Hattie's Research Based Instructional Practices and Collaborative Professional Development Plans

Video Transcription

Hello there and welcome. In this lesson, we'll be focusing on the work of New Zealand-born researcher John Hattie and what he calls visible learning, which are research-based instructional practices and how they relate to collaborative professional development plans. Let's get started.

There's never enough time, not with our family, our friends, or our jobs. This realization requires us to make some difficult decisions. Here's an example. We were recently preparing to have guests for a family function. They were coming at 6:00 PM and there was a lot of work to be done.

My wife was in charge of preparing the food, and I was handling the cleaning. Time was getting away from me and I had a decision to make. Was it more important to clean the upstairs bedroom, which no one was going to see, or set up the volleyball net in the backyard? Since the objective was to ensure our guests would have fun, I closed the door to the bedroom and set up the volleyball net. When making decisions, it's important to think about what your initial objective is.

Researcher John Hattie's groundbreaking and incredibly thorough study in 2009-- updated in 2011 under the title Visible Learning for Teachers-- was the result of a meta analysis of 800 studies on the factors that have the most impact on student learning. His findings were published in a text entitled Visible Learning, which he defines as the ability of teachers to see learning from the perspective of their students.

In essence, this is a step toward teachers coaching students to take ownership of their learning and become their own teachers. However, to help students accomplish this, it takes a self-reflective and self-evaluative educator to help them.

As I mentioned, Hattie's work is extremely comprehensive. He took his findings and organized them into six domains that impact student learning. They are the student, which includes personal characteristics and demographics. The home, including family influences and culture. The school, including the culture, structure, environment, and other characteristics. The curricula, including content of what is assessed and curriculum progressions. The teacher, including background and preparation. And finally, teaching and learning approaches, including style and teaching strategies or pedagogy.

Hattie's work is a call for teachers to reflect and evaluate their own teaching practices based on the results of student data. If what we are doing is not working, we need to find other ways. In many cases, it may require a new way of thinking that leads us to professional development and growth in specific areas.

For example, if the data reveals that your students are struggling with meeting the science standards, perhaps it's because you don't have a clear understanding of the next generation science standards and attending a professional development would help. Teachers need to use what the research tells them about effect size and effective strategies to improve their own practice. Improvement, however, has to begin by developing a professional growth plan. Let's take a look at that science example again.

In analyzing the standards in their own practice, the teacher discovers that she is relying heavily on lecture and is lacking student-to-student interactions. As part of her professional growth plan, she decides to implement reciprocal teaching strategies to her daily practice.

This example leads us right into a discussion about effect size and which teacher practices carry with them the greatest impact on student achievement. According to Hattie's calculations through his meta analysis, he determined that strategies and influence with an effect size greater than 0.4 will impact student achievement. This number is referred to as the hinge point. However, when the effect size enters the 1.0 range, there's a significant increase in students growth-- up to 50%.

You may want to pause the video here and take a closer look at Hattie's top 20 influences across the six domains. The influence effect size is in parentheses. Based on the top 20 of the 138 influences, it's evident that the student, teacher, pedagogy, and content have the greatest impact on student achievement. There've been a lot of other studies as well, such as the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, that reveal other areas that impact teacher effectiveness as well, including teacher evaluation, observations, coaching, and feedback. This all leads back to why we do what we do, and that's to help increase student achievement.

If you overlay the Danielson and Marzano models with Hattie's top 20 influences, you'll find a great deal of overlap. In fact, many of Hattie's influences are actually embedded within those evaluation models. The only exception would be acceleration, which makes sense since teachers should maintain focus on their use of these influences.

When planning where to invest your time and energy, you always want to get the most bang for your buck. You'll want to keep this in mind when developing a professional growth plan. Whether you do it independently or is part of a collaborative team, my advice is to consider choosing strategies that have the greatest impact on student learning and are built around specific instructional skills in those areas.

For instance, a group of teachers may come together to work on providing students specific, timely, and actionable feedback to their students. Another example, may be a collaborative professional growth plan in which teachers agree to observe one another in order to document clarity in giving directions and assignments.

Let's go ahead and summarize. We introduced you Hattie's work called visible learning and its six domains. We defined effect size and looked at the list of top 20 influences based on that effect size. Then we looked at his theory through the lens of teacher evaluation.

And now for today's food for thought. Take some time to look at Hattie's top 20 list again. Which influences could you use of support with? For more information on how to apply what you've learned in this video, please view the additional resources section that accompany this presentation. The additional resources section includes links useful for application of the course material, including brief descriptions of each resource.

Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time.