More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Hattie
Read between
June 4 - June 21, 2019
Instead this book aims to have a message, a story, and a set of supporting accounts of this story.
The major message is that we need a barometer of what works best, and such a barometer can also establish guidelines as to what is excellent—too often we shy from using this word thinking that excellence is unattainable in schools.
We acknowledge that teachers teach differently from each other; we respect this difference and even enshrine it in terms like “teaching style” and “professional independence”.
Learning is spontaneous, individualistic, and often earned through effort. It is a timeworn, slow and gradual, fits-and-starts kind of process, which can have a flow of its own, but requires passion, patience, and attention to detail (from the teacher and student).
“not resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence resulting from the uncritical and uncoordinated acceptance of too many different innovations (Fullan & Stiegelbauer, 1991, p. 197).
Further, teachers are often very “context specific”, as the art for many of them is to modify programs to fit their particular students and teaching methods—and this translation is rarely acknowledged.
When we are considering what works in classrooms, we might have the wrong reference point. What then would be the right reference point?
If common sense is the litmus test then everything could be claimed to work, and maybe therein lies the problems with teaching.
For example, one of the major results presented in this book relates to increasing the amount of feedback because it is an important correlate of student achievement.
This too can be said of teachers. With more feedback teachers improve.
Simply applying a recipe (e.g., “providing more feedback”) will not work in our busy, multifaceted, culturally invested, and changing classrooms.
Evidence-based this and that are the buzz words, but while we collect evidence, teachers go on teaching.
Influences on the left of this continuum are those that decrease achievement, and those on the right increase achievement. Those near the zero point have no influence on achievement outcomes.
Effect size = [Mean treatment – Mean control]/SD
Effect size = [Mean end of treatment – Mean beginning of treatment]/SD
The effect size of 0.40 sets a level where the effects of innovation enhance achievement in such a way that we can notice real-world differences, and this should be a benchmark of such real-world change.
The major message is simple—what teachers do matters.
The activity was visible and “in the air”; passive was not a word in the vocabulary of these accomplished teachers—learning was not always loud and heated but it was rarely silent and deadening, and it was often intense, buzzing, and risky.
In contrast, the two deep processes—relational and elaborative—constitute a change in the quality of thinking that is cognitively more challenging than surface questions.
1 the child; 2 the home; 3 the school; 4 the curricula; 5 the teacher;
6 the approaches to teaching (two chapters).
prior knowledge of learning; • expectations; • degree of openness to experiences; • emerging beliefs about the value and worth to them from investing in learning; • engagement; • ability to build a sense of self from engagement in learning, and a reputation as a learner.
What the child brings to the learning.
parental expectations and aspirations for their child; • parental knowledge of the language of schooling.
What the home brings to learning.
the climate of the classroom, such as welcoming errors, and providing a safe, caring environment; • peer influences.
What the school brings to learning.
the quality of teaching—as perceived by the students; • teacher expectations; • teachers’ conceptions of teaching, learning, assessment, and the students—this relates to teachers’ views on whether all students can progress and whether achievement for all is changeable (or fixed), and on whether progress is understood and articulated by teachers; • teacher openness—whether teachers are prepared to be surprised; • classroom climate—having a warm socio-emotional climate in the classroom where errors are not only tolerated but welcomed; • a focus on teacher clarity in articulating
...more
The teacher brings to learning.
There is no set of essential experiences
that must be taught, let alone a “correct” order for teaching
students to become ...
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It seems that knowledge, empathy and verbal ability all need to be present. They are greater than the sum of the parts and if one is missing the effectiveness is reduced by more than a third.
The exemplary school emphasized the engagement of students in the learning process, teachers articulating strategies of instruction and paying attention to learning theories, and the school building as an infrastructure to support such instruction.
They argued that goals serve a variety of functions that are essential in the teaching process: goals regulate action and they explain the nature of the link between the past and the future; and goals assume that human action is directed by
