Narrator: Welcome to EDVIEW360.
John Hattie: Learning is a struggle. Learning's hard work. And we have to, as teachers, communicate that message. There's nothing wrong with struggling in learning. There's nothing wrong with not knowing.
How can we get teachers to hear how students are thinking? How they are processing? What they do when they get into problems? What do they do when the struggle? Do they see the point to give up, or do they see the point to try an alternative strategy? One of the things that I certainly want to highlight is how we can stop talking as teachers and start listening to how students think about their learning. That's the major point behind Visible Learning.
Narrator: You just heard learning and teaching expert John Hattie, author of Visible Learning for Literacy Grades K–12: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning, and the groundbreaking Visible Learning series. Mr. Hattie is our guest today on EDVIEW 360. Here's your host, Pam Austin.
Pam Austin: This is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW 360 podcast series. We are so excited to have you back with us. I'm conducting today's podcast from Dallas, TX, the heart of Voyager Sopris Learning®. Today, we are honored to have with us John Hattie, author of Visible Learning for Literacy Grades K–12: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning, and the Visible Learning series. Welcome, Mr. John Hattie. Thank you for joining us all the way from Australia. We're so pleased to have you with us. I have had the pleasure of diving into a few of your books, and using them as valuable resources for personal and teacher professional learning. How did you become an author? And, more specifically, how did you decide to focus on education?
JH: Thanks, Pam, and it's great to join and talk with you in Dallas, and with Voyager Sopris Learning, because I can get quite fascinated about this topic and I have been for many, many years. And, certainly, when this whole started for me was coming into education as a bit of an outsider, in that I'm a measurement person, a statistician. That was my training. And, I came into this business of education,was fascinated that everybody I met had the answer about what they needed to do in their class, in their school, to make a difference with student learning. And every one of the answers were different. I've never met a teacher who said they were below average. And I was a kid once, and I remember that's not completely true.
And, so, it was this notion of reading the journal articles where everything seems to work, talking to teachers, looking at the policy space and realizing that there is a million answers out there. Why is it, then, we're in the situation we are? Where we do have that variability across teacher quality. And, so, that's where it really started. And, at the time when I started my career, meta-analysis was pretty new, and so I dabbled in learning how to use it, did some myself. I then thought one day, "Wouldn't it be great if I could take the many meta-analyses and synthesize them?” Which, ultimately, led to the Visible Learning book.
It took me about 20 years to write it, not because of the data. The data's the easy part. In fact, a few months ago we released a website, a free website with all the data on it, so anybody else can take all that data, save them hours and hours of work. But what took me so long was, what was the story? What was that story underlying all those data? And Visible Learning was my 10th book, as I had practiced at being an author before. The previous nine, obviously, disappeared into oblivion. And for some reason, it caught on. I think it was less about the data but more about the story. I don't know, it can be contested as it should be, but it was really quite exciting to see the reaction to the Visible Learning story, and to hear teachers now talking about research themselves and seeing it as part of their day-to-day vocabulary, and asking that question about: How can we make learning more visible?
In fact, Pam, one of the ironies, it took me probably about two years of many, many discarded titles to come up with the title of Visible Learning, which is kind of weird in a way because learning isn't visible. It's what's happening inside your head. But the argument was, how can we make it more visible? So, we can understand how students are thinking, how teachers are thinking, how policy and principals are thinking? So, that's where it all started from.
PA: When we take a look at your Visible Learning series, you've kind of alluded to why you created that series. But I want you to tell us, what is your definition of Visible Learning? You did mention that learning isn't visible, but what would you call Visible Learning in your own words?
JH: Yeah, when I say it's not visible, it's not easily visible. One of the things that I certainly want to highlight is how we can stop talking as teachers and start listening to how students think about their learning. Let me ask you, Pam, how do you go about learning?
PA: I stop, I think, I write. I process information. I try to apply it to the knowledge that I already know, and see if it makes sense.
JH: And just listen to that. The first comment I make is you had about six or seven different strategies of learning. Many students have one, and when it doesn't work, they do more of it. And then they say, "I can't learn. I'm not learning. I'm not achieving at school." And, so, to understand what students do when they don't know what to do, do they have multiple strategies? And by multiple, I mean two or three. You've got about six, which is quite a large array of strategies. Quite often, when I ask adults and particularly teachers that question, they say, "Well, I read it," or "I visualize it." And in many senses, of course, they do that. But if that doesn't work, they do what you do. They do other ways of thinking about it. So, how can we get teachers to hear how students are thinking? How they're processing? What they do when they get into problems? What do they do when they struggle? Do they see the point to give up or do they see the point to try an alternative strategy? Now, we went through transcripts from 14,000 hours of teachers' lessons, and we couldn't find a single instance where a teacher heard a strategy or taught an alternative strategy. That's the major point behind Visible Learning. Listen to how the students are thinking, help them to articulate it. Even we as adults, perhaps not you, given what you commented then. Sometimes, we struggle to have a language about how we think. But isn't that the essence of what kids are doing every day in the classroom? That's what Visible Learning's about.
PA: The whole idea that if you're teaching, it doesn't necessarily mean the students are learning, right? That whole processing piece is there. Since you already released a book, Visible Learning for Teachers, what made you decide to then develop a book specific to literacy? Why did you think that was needed?
JH: Well, all education's local. Everyone argues that their class, their school is different. And whilst the evidence indicates that's not really true in terms of what makes the major difference, it's the reality in how people think. The question I get and emails I get probably more than anything else is, "I've got a primary school, elementary school, does it work here?" "Is the research including university students? Surely it doesn't work the same for them, same for others." What works here in Melbourne, Australia, is not the same as what works in Dallas, TX. What works for special needs kids doesn't work. What works in literacy doesn't work in social studies. And, so, part of what we've been doing, and now we have about 20-something of these books, and social studies is just about to be released, is to try and put the message in the language which the teachers use every day. And, many times, more times than not, the similarity is incredibly greater than the differences.
But all of us speak in our own jargon, all of us speak in our own language. So, when we decided the literacy book, the literacy people would say, "Well, it doesn't apply to us because we're literacy teachers." Well, we can argue black and blue at dusk, but until we start writing the books in their language and acknowledging that we do have a professional language within our profession, then I think we're missing the point. So, the Visible Learning for Literacy uses lots of literacy examples. As you probably can see, it's tried to take the way in which, and we spent a lot of time talking with literacy and English teachers, teachers of English to try and understand the language they use. I have the luxury now, in terms of when I write books, we're able to trial them in schools with teachers, and at all times we're trying to listen. Do they understand what we're trying to say? And if they don't, we've got it wrong. So, we went back and re-wrote it.
PA: So, you are literally making connections to teachers.
JH: Yes.
PA: So that they can see how the information that you've gathered actually does connect, no matter what area, whether it's literacy or social studies, and I'm so excited to hear you mention that. Let's go back to the book, Visible Learning for Literacy. You specify the importance of teachers taking responsibility. Why is this aspect of teaching responsibility so important, and to what degree is it impactful to student learning?
JH: Well, when the book came out 10 years ago, one of the mistakes in my writing of that was that people saw the lead table of the list of influences and said, "Yes, I'm doing the stuff at the top, I'm not doing the stuff at the bottom," and that was never my message. And, so, what I started to do is to change the top story, the big story around the concept of knowing thy impact, which is getting to what we're talking about here. And I want teachers, yes, I do want them to choose high-probability interventions. But what really matters is the impact they're having on their class, and taking responsibility for the learning and, particularly, the lack of learning.
Teachers, believe it or not, are human. And as humans, we have an incredible number of biases, and probably the one I'm most guilty of is confirmation bias. I look for evidence that what I'm doing is correct, particularly as a father and as a husband, and around my daily life. But if we're going to advance things, we almost have to ask the opposite question. What evidence will I accept that I haven't done a good enough job? About what? About which students? And am I getting the degree of growth that I need? And when you start looking at classrooms that way, then, the only person in the classroom that's paid to be there is the teacher. So, I would expect the teacher to change what they do to reach more students, to have a greater impact on the content and the understandings they want to do, to increase the magnitude of the effect they're having.
And, so, this whole notion of taking responsibility of the learning and lack of learning, particularly the lack of learning, and seeing that as the major piece. I want a teacher to walk into a classroom and say, "My job here today is to evaluate my impact." That's when the students have the most benefit.
PA: It's a reasonable expectation, I would say, and it lends itself to that self-reflection and a focus on, "Hey, what did this research says works?”
JH: What I would like is kind of like Alice in Wonderland notion of reflection. How do you go through the looking glass, and see yourself from the other side? That's why it's so imperative that you talk with the students, you look at the artifacts of their work, you look at their assignments, about what they do know and what they did not know from your teaching. We have a tendency as humans so often to say the kids didn't learn because the kids weren't paying attention, they didn't put in enough effort. I want that turned on its head. What did we do as teachers? And do we just do it again, or did we just move on? Did we leave kids behind? Did we give the kids that were having the most difficulty the easy stuff, and say, "That's good enough for them." No, I want that reflection to be seen through the eyes of others.
And this is why listening to the students, seeing it through their work, and seeing your impact through their work. So, reflection's a bother to me unless it's reflection through the eyes of others.
PA: You know, you've got a quote from your book. You said that every student deserves a great teacher, not by chance, but by design. And you mention that maintaining things such as a clean classroom, and communicating expectations, so kids know what it is they're supposed to do and understand what direction they're supposed to go. Why are these factors so important?
JH: Well, there's two halves here, Pam. The first half is that there are a lot of pre-conditions to effective learning. When you ask students, right across the age range, "What's the most important thing about this classroom?" The concept of fairness gets out to be No. 1. They want a fair classroom. They don't talk about whether it be quiet or noisy. Fair. And, quite often, fair classrooms can be buzzy, noisy places, they can be quiet places. So, there are a lot of pre-conditions that are necessary to having great teachers. The second part of it, though, is that learning is a struggle. Learning's hard work. And we have to, as teachers, communicate that message. There's nothing wrong with struggling in learning. There's nothing wrong with not knowing. You don't come to school to learn that which you already know. So, how can you make sure that not knowing is an opportunity rather than a demerit? And that then brings this notion of communicating expectations to students about what they're learning.
Now, we've just completed a pretty major study here in Australia asking teachers about their concept of engagement. So, what does it mean when students are engaged and learning? And, sadly, the dominant notion of engagement is “doing.” The students are doing the work, the students are putting in effort. And, sadly, in a lot of doing, there's not a lot of learning. And around the ages of 9, 10, 11, 12, a lot of students say, "I don't want to do this anymore." And, so, they start to turn off. And, as Lee Jenkins has shown, by the end of primary school, the start of high school, four or five kids at most in each class want to be there deliberately to learn the stuff that we teach them. That's pretty horrific statistics.
And, so, how do we move away from engagement expectations as a function of completing the work, making sure it was neat, long, and handed in on time, to, there is a struggle of learning? And, when you ask students, as we've done, and I'm sure you've done many times, what engages them most in learning is that a-ha moment of discovery. It's that sense of making connections. It's not knowing something and then knowing something. And that's a totally different notion from many people who see good classrooms as kids getting high scores. And some kids, unfortunately, and some parents think that.
Learning is difficult, learning is a mess. Learning is a staccato. And this is why this notion of communicating expectations, providing the honest feedback, focusing on the learning more than the doing is so, so important.
PA: We're looking at changing a mindset, right? "I don't have to get it right the first time."
JH: That's right. That's why, when people were misinterpreting the early work, we decided to write the book on the 10 mindframes to make that very point you're making. It's a way of thinking.
PA: You also mention that each student should be able to ask...answer and ask questions, and these are the three questions: No. 1: What am I learning today? No. 2: Why am I learning this? And, No. 3: How will I know that I learned it? How can a teacher ensure that a student is able to answer those questions during and after every lesson?
JH: We do a lot of work now in schools around the world, and promoting our whole Visible Learning model. And one of the one things that we often do upfront is we ask teachers, what is their understanding of a good learner? What does learning look like to them? And, of course, we ask the students. When you get a mismatch in the answers, you've got a serious problem. Too often, students, when you're asking them what are they learning today, they talk about what they're doing. "This is what we're doing." "We have to complete this.” “We have to do that." And as I said before, that's not really what learning is.
If I took you outside now, Pam, and said I'm going to make you do the high jump, and I'm going to put up two poles but I'm not going to put a bar across the middle. I have a hunch, like me, you probably wouldn't do it. And if you did do it, you'd probably feel a little silly. But, unfortunately, for many kids, that's what school looks like. They don't know when good's good enough. They don't know what the bar is. They don't know what the criteria of success is other than handing it in on time and neatly. And, so, this notion of what I'm learning today, and what we find time and time again, that the more the students are understanding when's good good enough, they look at a worked example. They see an exemplar, they see a progression rubric, and they can see how they go relative to that. They are then much more involved in this task of learning than if you just give them something to do and hope like hang that they get it right.
And, then, this notion of “why.” I think we spend far too much time talking about real world examples, authentic examples. A lot of learning is not authentic, a lot of learning is not real world. But there's still a “why” to it. Learning the times table, there's a “why” to that. And understanding that “why,” a lot of reciprocal teaching work is very much based on understanding the “why” of what we're doing. What's the connections here? And, then, once again, as adults, we probably wouldn't stay on a task if we didn't have some sense that we're actually having some success. So, this notion of knowing how far or how close you are to success criteria, how you're moving beyond your personal best, how you know you learnt it. That's a really critical question.
Now, if I had a chance, I'd add a fourth, and I'm sure you could add many others. And my fourth would be: Can you now teach it to someone else? Surely the epitome of learning is being able to teach something to someone else. This is why teachers are so esteemed in my view, in the world. They can do that. I want kids to become their own teachers.
PA: You know, when I listen to you detail the reasons behind those questions, it came to my mind that, you know, we're teaching students to be self-reflective.
JH: Yes.
PA: Yes. It's a skill that they need for their lives, wouldn't you think?
JH: Look, particularly, in this Internet world where...Your country's very good at creating false facts, truths out of facts, all this kind of stuff, and it's endemic throughout the whole Internet system. And this is why at the moment in my work, we're spending a lot of time on how you develop evaluative mindsets. As I said before, I'm not a great fan of the reflection word because it so often turns into, my view about what I think I did. I want, my view about what I think I did and how it triangulates with others' views, and that latter part hardly happens.
So, we talk about the evaluative mindset. How can you, and this is what I think you're getting at, Pam. How can we evaluate how well we're doing? How can we use the artifacts around us, the evidence around us, other people's viewpoints, to understand ourselves? To have our own viewpoints? And this is why this whole notion of evaluative mindset is really critical, not only for teachers but particularly for students. We want them to have a sense of how close they are, but the other part of it. When you do have that a-ha moment, when you do make that connection, that's when there's the joy of learning. And we've got to bring those emotions back into learning. There's got to be a sense of accomplishment, there's got to be a sense, "I didn't know that before, and now I do now." And I think without those kind of joys in learning, we as adults wouldn't persist in doing what we're doing. No different to kids. They've got to have that emotion as well.
PA: Oh, definitely. There is a wonderful feeling when you've accomplished something, when you've worked hard and you've worked through it, and you've gotten to the other end, the other side of it, and then you've added to your backpack of knowledge and skills. Something that you can use again and again and again, so that definitely resonates with me. And the idea of the evaluative mindset as well. Now, I'm clear on what you mean with that, John, most definitely, and I think it connects with another phrase that you use, and this one resonated with me very strongly. The fact that errors are the hallmark of learning. That joy you get when you make a mistake, and you feel a little bit disappointed. But, oh, I made a mistake. I can evaluate what that mistake is and move forward. How are errors an opportunity for celebration? For that joy that you mentioned?
JH: No matter how much we try, Pam, talking about errors, it gets misunderstood more often than not. Sometimes, many of us, not just me, but others have tried to come up with other phrases like “desirable difficulties,” you know, "The brain is a great predictor of error," to get around it. Because what happens is teachers think that when kids make errors, particularly in front of other kids, it affects their self-esteem. And, yes, it can. But that shouldn't be a reason why we don't see errors as opportunities. Like if you're not making errors, the work's too easy. If you're making too many errors, the work's too hard.
So, errors can also be an indicator. And it's like all things. When you don't know something, how do you approach the fact you don't know? This is why, for example, less than 2 percent, 2 percent of child prodigies, become gifted adults. The majority of gifted kids at schools don't become gifted adults. They are terrified of errors. Particularly, their parents. And, so, that is a really destructive thing that we do to many of those students, and quite frankly, we're not as good with kids above average as we are with kids below average, for this very reason.
We see errors as mistakes, as wrong, as nasty, as needing kind of, "Go ahead and do it again," and kind of all the negative emotions to it. It's kind of like, when we ask kids in school, as I'd encourage your listeners to do, "What do you do when you make a mistake?" The majority of kids say, "I put my hand up, ask the teacher." Well, go and observe them. No, they don't. The only kids that put their hands up are the kids who know the answer, and a few who think they know the answer.
The majority of kids who don't know have learned by age 8, socialized into silence. And I think that is a travesty in terms of where we're going, because anything that you can teach...You take a literary novel, and you're going to teach that. I would never expect on day No. 1 for kids to know the answers. If they did, why am I teaching it? And, so, how can I see those misunderstandings, those errors, those struggles, as opportunities rather than mistakes? No kid, as I said before, comes to school to learn what they already know. It's what they don't know. And that's why we talk about all the time, "What do you do when you don't know? What do you do when you don't know what to do?" And I would hope that you said, "I would seek help." And that's sometimes the hardest thing for kids to do in a classroom. Some kids don't know how to do it by themselves. Giving them control over learning doesn't. In fact, it's the only influence that has an effect size of zero.
If I don't know what to do, I need to know how to go and get help. I can get help from the Internet. I can get help from a teacher. I can get help from a peer. I can express what I don't know, and that's what I want to see happen more in the classroom. We're spending a lot of our time at the moment looking at transcripts of classrooms, and it's sometimes pretty scary. Teachers talk between 80 percent and 90 percent of the time. How can you hear what you don't know, while you're supposed to be listening? How do we change that dynamic around? And that's why this notion of errors are the hallmarks of learning, they're the opportunities, is so powerful.
PA: All right, definitely powerful. Seeing errors as opportunities, as a shift to changing the idea of errors with a positive connotation, right? That's what we're looking to do.
JH: There's another conspiracy here, Pam, in that when we ask students about teachers talking, kids above average want the teachers to talk more, because they know how to play the game. It's the kids below average that want the teacher to talk less and listen to them, because they want to learn how to play the game, but they're denied that opportunity. So many teachers, when they self-reflect, say, "Oh, all the bright kids asked the right questions. They wanted to hear me talk more." Well, that actually is a sign that it's not working.
PA: Right, avoidance. Oh, and they learn the game. You're so right. You mentioned feedback.
JH: Yes.
PA: I'd like to know, what is the difference between good and bad feedback, and how do teachers make sure that they're providing good feedback to their students?
JH: Right from the very beginning of my work in Visible Learning, feedback became a very strong common denominator of the things that really made a difference. And I had a lot of pressure on me to write a book on feedback, which I resisted because there's a serious problem here. About a third of feedback is negative, is bad. The same feedback I give to you works. I give the same feedback to another student, it doesn't work. I give you feedback today, it works. I give you the same feedback tomorrow, it doesn't work. Understanding that variability is the key to feedback. Understanding that distinction between good and bad feedback is key. And, so, there are two things that really do matter here.
When I ask teachers what do they mean by feedback, more often than not they say it's about giving corrections. It's about giving more content. It's about working out what the kids know and don't know. It's about whether it can be informative, descriptive, prescriptive, and on and on. And there's nothing wrong with that. But when you ask students what do they mean by feedback, they have one answer. "Tell me what to do next." If feedback doesn't include information about where to go next, students will argue black and blue, despite two pages of your comments that you spent all Sunday writing, they didn't receive any feedback.
Most students will look at the mark because that's the only information they have about where to go next or where not to go next. Now, there's nothing wrong with comments, clarifications, and all that kind of feedback. But if there is nowhere to next, as well, in fact, that actually strengthens the where to next. And, so, that notion of where to next, it's like at the end of this call, Pam, and your editor said, "Well, you did this right. You did this wrong. You did this right…blah blah blah.” But they don't say, "And here's a way you could have done, and asked a question differently," or whatever. You're not going to learn anything other than it was good or bad. That where to next is so critical, and kids want it, so let's give it to them.
The second part of feedback is where you are in the instructional cycle. As you're first learning something, you're learning a lot of content, you're learning a lot of facts. You're trying to put the content and the information in front of them. If you're trying to teach a novel, what's the ideas? Tell me about the characters. Then, there comes a point where you want to relate those ideas and you want to say, "Well, when this character did this, what was the effect?" etc., that relationship stuff. And, then, finally, you want the students to take some ownership of their own learning. If you keep giving feedback at the task level, the students stay at that level. So, the kids that are working at the higher levels will argue, "I've got no feedback," and vice versa. If you give them all this feedback about relationship stuff when the kid's just trying to work out who the characters are, the feedback's not received.
So, this is why in our work we spend a lot more time on not asking about the nature of feedback that's given, but we ask about the nature of feedback that's received. Teachers actually give an incredible amount of feedback a day. On average, each kid receives about three seconds. They don't understand it, it's not relevant to where they are in their learning, it doesn't help the where to go next. So, what I'd like your listeners to do when they spend next Sunday and mark all the kids' work, give it back, wait a day so it's not just short-term memory, and then ask the students, "Write in three bullet points what you understood by that feedback I gave you yesterday." It's pretty sobering. It really shows you that a lot of feedback's not received, and in many ways, this is bad feedback. This is teachers doing all the work, and the students' not getting any of the benefit. And, so, feedback's a really tricky notion. We really have to understand that variability. And can you imagine, Pam, given feedback has a very powerful effect, if we could reduce that third that's negative, whoa? It's dramatically dynamic.
PA: You know, you stressed the importance of a teacher changing their teaching method based on student performance. What should the teacher's next steps be?
JH: Stop. I think one of the words that we don't use in education enough is the word efficiency. Harry Fisher does this method. We talk all the time about how effective it is, but sometimes we take too long to work out whether it was effective or not effective. There's a lot of work. Your country, right around the rest of the world. We've been obsessed with this notion of formative evaluation. And, sometimes, we miss the point, and we think formative information is about the assessment, and about the tests. It's not. It's about us understanding about what we're doing, so that we change it.
I have no difficulty with summative, I have no difficulty with formative. I just want people to see more often that as teachers, we need to be the greatest formative engines of the lot, and we have to use the evidence, which isn’t just the test scores. It could also be the artifacts of kids' work, it could be talking to the kids, to triangulate that. To continually ask the question about, "Am I having an impact? About what, with whom? To what magnitude?" That's why teachers should be the ones that are the best listeners in the classroom to get that evidence, to know when it's time to stop using the method that they're doing, and start keeping going on.
The other thing I mentioned before, one of the sources of evidence we don't want to use just by itself is: “Are the kids engaged?” “Are they doing?” Because sometimes you can get very quiet, busy classrooms with no learning. What are they struggling with? What are they grappling with? Where do they go next? And this is where I want teachers to shut up more and listen more. This is where I want teachers to sometimes have multiple teaching strategies. This is not a bag of tricks, this is not eclecticism. This is a strategy so that they continually ask the same question: "What is my impact today?"
PA: In your book, Visible Learning for Literacy, you list out 10 mindframes for teachers, and I'm just going to read them for those of us who may not be familiar with them, so bear with me here:
Can you explain how these 10 mindframes apply to curriculum planning?
JH: It was that move from looking at the research as tips and tricks to choose between...But that worried me. To me, then moving to this notion of looking at how teachers think. When we say how teachers think, that's almost a glib statement. We wanted to get beneath that. And this is why we spent quite some time working with teachers, particularly those that had incredibly high impacts, about how they were thinking. And these 10 mindframes are trying to capture that thinking of our most successful teachers. And, yes, I do want them, teachers, to look at how they think, particularly when it relates to planning. This is why looking at, I set challenges, is the task going to be appropriately challenging for the students? Or is it going to be students are going to be doing more of what they could do yesterday? And that Goldilocks principle of challenge, not too hard, not too boring, is really critical when we devise curriculum.
Now, the difficulty, of course, is we have 20 to 30 kids in the class, there are 20 to 30 different ways in which kids can be challenged. But if we're not challenging the students in our curriculum, I can guarantee you they will challenge you, and probably not about the things you want to be challenged about. Telling them about what the nature of learning is required, and making sure they've got the tools and teaching relating to that notion of the different strategies of learning, as we've talked about. How do you create the lesson so that there is more dialogue? Now, that's a tricky one because we've got to get that balance right. It's not dialogue vs. monologue. It's the right time for monologue. It’s the right time for dialogue. Surely, 89 percent of time, from our 18,000 transcripts of teacher lessons, 89 percent is the average amount of time teachers talk. Surely, that's too much. How do we reduce it at the right time? How do we get students to talk to each other at the right time, about the right things? How do we actually get students to appreciate and realize in the curriculum and, in our planning, it's OK to go into the learning pit and not know? When's it the right time to come out? And that needs to be planned for, in terms of what we're doing as a curriculum agent.
And, so, these mindframes really do underlie the whole notion about how we plan. When we looked at National Board teachers in the U.S., and the work we did on that, many of those teachers didn't have written curriculum plans. But they had very clear planning about when they stopped something, when they listened, when they looked at how kids were thinking, what they were doing. They had really incredible challenges in the class. In fact, the most stunning difference between National Board teachers, which I would call experts, and those who were as experienced but not experts, was 75 percent of the work in the National Board teachers' classrooms was about deep learning, and 25 percent surface, and the exact opposite in the experienced but not expert. They got the balance right of the content that you need in terms of the literacy we're learning, the knowledge we're learning, and then moving on to using it. And they knew when to be surface, when to be deep, and that requires incredible planning. We're doing a lot of work at the moment in our own research, looking at how we use, and it's terribly jargon-y here, Pam, cognitive task analysis. How are we going to actually structure tasks so that we have a better understanding of the kinds of thinking that we want kids to have as they engage with texts, as they engage with notions of literacy, etc. etc. And it's not easy, and I won't confess we're there, but this is what we want to spend a lot more time on, and I'm really excited that if we can start grading our lesson plans in terms of the rigor and complexity of thinking, I think we can make major advances to turn kids on to the challenge of literacy.
PA: I want to shift a little bit to, what advice would you give to school and district leaders to help ensure that they are also prepared to understand the complexity, right? The diversity. All that work that goes into teaching that most people think is simple. You just go in and teach, right?
JH: The whole Visible Learning model has been criticized as, "All you're doing is telling teachers that they should do different stuff, etc." “And you're not investing in improving the nature of what teaching is." It's the exact opposite. And this is where school leaders and district leaders are so important. To do the kind of work that we're talking about takes time. It takes resources. Like getting teachers to work together under this notion of collaborative efficacy. I don't want them to do it at four o'clock in the afternoon. I want them to do it as part of their day job. That's expensive. And, so, we know this, and I think it's really important that school and district people realized that teachers do need to critique each other's work in positive ways. They do need to start and understand how they go about thinking and the evaluative thinking in their classrooms, doing it together. This is where it really becomes really critical for school and district leaders to see this, to resource it, and to make sure that the focus is right.
Your country has been going through a whole wave of professional learning communities. It's a wonderful idea that unfortunately is going to fail, because too many people are seeing it as, "Let's get some teachers together and talk," or share a resource, or best practice, or watch an app, or worse, watch another teacher teaching. I don't want any of that. I want the interaction amongst those teachers about, what does it mean to have a year's growth or a year's input? What does it mean to have an impact in this particular classroom? And this is where school and district leaders are so critical.
I just find it amazing that if you look over the last 50 years, like, when I went to school 50 years ago, teachers had no responsibility for my social and emotional wellbeing. Now, it's critical. As our teachers have taken on so many tasks, and they've taken it on with 20 to 30 kids, incredible responsibilities. In some parts of your country, there is very little professional learning that's part of the day job, and I think that's really the travesty of this business. It is tough improving, continually asking, and when we talked about reflection before, I don't want teachers to do it by themselves. I want teachers to come into other teachers' classrooms and watch the impact on the kids, not watch the teacher teaching. That's a resource issue.
And, so, yes, when we talk at school and district level, they start to realize that, yes, it's an expensive intervention to want to make a difference. But we also spent 10 years building up evaluative data showing that the investment is incredibly well worth it, and that right at the moment, Pam, about yesterday, I'd finished the next book on teaching as a profession, the whole notion of evaluative thinking, and how we need to do it collectively. That is kind of a dramatic difference in terms of how we fund our schools at the moment. So, no, school and district leaders are pretty critical to make sure that we do get teachers working together about their impact. We have professional coaches that help them understand that. And I want to do it collectively, I don't want to do it one teacher at a time. So, the school level is pretty important.
PA: And I think about what district leaders want to do, how they want to support, and quite often they want the results in a hurry, and it's because there is pressure on them. And it is expensive, I agree with you, and time consuming, but definitely worth it. Thank you so much for just adding your input on that, that evaluative thinking and processing is definitely what we need in our schools.
Narrator: You’ve just heard Part 1 of a two-part podcast featuring learning and teaching expert John Hattie. Download the second part of the interview at VoyagerSopris.com/podcast, or on iTunes. Thank you for listening.
*John Hattie is not affiliated with Voyager Sopris Learning, nor does he endorse or make any representations or warranties regarding products associated with Voyager Sopris Learning.