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Well, after a few false starts, the moment is here! SpedSafari Book Club is back and ready to support teachers everywhere through the school year by providing DIY professional development on your terms!
This month, we’re getting the year off to a great start by reading and discussing Visible Learning for Teachers by John Hattie!
John Hattie is one of those researches that everyone in the education field comes across sooner or later. His work on high-leverage teaching practices and effect sizes comes up time and again in teacher prep and leadership development programs, and everywhere you look his name is mentioned in connection with discussions of what, exactly successful schools are doing to be successful, and how those results could replicated other places.
Well, Mr. Hattie isn’t necessarily happy about that. He comes right out of the gate in Visible Learning for Teachers and says that based on the massive amount of research that he and his colleagues have done, any instructional practice improves student performance at least a little! Consequently, it’s not sufficient to look at high-leverage practices and treat them like a recipe- add a little of this and a little of that and the end result will be positive outcomes for students, 100% of the time. Instead, the focus should be on teachers themselves, and how they evaluate their students’ learning to determine next steps and move them forward.
I’m only being a teeny bit sarcastic with my meme choice here, because it seems as though this statement should be pretty self-apparent, if I’m honest. Having instruction leads to better outcomes than no instruction at all, right? That makes sense. However, it’s more nuanced than that. Hattie argues that the position that “teachers make the difference” misses the point entirely, and in fact he makes that exact statement three different times in the book.
That’s right! Instead, what separates good teachers from great ones, and expert teachers (teachers who, according to Hattie, are dedicated to and passionate about the craft of teaching) from experienced teachers (teachers who have just been around a long time) is the presence of evaluation. That is, expert, effective, passionate teachers are constantly evaluating lessons, instructional delivery, and student learning, engagement, and performance to identify what adjustments need to be made, and then they actually make those adjustments!
This is indeed good news, for everyone! We hear all the time (or at least, I have) about the need to be reflective regarding our practices. Hattie says that evaluation and reflection go hand in hand. We don’t need to justify what did or didn’t happen in a given lesson, we can evaluate and form a plan for how to move forward. That sounds like something that we’re all having to do now, as we begin another school year and navigate the ever-changing landscape of COVID-19 protocols.
Indeed, now more than ever, we are having to make decisions about what to keep and what to leave behind as we strive to move students forward, in some cases in the face of significant learning loss. We have to merge our required content with the need to meet students where they are, emotionally as well as academically, while also safeguarding our own physical and mental health and making decisions about how to use the resources we have to do the most good for our students.
Evaluating student learning and using data to make decisions help to ensure that students are learning what they need to learn and that nobody’s time is being wasted- theirs or ours!
We could probably do an entire year’s worth of book studies just going one chapter at a time through Visible Learning for Teachers, but now I want to know what you thought of the book!
How are you evaluating student data this year? Is that a change from last year?
How do you get support when data are unclear or the way forward is messy?
How are students involved in this process? What do they think about all this?
Weigh in in the comments below! And, as if that weren’t enough fun, stop back tomorrow when the October 2021 book for SpedSafari Book Club will be revealed!
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