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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Hattie
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December 2 - December 22, 2019
The art of teaching, and its major successes, relate to “what happens next”—the manner in which the teacher reacts to how the student interprets, accommodates, rejects, and/or reinvents the content and skills, how the student relates and applies the content to other tasks, and how the student reacts in light of success and failure apropos the content and methods that the teacher has taught.
Fire
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).
tales of wonderful work produced by happy children with contented parents and doting teachers.
Michael Fullan, one of the most critical problems our schools face is “not resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence resulting from the uncritical and uncoordinated acceptance of too many different innovations
we so often supply yet another program rather than nurture demand for good programs.
We have a rich educational research base, but rarely is it used by teachers, and rarely does it lead to policy changes that affect the nature of teaching.
achievement. It demonstrates that the reason teachers can so readily convince each other that they are having success with their particular approach is because the reference point in their arguments is misplaced.
As Glass (1987) so eloquently argued when the first What Works: Politics and research was released, such appeals to common sense can mean that there is no need for more research dollars. Such claims can ignore the realities of classroom life, and they too often mistake correlates for causes.
It may be that increasing these behaviors in some teachers also leads to a decline in other attributes (e.g., caring and respect for students). Correlates, therefore, are not to be confused with the causes.
As Nuthall (2007) has shown, 80% of feedback a student receives about his or her work in elementary (primary) school is from other students. But 80% of this student-provided feedback is incorrect!
Some have argued that the only legitimate support for causal claims can come from randomized control trials (RCTs, i.e., trials in which subjects are allocated to an experimental or a control group according to a strictly random procedure). There are few such studies among the many outlined in this book, although it could be claimed that there are many “evidence-informed” arguments in this book. While the use of randomized control trials is a powerful method, Scriven (2005) has argued that a higher gold standard relates to studies that are capable of establishing conclusions “beyond reasonable
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A major aim is to weave a story from these data that has some convincing power and some coherence, although there is no claim to make these “beyond reasonable doubt”.
Well said
Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game. (Popper, K. R., 1968, p. 280)
My man karl
Teachers engage in the discourse of the child and their home by pathologising Māori students’ lived experiences and by explaining their lack of educational achievement in deficit terms.
Alison Jones calls this type of thinking a “discourse of disadvantage” (Jones & Jacka, 1995). They do not see themselves as the agents of influence, see very few solutions, and see very little that they can do to solve the problems.
Clever
It is the mark of an educated man … that in every subject he looks for only so much precision as its nature permits. (Aristotle, 350BC)
Probable is improbable
Power of mayhrmayical thinking
Cohen (1990) has commented that “under the sway of the Fisherian scheme [or dependence on statistical significance], there has been little consciousness of how big things are … science is inevitably about magnitudes … and meta-analysis makes a welcome force toward the accumulation of knowledge” (pp. 1309–1310).
effect size
Effect size = [Mean treatment – Mean control]/SD or Effect size = [Mean end of treatment – Mean beginning of treatment]/SD where SD is the pooled sample standard deviation.
reciprocal teaching, which has an overall large effect of d = 0.74.
Instead of considering only the size of an effect, we should be looking for patterns in the various effect sizes and the causal implications across effect sizes, and making policy decisions on an overall investigation of the differences in effect sizes.
engage or disengage, and make meaning out of this variegated landscape.
the generalizability of the overall effect is an empirical issue, and, as will be seen, there are far fewer moderators than are commonly thought.
I realized that the most powerful single influence enhancing achievement is feedback.
it dawned on me that the most important feature was the creation of situations in classrooms for the teachers to receive more feedback about their teaching—and then the ripple effect back to the student was high
These messages of learning intentions, success criteria, direct teaching, and the power of feedback—rather than being concerned with structural adaptations—are still powerful two decades later.
the “best way to teach organizing ideas—concepts, generalizations, and principles—appears to be to present those constructs in a rather direct fashion” (Marzano, 1998, p. 106) and then have students apply these concepts to new situations.
argued that 80 percent of the variance in achievement could be accounted for by student effects, 7 percent by school effects, and 13 percent by teacher effects.
students of exceptional teachers, even in ineffective schools, either maintained or increased achievement, many quite substantially. “Exceptional performance on the part of teachers not only compensates for average performance at the school level, but even ineffective performance at the school level” (Marzano, 2000, p. 81).
Topics not included are those concerning English as a second language, affective or physical outcomes, and meta-analyses where the number of studies was fewer than four.
Sorry ms darcas
Using the average sample size per study, this would multiply out to about 236 million students in total.
Said whoa 😮!
To those immersed in large-scale statistics, this would not be surprising: normality is often, but not necessarily, present when there are large sample sizes.
Law of large numbers
Throughout this book this d = 0.40 effect size is referred to as the hinge-point or h-point, as this is the point on the continuum that provides the hinge or fulcrum around which all other effects are interpreted.
The best available estimate as to the effects of schooling is based on longitudinal studies.
Aah'
I remember this word too
They should be seeking greater than d = 0.40 for their achievement gains to be considered above average, and greater than d = 0.60 to be considered excellent.
The null hypothesis is virtually certain to be false before analysis commences and thus it is uninformative (see Novick & Jackson, 1974).
Maturation alone can account for much of the enhancement of learning (see Cahan & Davis, 1987). Thus, any effects below d = 0.15 can be considered potentially harmful and probably should not be implemented.
We think in generalities, but we live in details. (Whitehead, 1943, p. 26)
Visible teaching and learning occurs when learning is the explicit goal, when it is appropriately challenging, when the teacher and the student both (in their various ways) seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained, when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when there is feedback given and sought, and when there are active, passionate, and engaging people (teacher, student, peers, and so on) participating in the act of learning.
The remarkable feature of the evidence is that the biggest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers.
the key ingredients are awareness of the learning intentions, knowing when a student is successful in attaining those intentions, having sufficient understanding of the student's understanding as he or she comes to the task, and knowing enough about the content to provide meaningful and challenging experiences in some sort of progressive development.
having the skill to “get out the way” when learning is progressing towards the success criteria.
A safe environment for the learner (and for the teacher) is an environment where error is welcomed and fostered—because we learn so much from errors and from the feedback that then accrues from going in the wrong direction or not going sufficiently fluently in the right direction.
the activity of teaching and learning, and
spiraling up and down the knowledge continuum,
the power of deliberative practice. It
teachers as activators, as deliberate change agents, and as directors of learning.
Effective teaching is not the drilling and trilling to the less than willing.
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.
constructivism is not a theory of teaching, but a theory of knowing and knowledge, and it is important to understand the role of building constructions of understanding.
