John Hattie - Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning

Visible Learning for Teachers

John Hattie's ground-breaking book Visible Learning synthesized the results of more than 15 years research involving millions of students and represented the biggest ever collection of evidence-based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning.

Visible Learning for Teachers takes the next step and brings those ground-breaking concepts to a completely new audience. Written for students, pre-service and in-service teachers, it explains how to apply the principles of Visible Learning to any classroom anywhere in the world. The author offers concise and user-friendly summaries of the most successful interventions and offers practical step-by-step guidance to the successful implementation of visible learning and visible teaching in the classroom.

This book:

links the biggest ever research project on teaching strategies to practical classroom implementation;

champions both teacher and student perspectives and contains step-by-step guidance including lesson preparation, interpreting learning and feedback during the lesson and post lesson follow up;

offers checklists, exercises, case studies and best practice scenarios to assist in raising achievement;

includes whole school checklists and advice for school leaders on facilitating visible learning in their institution;

now includes additional meta-analyses bringing the total cited within the research to over 900;

comprehensively covers numerous areas of learning activity including pupil motivation, curriculum, meta-cognitive strategies, behaviour, teaching strategies and classroom management.

Visible Learning for Teachers is a must read for any student or teacher who wants an evidence-based answer to the question: how do we maximize achievement in our schools?

John Hattie is Professor and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia and honorary Professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Visible Learning and co-author of Intelligence and Intelligence Testing, both published by Routledge.

Visible Learning
for Teachers

Maximizing impact on learning

John Hattie

First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2012 John Hattie

The right of John Hattie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hattie, John.

Visible learning for teachers : maximizing impact on learning / John Hattie.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Visual learning. I. Title.
LB1067.5.H37 2012
370.1523dc23

2011032967

ISBN: 9780415690140 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780415690157 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780203181522 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon

Elliot is now aged 10. When Visible Learning was being completed, Elliot was diagnosed with leukaemia. Since then, he has completed the four-year regime of chemotherapy; now, his own system is being asked to take over. He has started school, is learning to read and write, and is becoming a happy, adventurous pre-teen having retained his sparkly personality throughout the arduous hospitalization. The scripts that the doctors decided to follow have been successful and the interventions have had major positive consequences. Throughout the treatment, the impact of the interventions was monitored, changed, and led to the critical decisions that now allow Elliot to shine in touch rugby and BMX riding, and to be a peer mediator at his school. He has been a part of a community of doctors, nurses, teachers, friends, and family so many were involved. The impact of the dosage and treatment was constantly monitored to ensure that it was leading to the criteria of success. Decisions were made in light of the monitoring; teams worked to understand the consequences of treatments; and evidence was the key to adaptive professional decision-making all aiming to maximize the impact not only on the medical, but also the social and family, aspects. We all truly knew their impact. Again, Elliot is the inspiration for the major message of this book: know thy impact!

For many years of my career, I have worked in schools, met many stunning teachers who have evidence of their impact on student learning, and worked with some of the best in the world in researching teaching expertise. In the past few years, my team has run workshops for over 3,000 teachers and school leaders, and worked in more than 1,000 schools, mainly in New Zealand and Australia. We have learned much from these schools about the implications from Visible Learning. The message certainly is not ticking off the top ten in the league table! The most common question is: Where do I start? The argument in this book is that the starting place is the way in which you think about your role it is to know, on a regular basis, the nature and magnitude of your impact on the learning of your students. The next most common question is What does visible learning look like in a school? hence one of the themes in this book of visible learning inside. There is no program, no single script, no workbook on how to implement visible learning; instead, I have provided a set of benchmarks that can be used to create debates, to seek evidence, and to self-review to determine whether a school is having a marked impact on all of its students. This highlights the importance of educators as evaluators of their impact.

Both questions (Where do I start?; What does visible learning look like?) beg the next question,What is the nature of the learning that you wish to impact?, and my hope is that it is more than passing surface-level tests. It involves impacting on the love of learning, inviting students to stay in learning, and seeing the ways in which students can improve their healthy sense of being, respect for self, and respect for others as well as enhancing achievement. What achievement is to be valued needs to be a major debate in schools, communities, and societies; right now, such curricular questions seem more determined by the test specifications than by such lively debate.