10 Steps to Develop Great Learners

Visible Learning for Parents

John Hattie, Kyle Hattie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032189284
• eBook ISBN: 9781000574166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What can concerned parents and carers do to ensure their children, of all ages, develop great learning habits which will help them achieve their maximum at school and in life? This is probably one of the most important questions any parent can ask and now John Hattie, one of the most respected and renowned Education researchers in the world draws on his globally famous Visible Learning research to provide some answers.

Writing this book with his own son Kyle, himself a respected teacher, the Hatties offer a 10-step plan to nurturing curiosity and intellectual ambition and providing a home environment that encourages and values learning. These simple steps based on the strongest of research evidence and packed full of practical advice can be followed by any parent or carer to support and enhance learning and maximize the potential of their children. Areas covered include:

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• Communicating effectively with teachers

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• Being the 'first learner' and demonstrating openness to new ideas and thinking

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• Choosing the right school for your child

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• Promoting the 'language of learning'

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• Having appropriately high expectations and understanding the power of feedback

Anyone concerned about the education and development of our children should read this book. For parents it is an essential guide that could make a vital difference to your child's life. For schools, school leaders and education authorities this is a book you should be encouraging every parent to read to support learning and maximize opportunities for all.

PART I Setting the scene

MIND FRAME 1 I have appropriately high expectations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003257028-2

1. Children are born into a world of expectations
   • These expectations form the basis of how your child will interact, learn, and develop.
   • To be successful in meeting these expectations they will need encouragement and demand a sense of fairness in how you react to them.
2. The Goldilocks principle of expectations and encouragement
   • The aim is to make these expectations appropriately challenging, socially appropriate, and adhering to the Goldilocks principle of not too easy, not too hard, and not too boring.
   • If you set expectations too low, they probably will achieve them – and that’s it; set them too high and they may try for a time to meet them but ultimately will throw them away through fatigue and helplessness at trying to reach what is not attainable.
3. Attachment builds expectations
   • Attachment relates to a child’s emotional connection to an adult caregiver – when needing comfort, support, nurturance, protection, or learning, particularly in times of distress and confusion.
   • To meet expectations, children require high levels of trust so that they can explore, make mistakes, learn from errors; develop resilience; and know when to seek help, when to be conscientious, when to stop and learn from others, and when and how to seek, hear, and deal with feedback.
   • Your role is not to make your child depend on you or to follow all your instructions but to develop their sense and skills in autonomy and their sense of competence.

This chapter outlines the importance of having high expectations for your child, ensuring that these are challenging, and creating a family environment of high trust so that your child can explore, make mistakes, and develop resilience.

My (KH) firstborn, Emma, at 4 years old was an exceptional child (I know all parents think this, as they should). She was climbing ladders before she could walk, she was talking in full sentences before her first birthday, and her curious and inquisitive nature leaves her wanting to know more about the world around her. With my youngest, Danielle, I was constantly comparing her timeline to Emma’s. I know that my children are different, and I celebrate their unique qualities and behaviors every day. I want them each to be their own person and yet I still compare. Emma was walking at 10 months; Danielle still preferred to crawl. Emma was talking in full sentences before her first birthday Danielle, at 16 months, was still not stringing sentences together. Emma loves creating and Danielle loves creating a mess. I have high expectations for both my girls and want them to do well and learn as much as they can, but I have forgotten the key word in that sentence. ‘I have high expectations’ – the word I am missing is appropriate. The expectations I had for Danielle are not fair. Of course she is not progressing at the same rate as Emma, and that is okay. She is not progressing the same because she is not Emma. Danielle may not be talking yet, but what are my expectations for Danielle? She is curious and loves exploring her surroundings. Danielle is amazingly resilient. She will be running as she is playing and fall, but that doesn’t faze her. She just gets up and continues to keep going. As a parent I need to be thinking about what my expectations are for each of my children and are they acceptable for them.

The power of expectations can dominate how your child grows up in the many worlds they face. Even if you do not say these expectations aloud, your children soon become deeply aware of your expectations for them. They become aware of expectations from the earliest ages as they form boundaries, during elementary schools when they learn to comply, in adolescence when they stretch and question, and in early adulthood as they take over deciding, building, and realizing the expectations they have learned from you, tested you with, and developed for themselves. The aim is to make these expectations appropriately challenging and socially appropriate and adhere to the Goldilocks principle of not too easy, not too hard, and not too boring.

One of the more famous experiments in education was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen¹ and was termed ‘the Pygmalion effect’. Pygmalion was a Greek sculptor who fell in love with a statue of a beautiful woman he had carved. He kissed and doted on the statue, which then turned into a woman, and his expectations were realized. Similarly, in their experiment, Rosenthal and Jacobsen told teachers that half their students would ‘bloom’ during the year and half would not. All students were tested before the split and then divided into bloomers and non-bloomers. But the teachers did not know that the division into bloomers and non-bloomers was random and not based on the test results. Sure enough, at the end of the year, the bloomers outperformed the non-bloomers. Given the assignment of bloomer/non-bloomer was random, the researchers concluded the difference was because the teachers had higher expectations for these bloomers. Like most research that tells bold stories, this one too has been extensively criticized, but the basic message has often been replicated.²

This research led to many hunting for the sources of these expectations. The list of potential sources is a long one. It includes gender, ethnicity, social class, stereotypes, diagnostic labels, and physical attractiveness. It includes language style, the age of the student, personality, and social skills. And it includes the relationship between teacher and student background, names, other siblings, and one-parent background. Christine Rubie-Davies³ argued that this hunt for specific influences was not that worthwhile, because teachers who have high expectations tend to have them for all the students, and those who have low expectations tend to have low expectations for all the students. She tested the students and gave the teachers the results, and encouraged the teachers to do their own evaluations in the first month of the school year. She then asked the teachers to predict the students’ attainment at the end of the year. She found that some teachers had high expectations of yearly progress for all students in the class whereas others had low expectations and that both groups realized their teachers’ expectations – wonderfully (for the highs) and sadly (for the lows).

This chapter outlines how to encourage appropriately high expectations, how to provide encouragement for the child to realize these expectations, and how to develop the child’s coping strategies to deal with your expectations.

1 Children are born into a world of expectations

Children enter a world of expectations – from parents, from grandparents, from almost anyone who comes into contact with the child. These expectations are the basis of how your child will interact, learn, and develop. Without expectations, the child is in a more random world, not knowing when good is good enough and not appreciating the possibilities for progress instead of doing what is minimal. Higher expectations can offer opportunities, entice more effort and striving, and help children realize the thrill of playing the game and meeting the challenge.

Their perception of your expectations starts early. Between 1–3 years, they are rapidly developing a ‘theory of mind’, or way of seeing the world around them, learning how to interact and to act in light of others, how to make sense of this world, how to develop competence, and how to learn to make choices. This all requires high levels of trust because children are vulnerable in these early years, hence the importance of having a sense of attachment, or emotional connection, so they can build this trust to explore, make mistakes, and learn from errors. They are learning the importance of how to cope with situations – both emotional coping (crying, venting) and problem-based coping (restructuring what happened, knowing how to learn effectively). To do this they need to have a sense of persistence and know when to have grit and when to seek help, when to be conscientious and when to stop and learn from others, and when and how to seek, hear, and deal with feedback.

During the early years, parents need ‘to be in front’, but as children grow, parents need to gradually release responsibility, moving to be beside the child. The early communication of appropriately high expectations sets the building blocks for the all-to-critical adolescent years – when they spend much more time away from you.

Most of us have expectations or heard stories about what it is like to parent teenagers! The concept of ‘adolescence’ has been around for many centuries and means to grow into maturity. Stanley Hall wrote the definitive book Adolescence in 1904,⁴ and he was intrigued by the German notion of ‘sturm and drang’ or storm and stress. He portrayed adolescence as going through a negative phase, fluctuating emotions, selfishness, and altruism, good and bad conduct, insensitivity and apathy, mood disruptions, risky behaviors, and parental conflict. It has taken a long time to correct these messages, as adolescence does not have to be a period of storm and stress, particularly if the adolescent has learned boundaries, that home is still a safe haven, and the appropriateness of expectations. Here’s the tough news. Teenage years now cover a longer age period and many new labels are being invented: tweenagers (9–12), teenagers (13–19), and twentagers (20–27), with adolescence stopping more at 27 than 19.

2 The Goldilocks principle of expectations and encouragement

Goldilocks was right. Expectations must not be too high, too low, or too boring. We used to say, ‘Not too high, and not too low’, but then realized that many will strive for higher goals if the tasks are not boring. Also, you may need to work with your children to revise your expectations – and appreciate that they TOO have a major say in setting these expectations. But be warned, if you set them too low, they probably will achieve them – and that’s it; too high and they may meet them for a while but then throw them away through fatigue at trying (a typical reaction to Tiger Mom parenting).

It is even better if there is some agreement between parents and children in the content and focus of the high expectations and in the joint nurturing and encouragement between mothers and fathers with their children. Any discrepancies can increase unease and discord and will certainly be picked up by the child. It may be that some parents (especially fathers) may see their role as ‘father-as-helper’, but today more fathers now want to be highly involved in the care and growth of their children as providers and teachers. They want, like many adults in the lives of children, to be helpful, close, and have emotional bonds – and not only hold appropriately high expectations but also help their children realize these expectations.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• The main messages – the 10 mind frames
• Part I Setting the scene
• Part II The foundations to develop learners
• Part III Learning and schooling
• Part IV The big-picture story
• Glossary
• Appendix: There is evidence about high-impact parenting
• Index