Visible Learning For Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning

1. Chapter 3 Key Concepts

1.1. Expert teachers can identify the most important ways in which to represent the subject that they teach:                                                                     Visible Learning showed that teachers subject-matter knowledge did not improve student achievement! But expert teachers do differ in how they organize and use this content knowledge. They know how to introduce new content knowledge in a way that integrates it with students’ prior knowledge, they can relate the current lesson to other subject areas, and they can adapt the lessons according to students’ needs. Because of how they view their approach to teaching, they have a greater stock of strategies to help students and they are better able to predict when students will make errors and respond when they do. They seek out evidence of who has not learned, who is not making progress, and they problem solve and adapt their teaching in response.

1.2. Expert teachers are proficient at creating an optimal classroom climate for learning:        The best climate for learning is one in which there is trust. Students often don’t like to make mistakes because they fear a negative response from peers. Expert teachers create classrooms in which errors are welcome and learning is cool.

1.3. Expert teachers monitor learning and provide feedback:                                                          Expert teachers know that a typical lesson never goes as planned and they are skilled at monitoring the current status of student understanding. They are excellent seekers and users of feedback about their teaching – that is, they see student progress as feedback about the effect they are having on learning. To do this they must regularly gather information to know who is not understanding.

1.4. Expert teacher believe that all students can reach the success criteria:                               Expert teachers believe that intelligence is changeable rather than fixed. This means that not only do they have a high respect for their students but that they show a passion that all students can succeed.  While passion may be difficult to quantify, students are certainly aware of whether or not their teachers exhibit this passion.

1.5. Expert teachers influence surface and deep student outcomes:                                        Expert teachers exert positive influences on student outcomes and these are not confined to improving test scores. Expert teachers influence students in a wide range of ways: encouraging students to stay in school, helping them to develop deep and conceptual understandings, teaching them to develop multiple learning strategies, encouraging them to take risks in their learning, helping them to develop respect for themselves and others, and helping them develop into active citizens who participate in our world.

2. Chapter 2 Key Concepts

2.1. The principle throughout this book is “visible teaching and learning.” When the teaching is visible the student knows what to do and how to do it. When the learning is visible the teacher knows if learning is occurring or not. Teaching and learning are visible when the learning goal is not only challenging but is explicit.  Both the teacher and the student work together to attain the goal, provide feedback, and decide whether the student has attained the goal. Evidence shows that the greatest effects on student learning come when not only the students become their own teachers (through self-monitoring, and self-assessment), but the teachers become learners of their own teaching. In successful classrooms, both the teaching and learning are visible.

2.2. A key part of successful teaching and learning has to do with the teacher’s mind frame. It is critical that teachers see themselves as evaluators of their effects on students. Seeking interventions and actions that have positive effects on student learning should be a constant goal for teachers. Teachers should be vigilant to see what is working and what is not working in the classroom. Then teachers must use this evidence to inform their actions and their use of every possible resource to move students from where they are now to where the teacher thinks they should be.  When a teacher has an appropriate mind frame combined with appropriate actions that these two work together to achieve a positive learning effect.

3. Chapter 1 Key Concepts

3.1. What is Visible Learning - This book is about the attributes of schooling that will truly make a difference for student learning.  "Visible" refers to a few things. First, it refers to making student learning visible to teachers so they can know whether they are having an impact on this learning.  It also refers to making teaching visible to the student so that students learn to become their own teachers, an important component of becoming lifelong learners. The "learning" part of visible learning is the need to think of teaching with learning in the forefront and with the idea that we should consider teaching primarily in terms of its impact on student learning.

3.2. Visible Learning was based on over 800 meta-analyses of 50,000 research articles and about 240 million students. The most important discovery from the research was that almost any intervention can claim to "everything works”.  Almost every intervention had an effect size above zero which simply means that the intervention had some positive effect on achievement.  If every intervention has some effect on achievement, then all we need to do is implement more of what we already have  –  more money, more resources, more teachers.   However, this will not solve the problems in education. Instead, we need to be more discriminating. Rather than looking at any practice that has an effect size of more than zero (d > 0), in Visible Learning Hattie suggests that an effect size of 0.40 should be considered the hinge-point. An effect size of 0.40 is about the average effect we expect from a year’s schooling. Therefore we should aim to implement those interventions of 0.40 and above because those are the ones that will truly improve student achievement.