feedback for Learning Infographic - VISIBLE LEARNING

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"Most of the feedback that students receive about their classroom work is from other students - and much of that feedback is wrong." (John Hattie) The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ( ASCD) is an international non-profit organization for teachers and educators.

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Visible Learning Infographic - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Our infographic provides an overview of John Hatties “Visible Learning” & “Visible Learning for Teachers”. It visualizes the Top 10 effects & the disasters

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Terry Burr designed that beautiful educational infographic for Osiris Educational and Visible Learning Plus. The infographic is based on data from John Hattie's research and the work of the Visible Learning Plus team.

(c) www.osiriseducational.co.uk / www.visiblelearningplus.co.uk

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Visible Learning visualized in a beautiful infographic - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Terry Burr designed that beautiful educational infographic for Osiris Educational and Visible Learning Plus. The infographic is based on data from John Hattie's research and the work of the Visible Learning Plus team. (c) www.osiriseducational.co.uk / www.visiblelearningplus.co.uk Visible Learning Infografik Visible...Read more ›

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11 Questions asked of John Hattie by teachers 

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11 Questions asked of John Hattie by teachers 

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Short quick videos answering the questions, really interesting.

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Are you a teacher and surprised by some of the evidence found in the Visible Learning research? Wouldn't it be great to discuss your questions directly with Professor Hattie? In 2016, Corwin, a partner of John Hattie's professional development program Visible Learning Plus, has organized an online Q&A. (Corwin has also published Visible Learning for Literacy, the latest addition to John Hattie's VL series). Here are the questions that teachers and school leaders submitted to Professor John Hattie. We provide an excerpt of each answer as a quick take-away. But you should definitely take the time to listen to the full answers. And read the the books.

1. Why does inquiry-based learning only have an effect size of 0.31 when it is an approach to learning that seems to engage students and teachers so readily in the process of learning?
-Question submitted by a school improvement resource team leader from Canada
Professor John Hattie: "It turns out that if you are learning surface-level information, the content, as contrasted with deep learning which is the relationships between the content, then problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning is pretty useless. But if you don't teach the surface and the content, you've got nothing to inquire about. [...] The reason it comes out very low on the chart is because most teachers introduce it far too early."

2. Why are we striving for an "assessment-capable learner" and not a "self-regulated learner"?
-Question submitted by a Principal from Southern California
Professor John Hattie: "If we teach the students how to evaluate their own learning, that's what the key of formative assessment is. And of course, if you're going to teach the students that, the teachers have to know it to teach the students that. So you get this double virtuous circle without all that language that goes with formative vs. summative."

3. What are the three most important things I can do in my classes to improve learning?
-Question submitted by a Teacher leader from Texas
Professor John Hattie: "Know thy impact!" Having an understanding...

what impact means,

about the magnitude, how big the impact you want,

about the equity question, whether all kids get that impact."

4. What methods have been successfully used to effect a paradigm shift at the campus and district level?
-Question submitted by a Curriculum instructional specialist from Texas
Professor John Hattie: "It's about how we think about what we do. Do we have a mind frame that we actually can collectively make a difference to these kids?"

5. Is there a correlation between calculating effect size and percentile rating? If so, how do you compare scores and effect size?
-Question by Ainsley Rose, Corwin Author and Certified Visible Learning Plus Trainer
Professor John Hattie: "Yes, there is a way to do it. Unfortunately, you have to use something that is not easy and not obvious. But I'd express a lot of caution. Percentiles have some major problems. The whole point of percentiles is to compare students to other students. And yes, there is a place for that, I suppose, but what I'm much more interested in with the effect size notion is the learning for each individual student, and when you look at the averages of the effect size, you've in sense got a comparison."

6. What is the effect size for the cultural competence of the teacher?
-Question submitted by an education consultant from Seattle, WA
Professor John Hattie: "Teachers, they do understand what kids bring to the classroom. Certainly the effect size of that is extremely high. [... ] It's how the kids think: Are these kids prepared to take challenges? Are they prepared to be risk takers? Do they study learning because they want to perform well in front of their peers. Or do they do it because they want to reinvest in learning and really want to master what they do. These are critical dimensions to make connections with these kids, to help them on this learning journey."

7. How can we prioritize which influences to focus on during the school year?
-Question submitted by a Principal from Michigan
Professor John Hattie: "Having a collective understanding of the actual problems we need to work on is critical. But at all times, we need to be very careful not to make changes to things that are really working. So that's where the prioritization starts. Then, what I'd love schools and districts to do is to map that with what are the high-probability effects from the research side of things [...] and from that then we do our interventions."

8. How does communicating the learning target impact student learning?
-Question submitted by an Instructional coach from Arizona
Professor John Hattie: "You need learning intentions and success criteria. It's those two things that go together. It is giving the kids a sense of what is the purpose of what we are learning here today. [...] Like think of kids playing video games. They know what it means to be successful: Get to the next level. And they're prepared to invest an incredible number of hours to get to that next level. And they get very many cues and understandings of what that next level is."

9. Why does ability grouping or tracking have a negative effect size?
-Question submitted by a Supervisor of math and science from New Jersey
Professor John Hattie: "It has a very close to zero effect size. And in many ways that means it doesn't matter whether you track or you don't track. [...] But the biggest problem with tracking - by a million miles - is the equity issue. For instance if you look at this country here. There is a higher probability for African Americans and Hispanics being in the lower track groups. How can you possibly defend that apartheid in that schools?!"

10. What RTI models did you investigate? What critical attributes were included in the models that you looked at?
-Question submitted by an Assessment coordinator from Iowa
Professor John Hattie: "I'm not weighted to one particular way of implementing the RTI model. What I like about the RTI model again it comes back to how we think. The RTI is always looking at the Response - To - Intervention. And then making adaptations and changes in light of that. And that's exactly what the Visible Learning notions are."

11. How does recess, art and music impact student achievement?
-Question submitted by a Principal from Michigan
Professor John Hattie: "Many years ago when I was a real teacher I was a music teacher. And so this question is very passionate to me. The answer is it's very very small but I wished it was zero. Because understanding music is worthwhile in itself. Why do we have to justify a subject just because it relates to a narrow excellence of teaching maths, literacy and numeracy? [...] Recess, art and music are worthwhile things! Kids need to have multiple ways of learning. I think the most important outcome of our schooling is kids who want to reinvest in learning. Not reinvest in a narrow excellence. There are multiple ways to be excellent in schools."

Video source: www.corwin.com/visiblelearning

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11 Questions to Professor John Hattie, asked by teachers (VIDEO)

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Are you a teacher and surprised by some of the evidence found in the Visible Learning research? Wouldn't it be great to discuss your questions directly with Professor Hattie? In 2016, Corwin, a partner of John Hattie's professional development program Visible Learning Plus, has organized...Read more ›

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Professor Hattie on effecting a paradigm shift

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What We've Learned from COVID Era Instruction?

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What We've Learned from COVID Era Instruction?

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Beware of doom and gloom reports. Looking at evidence of what went right could help schools break free of long-stifling practices.

Credit: Credit: Jess Rodriguez / Alamy Stock Photo

Perhaps the greatest tragedy to come from COVID-related distance learning would be not learning from this experience to improve our teaching when we physically return to classrooms. A robust discussion of the evidence of success during this pandemic school year could be a major boost to how we teach and learn.

Here are a few early examples:

1. Educators Led the Charge

One success is that educators led the revolution. It is hard to find a single policy from districts or policymakers (other than whether to open schools) that assisted in how to effectively teach during the pandemic. But educators found ways to engage their students, to deal with a myriad of new logistical and instructional issues, and to manage enormous workloads. Leaders were more likely to listen to their teachers, build collaborative teams to resolve issues, and be open to learning conversations (Jensen, 2020).

Reimers and Schleicher (2020) surveyed 1,370 educators across 59 countries in the early days of the pandemic. They started their report by noting these countries' "remarkable resilience, flexibility, and commitment to education in having established strategies for education continuity, in extremely challenging conditions, during the COVID-19 pandemic" (p. 3). What is fascinating is that 70 percent of the educators surveyed claimed that the strategies put into place for COVID teaching were well-planned and well-executed, and most claimed that the plans were not designed from the top-down but by those closer to students, particularly teachers and school leaders.

2. Independent Learners-and Empowered Teachers-Succeeded

In virtual and hybrid classrooms, those who were most likely to succeed were students with higher self-regulation skills, whereas those most dependent on the teacher-or those who had teachers who over-orchestrated their classes-struggled the most. Teachers who talked a lot in class, asked questions that required less-than-three-word responses, and focused myopically on the facts and content had trouble engaging learners remotely. However, teachers who had taught their students skills in self-regulation, engaged in gradual release of teacher responsibility, and focused on both content and deep learning had better outcomes.

So, there is a need to focus on how teachers successfully modified and structured their lessons to be more student-centered during the pandemic-and we must bring these ideas back to the regular classroom. We cannot revert to teacher-dominated talking and questioning.

3. Successes Outweigh the Losses

Beware of "doom and gloom" reports. For example, a major Netherlands study (Engzell, Frey, & Verhagen, 2020) was headlined with comments like "It's worse than you think" and "Students lost 20 percent of a school year." Yet the average effect size of reading and math in their study, compared to pre-COVID years, was only -0.08-an effect that can be turned around with great diagnosis and rebound teaching. From other studies, there is some early evidence that while math and reading scores, on average, have remained similar to previous years, there has been a more marked decline in writing (Webber, 2020).

Despite drops in areas like writing, educators have made headway in several areas: They built better connections with parents in helping them learn to focus on the language of learning and not simply having their child get it right (Jensen, 2020); students learned to be efficient (completing their schoolwork in less time) as well as effective; and teachers have become so much more adept at using technologies (Hood, 2020). Teachers also listened more attentively to how students were thinking. Teachers engaged in triage principles to discover what students already knew and could do, where they were stuck, and how to help them determine where to go next; they were obliged to be clearer about what success looked like; and they carefully evaluated how to best help each student in their progress.

This is not to make light of the concerning equity and access problems that arose over the last year (Kraft, Simon, & Lyon, 2020); such problems need to be understood and addressed in any rebound program. The message here is that we have to build on our pandemic successes; to structure lessons and teach the skills necessary for students to become less dependent on teacher-dominated classrooms.

From Fact-Engines to Physicians

To support educators in adapting to this new paradigm for instruction, my colleagues and I have used the Visible Learning research base to write books about how to teach when students are not physically in front of us (e.g., Fisher, Frey, & Hattie, 2020), and there have been many reports with recommendations on how best to reboot our school systems after students return in-person. Darling-Hammond and her coauthors (2020), for example, recommend continuing to include online teaching as part of the new normal. They encourage sharing effective efforts among districts; developing standards for digital learning that articulate how technology should be used to empower learners; enacting distance learning with attention to equity; shifting from measuring seat time to learning engagement; prioritizing assessments that illuminate student growth and learning; supporting acceleration of learning, not remediation; and identifying safe, culturally responsive practices. Meanwhile, Kraft and Falken (2020) outline the importance of scaling one-to-one tutoring during and after COVID-era teaching.

In this new syntax of learning, teachers must move from being talking fact-engines who direct learning to the likes of emergency room physicians and nurses who triage by, for example, listening to how students are thinking, seeing struggle as desirable, prioritizing next learning steps, focusing on "the centrality" of each student (1:1 support complemented by the benefits of group interaction), enabling students to work and learn with other peers, and teaching them the skills of self-regulation.

On the Rebound

We know from past disruptions-such as earthquakes, floods, strikes, and wars-that we often learn little as we rush back to the comfort of our previous schooling hierarchies, where the past winners want to go back to being winners again, where we blame and name kids who cannot learn, where we fight about autonomy and money, where we prefer and enjoy tweaking curricula, see test results as the major outcome of schooling, and restrain rather than unleash the powerful profession of educators based on expertise and evaluative thinking (Rickards, Hattie, & Reid, 2021).

Now is the time, as schools round the corner of COVID-era teaching, for educators to keep learning logs of what went well, create collaborative dialogues in the class, use triage principles to listen carefully to students' learning, and build an evidence base of successful practices. COVID-era teaching may lead to a revolution in schooling, provided we take the opportunity to rebound-to bounce back even better.

References

Kraft, M. A., & Falken, G. T. (2020). A blueprint for scaling tutoring across public schools. EdWorkingPaper No. 20-355. Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Kraft, M. A., Simon, N., & Lyon, M. (2020). Sustaining a sense of success: The importance of teacher working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. EdWorkingPaper No. 20-279. Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Reimers, F., & Schleicher, A. (2020). Schooling disrupted, schooling rethought. How the COVID-19 pandemic is changing education. OECD.

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What Can We Learn from COVID-Era Instruction? - ASCD

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Perhaps the greatest tragedy to come from COVID-related distance learning would be not learning from this experience to improve our teaching when we physically return to classrooms. A robust discussion of the evidence of success during this pandemic school year could be a major boost to how we teach

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When teams of educators believe they have the ability to make a difference, exciting things can happen in a school.

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Shortly after my research synthesis Visible Learning (2009) was published, many of my colleagues were unhappy with the finding relating to the overall effect of school leaders. Across the 55,000 studies, which represented a quarter of a billion students, the average effect size of all influences was .40, whereas the effect size for leaders was a few notches below, at .36. An effect size is a standardized method to measure the strength or magnitude of a relationship. My col-leagues were disappointed that the effect size for school leaders was below average.

Transformational or Instructional?

In the meantime, my colleagues Viviane Robinson, Claire Lloyd, and Ken Rowe (2008) conducted a meta-analysis that compared two types of school leaders. They found that transformational leaders focus more on teachers. They set a vision, create common goals for the school, inspire and set direction, buffer staff from external demands, ensure fair and equitable staffing, and give teachers a high degree of autonomy.

In contrast, instructional leaders focus more on students. They're concerned with the teachers' and the school's impact on student learning and instructional issues, conducting classroom observations, ensuring professional development that enhances student learning, communicating high academic standards, and ensuring that all school environments are conducive to learning.

According to various surveys, the majority of school leaders (more than 80 percent) claim to be mainly transformational leaders (Marks, 2013). The push for transformational leadership has come from the business community and from policymakers who are looking to "transform" schools, and it has led to higher status for these business lookalikes within and outside schools.

What Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe discovered was that the overall effect from transformational leaders was .11, whereas the overall effect from instructional leaders was .42. That's a huge difference.

High-Impact Mind Frames

Let's look, then, at the attributes of high-impact instructional leaders. It all starts with what leaders think their job is in the school.

Seven major mind frames inform high-impact instructional leadership.

Understand the need to focus on learning and the impact of teaching.

Believe their fundamental task is to evaluate the effect of everyone in their school on student learning.

See assessment as feedback on their impact.

Understand the importance of dialogue and of listening to student and teacher voice.

Set challenging targets for themselves and for teachers to maximize student outcomes.

Welcome errors, share what they've learned from their own errors, and create environments in which teachers and students can learn from errors without losing face.

High-impact instructional leadership is riskier than transformational leadership because leaders have to publicly declare what success means-and they may not get there, at least not quickly.

Defining Impact

The Visible Learning mantra is "know thy impact," but what does impact mean? It's more than a simple increase in test scores. When effective instructional leaders consider the concept of impact, they think about four related questions:

Approaches that Work ... Better

If I've learned anything from the Visible Learning research, it's that almost everything in education works. The key question is not, What works? but, Is it working sufficiently above the average of all possible influences?

The evidence is clear that leaders who embed evaluation as a core professional responsibility and who know the impact of those serving in the school have a significant effect on student learning outcomes (Hattie, in press).

For example, the effect sizes (ES) of the following are well above average:

Leaders who believe their major role is to evaluate their impact (ES = .91).

Leaders who get everyone in the school working together to know and evaluate their impact (ES = .91).

Leaders who learn in an environment that privileges high-impact teaching and learning (ES = .84).

Leaders who are explicit with teachers and students about what success looks like (ES = .77).

Leaders who set appropriate levels of challenge and who never retreat to "just do your best" (ES = .57).

This focus on impact highlights the capacity of leaders and teachers to design effective programs, implement them with quality, and determine the magnitude of their outcome on student learning. The high-impact leader creates a school climate in which everybody learns, learning is shared, and critique isn't just tolerated, but welcomed.

It Needs a Team

The Visible Learning model isn't one in which the leader is a hero who does everything alone. Improving outcomes requires a team of teachers, students, parents, and community members, all working in collaboration. The team works together to agree on the nature of success throughout the school year. This success can be reflected in the degree of improvement in students' understanding of specific content, through development of more effective learning strategies, or in a greater desire among students to invest in their learning.

There's mutual agreement that any interventions that don't achieve the intended impact will be changed or dropped. If a given program influences only a certain subgroup, teachers use a variety of differentiation strategies to ensure all students experience success.

Start with the Evidence

A major task of school leaders is to lead discussions about the nature and quality of the evidence that would convince everyone in the school that a given practice, program, or initiative had above-average impacts on student learning. This is a key concern of our Visible Learning work-moving away from anecdotes and war stories and focusing instead on quality evidence.

High-impact instructional leaders seek their colleagues' agreement about what constitutes convincing evidence that their school is engaged in high-impact practices. They might look at

The process of clarifying what counts as evidence and then using that evidence as a guide for deciding which interventions to keep and which to drop is no easy task, especially when pet projects turn out not to be having the desired effect. It all requires strong leadership driven by a relentless determination to maximize the impact on student learning, improve the nature of the evidence about that impact, and make the right decisions going forward.

An Example from Practice

Keilor Views Primary School, outside Melbourne, Australia, exemplifies high-impact leadership. As a newly merged elementary school (two schools became one), the school experienced significant challenges, but it also had the opportunity to reinvent its aspirations for students. School principal Charles Branciforte, who ultimately was named the 2013 Victorian Principal of the Year, knew he needed to create a leadership team that would work together to drive change.

Student achievement data showed that students were not progressing at the national average, although there were pockets of success. The leadership team gathered evidence through classroom observations and walk-throughs, and it became clear that students were often not at the center of teaching and learning and certainly didn't have the understandings and strategies they needed to "see themselves as their own teachers."

For example, when members of the student focus group were asked to describe a "good learner," they suggested, "Good learners listen to the teacher," "Do their work," "Are well-behaved," "Try their hardest," and "Start their work straight away." The school decided that its central purpose was to support each student to achieve at least one year's growth for one year's work. Its strategic outcome for students-the outcome through which the school would achieve this purpose-was to grow students as visible learners. Visible learners clearly understand what they're learning, know where they are in the learning progression, and can articulate their personal learning goals.

It soon became clear that the variability in student outcomes was the consequence of the variability in teacher effectiveness. Too many teachers weren't making the connection between student achievement and their own practices, weren't paying enough attention to what students were saying or doing, and didn't understand the importance of learning intentions and success criteria as a means of ensuring that they and their students understood the purpose of learning and could monitor its progress.

This was where the mind frame of being a change agent became so crucial. It was of utmost importance for school leaders to believe that success or failure in student learning was about what they, as teachers or leaders, did or didn't do. Noted Branciforte, "We did a lot of work expelling the 'but' culture-for example, ' but our kids are poor,' ' but our kids don't read at home.'"

The school also had to look at what was worth keeping and what needed to go. A commercial spelling program that everyone liked proved to have insufficient evidence of impact. Teachers began to regularly discuss what "impact," "progress," and "seeing through the eyes of students" actually meant and looked like. They jointly analyzed effect sizes of their own programs and used evidence of student growth to answer such questions as, What does this mean for future planning? How can we share practices to make the data reflect more consistent success across the grades? and What could be the cause of the differences among individual students? Feedback conversations that center on "knowing thy impact" have become a normal part of how things are done at Keilor Views.

In its first two years, the school exceeded its target for year 5 students: The students, on average, gained almost two years of growth for one year's input. As students developed their own voice in their learning, they began to see themselves as the key to their own success. Students now discuss what they're learning, not what they're doing.

This process has opened the school's eyes to a whole new set of goals and targets, which have paved the way for future work. New goals include developing strategies for sharing and transferring knowledge and good practice about how students learn, collecting and regularly using data to turn information into insight, and explicitly focusing on student-centered learning.

It's About the Students

This is instructional leadership in action. It's as much about choosing what not to do as choosing what to do. The evidence can lead to stopping programs, changing how some teachers teach, highlighting those who have the greatest impact on student learning, and creating ongoing dialogue and professional development that aim to maximize this impact for all students.

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Shortly after my research synthesis Visible Learning (2009) was published, many of my colleagues were unhappy with the finding relating to the overall effect of school leaders. Across the 55,000 studies, which represented a quarter of a billion students, the average effect size of all influences was

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John Hattie developed a way of synthesizing various influences in different meta-analyses according to their effect size (Cohen's d). In his ground-breaking study "Visible Learning" he ranked 138 influences that are related to learning outcomes from very positive effects to very negative effects. Hattie found that the average effect size of all the interventions he studied was 0.40. Therefore he decided to judge the success of influences relative to this 'hinge point', in order to find an answer to the question "What works best in education?"
Originally, Hattie studied six areas that contribute to learning: the student, the home, the school, the curricula, the teacher, and teaching and learning approaches. (The updated list also includes the classroom.) But Hattie did not only provide a list of the relative effects of different influences on student achievement. He also tells the story underlying the data. He found that the key to making a difference was making teaching and learning visible. He further explained this story in his book " Visible learning for teachers ".

John Hattie updated his list of 138 effects to 150 effects in Visible Learning for Teachers (2011), and more recently to a list of 195 effects in The Applicability of Visible Learning to Higher Education (2015). His research is now based on nearly 1200 meta-analyses - up from the 800 when Visible Learning came out in 2009. According to Hattie the story underlying the data has hardly changed over time even though some effect sizes were updated and we have some new entries at the top, at the middle, and at the end of the list.

Below you can find an updated version of our first, second and third visualization of effect sizes related to student achievement.
Order VL for Teachers!

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Hattie effect size list - 256 Influences Related To Achievement

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Hattie's updated effect size list of 256 influences across all areas related to student achievement.

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Visible Learning and Feedback in the Classroom

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Visible Learning and Feedback in the Classroom

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John Hattie on Visible Learning and Feedback in the Classroom

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What is your collective conception of impact?

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What is your collective conception of impact?

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Annual Visible Learning Conference: John Hattie: Day 1 - Part 1

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There is more Math Feedback than That's Correct, That's Incorrect

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There is more Math Feedback than That's Correct, That's Incorrect

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Short article, I wouldn't share this with educators because it isn't "research," however it's effective and grounded in research to build our knoweldge.

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There’s More to Math Feedback Than ‘Correct’ and ‘Incorrect’

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Teachers can help students master grade-level content by giving feedback that supports independent learning and progress.

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Instructional Strategies to Build Student Capacity

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Instructional Strategies to Build Student Capacity

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As a high school math teacher, I have experienced my share of disengaged students. Teachers from all grade levels and disciplines assure me that I'm not alone. In 2015, just half of students reported feeling engaged in school (Gallup, 2015). Students' disconnection from their education has potential long-term effects, such as limiting entrance to higher-level coursework, harming future employment opportunities, and contributing to high school dropout (Wang & Fredericks, 2014).

To boost motivation and participation, two colleagues and I resolved to transform a senior-level elective math class over one academic year, with student empowerment results beyond our expectations. Though we used these strategies in math, any teacher can use them to reshape student agency.

Creating empowered classrooms arose from our collaboration in a math professional learning community (PLC). Supportive teacher-to-teacher relationships are a key component for enabling students. It is important for teachers to collaboratively investigate new teaching methods and equally important for administrators to be open to what teachers offer. Empowered teachers lead to empowered students.

We established mutual trust in our PLC, sitting in each other's classrooms to observe students and instruction. By the second semester, we actively led one another's classes from time to time, presenting on Archimedes or the mathematics of origami. By getting to know each other's students, we took collective responsibility for their learning. We prioritized honest reflection and became invested in one another's experiences. One teacher described how gratifying our collaboration was because we exchanged ideas, not worksheets.

We set the stage for significant change by establishing a foundation of caring. Consulting in the hall with a student who is having a hard day might show you care, but it's not enough. Our previous classes adhered to more rigid lesson plans, where off-the-cuff conversations were cut short to prioritize content.

We shifted to intentionally engage in whole-class discussions, strengthening our relationships with students through dialogue that wasn't limited to math. Some of the best conversations arose organically in response to school announcements or current events that concerned students. One such conversation about a student walkout took an entire class period. Students expressed their feelings and opposing views as they discussed the role of schools in the gun debate. One teacher in our group positioned desks in a circle to facilitate conversation. Another explained her expectation that all students contribute to the dialogue. This developed students' confidence, which transferred to conversations on content.

The benefits are multifold. First, emphasizing the value of students' contributions makes them greater stakeholders in class operations. When students saw that we cared about what they thought, they were more likely to become involved. Second, students learn to listen to one another rather than just the teacher. Third, conversations serve as windows into our students' lives. Knowing our students well-from what they did on the weekend to problems in their after-school job-allowed us to teach math that was relatable to their lives. We contextualized math content using what we learned through these conversations.

We implemented student peer feedback in every unit, which guided students to take greater responsibility for their performance. Students critiqued their classmates' work using a "Two Stars and a Wish" format, writing two comments about what they liked and one comment on an area of improvement. To boost the feedback's effectiveness, we shared critique examples and asked students to judge their usefulness. They identified that qualities such as specificity, alternative suggestions, and thoughtful questioning could elevate the work.

Students also engaged in self-reflection on their projects, using a Process strand and a Product strand. For example, in pairs, they researched how fractals are advancing research in ecology and medicine and assembled a website with the information, which was circulated to classmates and faculty for feedback. Students rated themselves on specific prompts related to the life skills they employed to work together, what they discovered about themselves as learners, what they might do differently next time, and their awareness of group strengths and domains in need of focus. By coding feedback from peers, students could weigh their self-assessments against observations from others. We provided time for students to return to these documents during future projects.

Our greatest shift to student empowerment came when we asked students to critique instruction. Students told us what they did and did not like about projects through questions on Google forms: How could we make this project more meaningful for students? What should teachers do differently and why? As a PLC, we looked for commonalities. One project needed greater connection to the real world. Another was too loosely structured; students wanted more progress checkpoints. We adjusted future projects to reflect these needs, then shared every change and its rationale with our classes. As students became part of the project design process, investment in their own learning increased.

Our roles evolved from instructors to facilitators, giving us incentive to take more risks. For one, we invited students to help us develop a new grading rubric. In groups of three or four, they listed on sticky notes their desired assessment components and attached these to Process, Product, or Presentation categories on the board. Overwhelmingly, students wanted to be evaluated on creativity, organization, effort, aesthetics, and whether they participated each day. Notes with words like "knowledge" and "depth of research" were in the minority. Though teachers and students didn't always agree, we put many of their suggestions into the mix.

It was a lot of work to widen our perspectives on how to give students broader reign. But as one student said, "I actually like math now. I can't believe I'm saying that." One teacher declared that he was a better teacher in his other classes as a direct result of partnering with his students.

Change challenges previous routines and needs space and time to take root. We teachers fluctuated in our bursts of creativity, alternately leading and leaning on each other. Finding time to collaborate was challenging when we didn't have common prep periods. Sometimes, the pull to revert to a textbook and "traditional" teaching was hard to resist-it would have been easier in some ways. Part of what made our experiment possible was that this senior-level class wasn't tied to a standardized curriculum, which gave us more freedom. Fixed content that adheres to a calendar schedule can stifle inventive expression. We must carefully weigh the impact of standardization on opportunities for student empowerment.

We also had the backing of our school and district administrators, who allowed us to drive our own professional learning just as we empowered our students. Supporting teachers in taking risks like this one opens spaces for teachers to welcome students as collaborators in the classroom.

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Instructional Strategies to Build Student Capacity - ASCD

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As a high school math teacher, I have experienced my share of disengaged students. Teachers from all grade levels and disciplines assure me that I'm not alone. In 2015, just half of students reported feeling engaged in school (Gallup, 2015). Students' disconnection from their education has potential

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MT EVEREST _ Layers of Leadership Course

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Austin's Butterfly: Models, Critique, and Descriptive Feedback