Season 4 | Episode 24 | Visible Learning with John Hattie
Aug 17, 2024
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John Hattie, a renowned education researcher, joins to discuss the principles of Visible Learning and how they can transform teaching. He emphasizes the importance of effective strategies rooted in extensive research involving 80 million students. Hattie challenges common misconceptions about effect sizes and highlights the need for tailored approaches to student learning. He also shares valuable insights on feedback, learning intentions, and creating inclusive environments, encouraging educators to embrace a positive perspective in their teaching practice.
John Hattie emphasizes the importance of prioritizing effective educational strategies through critical evaluation rather than assuming all methods yield success.
Creating a supportive classroom environment that values mistakes and fosters curiosity is essential for making learning transparent to both teachers and students.
Deep dives
The Journey into Visible Learning
The journey into visible learning stemmed from the necessity to discern what strategies truly enhance student achievement. Professor John Hattie highlights that a plethora of educational strategies often leads educators to believe all methods yield success, resulting in a lack of critical evaluation of what works best. His extensive research, including over 2,500 meta-analyses, emphasizes prioritizing effective strategies rather than merely identifying those that enhance learning. With the goal to refine educational practices, he urges education professionals to shift focus from merely what works to understanding what works best and scaling successful practices.
Understanding Visible Learning
Visible learning is defined as making learning transparent to both teachers and students. This involves students seeing learning from their own perspective and becoming their own teachers, which is facilitated by a supportive classroom environment where mistakes are valued as part of the learning process. Hattie underscores the importance of creating a culture that prioritizes student understanding and cognitive engagement over mere compliance, demonstrating that students often view learning as meeting teacher expectations rather than cultivating curiosity. The emphasis is thus placed on making educational outcomes explicit and fostering a culture of inquiry within classrooms.
The Importance of Feedback
Effective feedback is pivotal in the learning process, as it should be acknowledged, understood, and actionable by students. The conversation reveals that while teachers deliver ample feedback, it often goes unheard or misunderstood by students, hindering its effectiveness. Hattie notes that students crave feedback that directs them toward improvement rather than general praise, illustrating that clear next steps for learning are crucial for student growth. This highlights the need for educators to rethink their feedback methods, ensuring that it supports student understanding and promotes actionable improvement.
Addressing Misconceptions in Education
There are prevalent misconceptions surrounding visible learning, one of which is the belief that it solely focuses on achievement metrics. Hattie emphasizes that achievement is a product of first establishing an effective learning culture and employing appropriate learning strategies, thus making the case that emotional and social dimensions of learning are equally essential. Another misconception is the interpretation of feedback and its delivery; effective feedback should not prioritize metrics alone but rather the qualitative journey of each learner. Addressing these misconceptions is crucial for educational reform, and fostering a deeper understanding of successful teaching methods will lead to improved educational outcomes.