10 Mindframes for Visible Learning

Teaching for Success

John Hattie, Klaus Zierer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351796859
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein
• Edition: 1

The original Visible Learning research concluded that one of the most important influencers of student achievement is how teachers think about learning and their own role. In Ten Mindframes for Visible Learning, John Hattie and Klaus Zierer define the ten behaviors or mindframes that teachers need to adopt in order to maximize student success. These include:

• thinking of and evaluating your impact on students' learning;

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• the importance of assessment and feedback for teachers;

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• working collaboratively and the sense of community;

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• the notion that learning needs to be challenging;

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• engaging in dialogue and the correct balance between talking and listening;

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• conveying the success criteria to learners;

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• building positive relationships.

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These powerful mindframes, which should underpin every action in schools, are founded on the principle that teachers are evaluators, change agents, learning experts, and seekers of feedback who are constantly engaged with dialogue and challenge.

This practical guide, which includes questionnaires, scenarios, checklists, and exercises, will show any school exactly how to implement Hattie's mindframes to maximize success.

CHAPTER 1
I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning

QUESTIONNAIRE FOR SELF-REFLECTION

Assess yourself by rating your agreement with the following statements: 1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree.

I am very good at …

making my impact on student learning visible.

using methods for making my impact on student learning visible.

I know perfectly well …

that student achievements make my impact visible.

that student achievements help me to maximize my impact.

My goal is always to …

evaluate my impact on student learning.

use multiple methods of measuring student achievement to assess my impact on student learning.

I am thoroughly convinced …

that I need to evaluate my impact on student learning regularly and systematically.

that I need to use student learning to asses my impact.

VIGNETTE

Please imagine two teachers. Both prepare their lessons properly and conscientiously. While the one teacher formulates his or her central message as “I want to teach a good lesson,” the maxim of the other teacher is “I would like to make my impact on the learners visible at the end of the lesson.” Both mindframes are convincing at first glance. At second glance, however, the difference becomes clear: The first teacher will be satisfied if she or he feels at the end of the lesson that the lesson has gone well, the learners have participated well, no disturbances have interrupted the flow of the lesson, and the most important content was explained. All of this is, of course, important for the other teacher as well. But she or he will not rely on feeling and will look for evidence. As a result, at least at the end of the lesson, but probably during the lesson as well, the second teacher will have to slip into the role of the evaluator again and again, listening instead of talking, making learning visible and showing the students what they can do now – and what they cannot. The lesson will not end without this teacher trying to make his or her influence visible by means of the students’ learning performance.

What is this chapter about?

This vignette tries to pinpoint the core message of this mindframe: Educational expertise is shown by how teachers think about what they do. One of the most crucial questions is whether teachers want to know about their impact and make it visible. Teachers who have set themselves this goal and are consistently trying to implement it are fundamentally different from teachers who do not ask themselves this question. “Visible Learning” and “Know thy impact” become the core message of this mindframe – and the core message of this book.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to explain, in light of this core message:

• the progress from proficiency to enhanced achievement.
• the evidence of the factors “providing formative evaluation” and “response to intervention.”
• what is meant by the notion “Teachers are to DIE for.”
• how individual feedback works.

Which factors from Visible Learning support this mindframe?

When you walk into a classroom and say to yourself, “My job here is to evaluate my impact,” then students are the major beneficiaries. This is by far the most important of all mindframes and dominates as the major message from the Visible Learning research. Of course, this begs the moral purpose question of what we mean by impact. It also means we have to continually adjust and refine what we are doing to maximize the impact for each student, and it means we often need to stop talking and listen for our impact.

There are many forms of impact, such as a sense of belonging as a learner, the will and thrill of learning, respect for self and respect for others, higher achievement and attitudes, positive disposition, and social sensitivity. There are many ways to make this impact visible: artifacts of student work, observation of students’ learning, tests and assignments, listening to interactions among students, and privileging student voice about their learning.

We must ensure each student progresses in his or her achievement journey across the usual school disciplines. While, of course, the topics of these disciplines can be quite different depending on country or even jurisdiction, some form of academic achievement is present in every classroom. It is not the task of this book to debate this curriculum but to be reminded of Michael Young’s (2013) claim that we often send students to school to be exposed to what they would not be exposed to if they did not go. Also, to note that most curricula are based on “adult group think”: groups of adults deciding on scope and sequence of topics. Rarely is curriculum based on how students actually progress (because there is so little research on that topic). Indeed, if we lined up various curricula from different jurisdictions, it is for certain that they would differ in this scope and sequence and the choice of curricula topics – but each would be presented as the one and proper solution.

Whatever the content, the progress is the critical task we ask of teachers and students. Developing an understanding of progression can either be explicit and provided to teachers or it can be intuitive and worked through by teachers in the moment within the classroom. Given the many students in a class, the latter is more frequent, simply because learning is rarely linear and follows someone’s dictates of how learning progresses – it is more staccato, and it is likely that progression can differ depending on where each student starts.

FIGURE 1.1 Progress to proficiency

Note the emphasis on progression to achievement. Too often, high achievement is privileged and although, of course, we all want high achievement, an overemphasis on achievement can lead to distortions in understanding the impact of educators. The relation between progress and achievement can be expressed in many ways, such as in Figure 1.1. On the x-axis we have placed growth or progress and on the y-axis, achievement. We can apply tentative labels to each of the four quadrants. Success is thus not always high achievement (who wants to be a cruising school or student) but is defined as high progress. No matter where the student starts, he or she deserves at least a year’s growth for a year’s input. And knowing that this is the focus of impact is the fundamental starting point of understanding impact.

To understand what a “year’s growth” means, we have to consult multiple sources. It can include looking at effect sizes over time, examples of student work over a year, indexing to a year’s curriculum claims – but critically understanding this growth involves conferring with other teachers. This is related to the mindframe “I collaborate with my peers and my students about my conceptions of progress and my impact.”

Providing formative evaluation

In Figure 1.2, the factor “providing formative evaluation” arouses interest, as it is among the most powerful factors in Visible Learning, with an effect size of 0.90.

FIGURE 1.2 Providing formative evaluation

Source: Hattie and Zierer (2017).

What does formative evaluation involve, and what makes it so effective? Michael Scriven (1967) distinguishes between formative and summative evaluation of instructional processes. Whereas formative evaluation is conducted during an intervention, allowing the teacher to use the resulting data to improve the instructional process, summative evaluation is conducted at the end of the intervention and is thus an evaluation of its result. (Note that this means that there is no such notion as formative or summative assessment, as any assessment can be used to make formative evaluation [during the lesson] or summative evaluation [at the end of the lesson].) The effects on student learning will obviously be different in each case: Results from a formative evaluation can still be used to benefit the learners, whereas results from a summative evaluation serve only as feedback for the teacher – although it can be used later by learners in the next set of lessons. These characteristics show why formative evaluation is often seen as being closely related to feedback, and indeed there are many aspects in which they overlap. However, there are two important, if not to say crucial, distinctions between these factors. First, while feedback can take the form of teacher-to-student feedback or student-to-teacher feedback, formative evaluation provides feedback from the learner to the teacher: It helps the teacher modify instruction, see the effects of their teaching so far, and hints as to where to go next in their teaching. Second, while feedback focuses on all aspects of teaching, formative evaluation focuses on the goals of the learning process and seeks to determine whether the learners have reached these goals – yet. The secret to the success of a formative evaluation lies in these two distinctions. After all, it is focusing on whether learners have reached the goals or success criteria of the lessons – and it is the teacher who needs to have the competence and mindframe to seek this information and draw the right conclusions from it for the further course of the learning process. Of course, students can also use formative evaluation to tweak, change, and modify their own learning, but it is formative evaluation about and to the teacher that has the greatest impact.

Response to intervention

The term “response to intervention,” “RTI” for short, originated in the United States, and refers to an approach designed especially for children and youths with learning difficulties (see Figure 1.3). It thus has its roots in special education but has since been applied to general education within the context of inclusion – with as much success. The secret to the success of the “response to intervention” factor lies in the teacher’s continuous adjustment of the lesson (intervention) and the resulting benefit derived from the learners (response). It enables the teacher to continually adjust the instruction to match the current learning level of the students.

This process is organized in a so-called multilevel prevention model generally made up of three tiers: At the first tier, the teacher holds a regular lesson for all learners that meets current quality criteria. At the second tier, the teacher intervenes on behalf of the learners who were incapable of achieving the desired learning success in the first step. This support involves applying appropriate methods for measuring learning levels and is given in small groups for a set period of time. At the third tier, the teacher provides supplementary instruction for learners who did not achieve the desired learning success during the intervention on the second tier.

At this third tier, interventions generally take the form of one-onone instruction...