John Hattie thinks schools pay too much attention to which teaching methods are being used in classrooms, and that this distracts from what really matters: learning.

“I don’t care about how you teach. I care about the impact of your teaching,” he said today. “Most of our policies aren’t about learning, they’re about teaching. I think we need to help schools better focus, and have more resources to focus on this notion of learning.”

Speaking at the World Education Summit today, the emeritus laureate professor at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education and author of Visible Learning - a synthesis of the research evidence on what teachers can do to maximise their pupils’ learning - explained that in order to shift this focus, teachers need to ask themselves five key questions:

1. What are the students ready to learn?
    
2. Have I chosen optimal, evidence-based interventions and built a “logic model” to focus on implementation?
    
3. Am I seeking evidence that I might be wrong? 
    
4. What are the shorter-, medium- and longer-term impacts, and am I monitoring my success with all students? 
    
5. Am I seeking others’ perspectives and evidence about fidelity and impact?

But what do these questions mean in practice?

Hattie explained that teachers need to be able to diagnose what students already know, can do and care about to ensure that there is appropriate levels of challenge, and then align this with “optimal evidence-based interventions”. Too often, he added, lessons are planned but students already know how to do the task, or the task is unrelated to students’ needs.

John Hattie on ‘making learning more visible’

If teachers can engage students in appropriately challenging tasks, teach the skills of learning, and focus on progress in the shorter term, it’s more likely to lead to deeper and more effective learning, he explained. 

“The hardest is [question] number three,” said Hattie. “If you’re like me, as a teacher, I do the opposite. I continue to look for evidence that I’ve done a good job: the student understands the work, therefore they all do. [But this means] I’m not helping the majority of my students.”

It’s important that teachers look for errors in how they are approaching teaching and learning, he added, because this process is the “core” of “evaluative thinking”. If teachers get better at self-evaluation, this will help them to choose the interventions that will have the greatest impact in their classroom context. 

“Every school teacher and leader has a toolbox of strategies, but they don’t always relate to what the issue is,” Hattie explained. “We need to be a lot smarter in diagnosis; we need to be a lot more nosy about what’s working and what’s not working.”

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This involves teachers self-evaluating their own practice, but also learning from expert colleagues. In an interview with Tes, published earlier this year, Hattie suggested that advances in technology were making this process easier. 

“In Australia, we have come up with a new method of observation. We ask expert teachers to consider a lesson they are planning to deliver, and then to record themselves talking through their planning. Then the lesson is filmed. The expert teacher then records themselves again, explaining the decisions and the evaluative decisions they made in the moment. The two recordings are then layered over the video,” he said.

“This allows those who watch the videos to hear what the teacher is thinking in real time. When you get teachers thinking aloud and talking about the decisions they’ve made, they are stunningly brilliant at critiquing each other.”

All of this work really matters, Hattie told the World Education Summit today, because, in many schools, teachers are “swimming in ignorance at the moment”.

“If I walked into your staffroom, would I hear teachers thinking aloud or would I hear just one person talking? It’s the same in the classroom: students want to hear how we make decisions, how we solve problems,” he said.

“Visible Learning is called that not because learning is visible, but because we want to make it more visible. How can we see evidence that we’re wrong, and then use that to lead to major improvements?” 

John Hattie was speaking at the World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event. To find out more and access the rest of the week’s sessions click here