#Educoach Chat 7/25: Visible Learning: Chapter 5 Prep

Hattie begins chapter five of Visible Learning for Teaching with an interesting title, "Starting the Lesson."  I've found myself often teaching in a continuum: together students and I pose the learning goal(s), create a prioritized menu of activities, chart students ready for conferences, list students who need peer support, answer questions and then everyone goes about their learning actions, checking in when necessary.  So the idea of a singular lesson has somewhat disappeared in my classroom as I embrace project base learning. Yet as I read this chapter title, I surmise that I'll leave the chapter with a focused look at the balanced approach to instruction including lessons, projects and units--not one or two, but a combination of all three approaches and probably more.

At the end of the chapter, I found myself wanting to institute a similar academic continuum as noted above, yet I want to tighten up that continuum so that goals, processes and evaluations are more explicit and intentional. Every decision we make as teachers impact students' learning, and as Hattie's research demonstrates our thoughtful, targeted decisions about classroom climate, processes, disposition and assessment are integral when it comes to orchestrating our work for student success.

Below I've listed a large number of Hattie's research-based recommendations for the classroom environment and learning endeavors.

• Fair and Caring: Teachers care about and believe in their students.
• Passion: Teachers are passionate about learning and want to "turn you on."
• Ability to ask questions and say, "I don't know" or "I need help."
• Trust: optimal teacher-student relationship
• Students know they are listened to.
• Students know that the purpose of the class is to learn and make progress.
• Reasonable sense of control and safety so students can partake in the learning process with confidence.
• Mindful teachers who understand and are aware of all that is going on.
• Students who have been taught how to work in groups, and have the chance to practice, reflect on and refine those skills often.
• High relational trust among the school community (principals, students, teachers, parents) leads to greater improvement on standardized tests. Relational trust includes respect for the roles each person plays, competence in carrying out one's role, personal regard and care for one another, and integrity--the consistency between what one says and does. 
• An atmosphere that acknowledges that failure and error are stepping stones to learning and should be embraced.
• "Less teacher-dominated talk, and more student talking and involvement." Too much teacher talk puts teachers in the focal point of the classroom rather than students--teachers become the owners of content, not students.
• "The more important task is for teachers to listen."  Listening "requires not only showing respect for others' views and evaluating the students' views. . .but also allows for sharing genuine depth of thinking and processing in our questioning, and permitting the dialogue so necessary if we are to engage students successfully in learning."
• Foster "dialogic talk" which "aims to promote communication with and between students, to demonstrate the value of the views of the students, and to help participants to share and build meaning collaboratively." Purposeful dialogic talk includes reviewing what has gone on before, repeating student answers, asking questions to stimulate recall, paraphrasing a student's response so the class can gain a better understanding, encouraging students to think and remember what has been discussed, collective tasks--learning together, reciprocal--listening to each other, sharing ideas, supportive--encouraging each other, acknowledging that mistakes are part of learning, cumulative--building on each others' ideas and purposeful--planning with clear intentions and criteria.
• Students ask most of the questions, the classroom is dominated by students' questions. Using strategic questioning techniques by and for students throughout lessons improves student engagement and learning--teaches students how to utilize questions in the learning process.
• There needs to be a similar balance between talk, listen and do for both teachers and students in the classroom.
• Move the focus to process and skills over content and achieve a balance of three modes of teaching and learning: 
• didactic: students learn concepts/curriculum
• coaching labs: students learn through practice and mastering skills.
• Socratic seminars: questioning leads students to question, listen, think critically and communicate their ideas effectively to group members and others.
• Establish a balance of surface and deep learning "leading to students more successfully constructing defensible theories of knowing and reality (conceptual level)."
• Students know what teachers value--teachers' response demonstrates that.
• Use the power of peers to positively progress learning: "peers can influence learning by helping, tutoring, providing friendship, giving feedback, and making school a place to which students want to come each day."
• Cooperative and competitive (personal bests, personal levels of achievement) learning are more effective than individualistic methods of learning. Tutoring is also an effective peer method of learning and teaching.
• Rarely label and have high expectations for all students--know each student well, and respond accordingly with regard to teaching.
• The effect we have on student learning is more important than a singular strategy; we often need multiple strategies and innovative approaches to help students learn.  When students do not learn, they often don't need more, they need different.
• Teachers' fundamental role is that of activators and evaluators of learning. 
• Engage students in the role of activators and evaluators of their own learning. Institute a process of establishing goals, outlining process, actively engaging in learning, evaluating and determining next steps. 
• While teachers can enlist the interests, questions and experiences of students in the learning endeavor, they should direct the overall learning goals and guide student work toward goals that are worthy and integral to a students' engagement, confidence and success.

School Roles: Definition and Impact

I've spent a lot of time this summer in hospitals--it's just been one of those summers where the family's events have led to visits to doctors and hospitals.  The visits have ranged from critical to minor and they've all been educational.  As a passionate educator I have found myself comparing the medical model to the education model during each and every one of these visits and while there is considerable overlap, there is also considerable difference.

One aspect of the medical model that has impressed me is role definition.  I've noticed a significant shift in the efficiency and targeted response in medical care now compared to years past.  It seems like everyone knows what their role is and they all are good at doing it with the patient or client's needs as the focus.  This role definition means lots of jobs get done well with someone who repeatedly completes the task which lends a sense of confidence to both the caretaker and the patient. The job of synthesizing all these tasks and managing the patient's overall care seems to still be a work in progress in many hospitals.

One issue I believe we face in schools today is outdated role definitions that really don't describe well what a specific person's duty is.

Let's start with the principal.  The principal in many respects takes on a "father or mother like" model in a school--he/she is the leader of the pack and is pulled in many, many directions, perhaps too many directions.  I'm wondering if a better title for principal would be program manager because the school is a collaborative of educational programs, and the principal is in charge of making sure that all those programs are focused, supported and successful.  I realize that the principal takes on other roles too, but I'm wondering if those roles would be better led by others in the school leaving the principal to most importantly manage and direct the programs that support optimal student learning.

Curriculum directors seem to have a title that partially explains their important task--they direct the decision making with regard to essential learning, but they also direct the decision making with regard to collaborative and individual instructional choices and delivery, so I believe their titles would be more comprehensive if they were changed to Curriculum and Instructional Directors.

Guidance departments are another area of schools that are mired in many, diverse tasks.  I do not work in this department, but I believe that these departments deal mainly with students social and emotional health and needs.  This department connects closely to the areas of physical health i.e. nurses and physical education teachers and social services (if any exist, but they should exist in all schools).  Better role definition of these departments would help teachers, parents and students access the help they need for social, emotional and physical health while not asking one or two counselors to "do it all."

Special needs educators, therapists, classroom teachers, specialists and coaches all overlap with respect to their roles helping every child learn.  New information related to learning responsibilities, actions and response lead me to believe that the collaboration within and between these areas needs to be analyzed and reviewed so that the lion's share of the time is spent in collaboration, time-on-task with students and providing motivating, informative feedback.  It seems like in many schools the responsibility factors related to teacher-student responsibility and accountability differ widely among these roles.  Looking carefully at these roles and responsibilities will end up providing students with more individual and small group attention, feedback, analysis and targeted, professional response.  It seems like the changes in education, in a large part, have landed on the classroom teacher's lap (yes, I am a classroom teacher) and I think greater delineation and collaboration of this responsibility will lead to better effect for all students.

Then as we head up the ladder of responsibility in a school system we have many roles such as superintendent, assistant superintendent, business managers, student services and many, many more.  Similar to the principal role, the superintendent title seems to be an outdated title leading one to think of one person as the "super" in the system. I think that role would be better defined as the system director--the one who directs the action in a school system and like a conductor, harmonizes, manages and motivates the system's efforts for best effect. Then as we move into other leadership roles, it's important to consider those role titles and the job that they are responsible for, whenever possible matching title specifically to responsibility thus lending greater transparency and understanding of the roles and responsibilities.

Medical models are changing and so are educational models.  All the changes are not optimal, and all the changes are not negative. When roles and responsibilities are analyzed, reviewed and changed to better serve clients whether they be patients or students, the change is optimal.

As a classroom teacher, I've been clamoring for better definition of my role.  If you read my blog, you know I've posted about this many times (see below).  Reading Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning by John Hattie is finally answering my questions and affirming my intuition in this regard.  It is an excellent researched-base book that will help teachers, schools and school systems to better define roles, responsibilities, schedules, time-on-task with students and expectations for professional staff and responsibilities with regard to teaching children well.  I recommend this book and the weekly Wednesday night #educoach chat at 10EST led by Shira Leibowitz and Kathy Perret.  Tonight's chat will focus on chapters 4 and 5.

Related Posts

Activator?
What's Your Place at the Education Table?
What's My Role as a Classroom Teacher?
Rethinking Schools: Role Focus
Restructuring Schools for Student Success

#Educoach Chat 7/25 Prep: Chapter 4

Visible Learning for Teaching by John Hattie supports the role of the teacher as a professional educator.  Too often, in my opinion, teachers have been treated as "robots" or "vehicles of information" rather than educated professionals who have a responsibility to teach each child well utilizing a wide spectrum of professional research, planning, targeted response, analysis and collegial collaboration.

Hattie's book lifts teachers into the professional realm and also prompts educational systems to think about how they treat teachers and what their expectations are for the teachers' roles and responsibility.  If teachers are going to be able to do the job that Hattie describes, then school systems will need to create the time and scheduling to make this possible.  Systems are also going to have to review the roles and responsibilities of all educators, curriculum leaders and leadership so that the primary focus of the school system is optimal learning for every student.

Visible Learning for Teachers supports collaborative teaching/learning efforts such as the structures of PLCs (professional learning communities) and RTI (response to intervention), two structures in place at my school.  Hattie lends greater structure, focus and purpose to PLCs and RTI by offering focus questions and actions.

Chapter four lends an outline to the collaborative efforts of a PLC when it comes to learning design by offering these points:

• "work together to develop plans"
• Determine teaching goals/essential learning: "What is it that we want our student to know and be able to do as a result of this unit", lesson, project, learning endeavor. . .?
• prior achievement?
• understand students' thinking strategies, ways of thinking.
• know what students' know.
• understand the attitudes and attributes students bring to a lesson.
• desired levels of achievement-targets?
• "focus on accelerating growth of those who start behind"
• "What does it mean to be good at _________?"
• accountability lies in the tasks students are asked to do."How will we demonstrate that they have acquired the essential knowledge and skills"--what consistent criteria will we use?
• we learn to do the work, by doing the work i.e time on task with students.
• common area of focus.
• rate of progress/progresssion?
• critique/assessment?
• common assessments, scoring guide, shared discussion about outcomes.
• prioritize, set, review, revise goals regularly.
• discuss, question and analyze instructional strategies and impact.
• "How will we intervene for students who struggle and enrich the learning for students who are proficient?"
• when needed improve content, teacher skill and student engagement.
• "develop common understanding of what is worth teaching"
• "collaborate to understand their beliefs of challenge and progress"
• "work together to evaluate the impact of their planning on student outcomes"
• "description before analysis; analysis before prediction; prediction before evaluation."
• "How can we use the evidence of student learning to improve our individual and collective professional practice?"

We can infer from this list, that PLCs have to focus on what learning goals they will collaborate on, as it will be impossible to collaborate on every little detail of classroom work.  Focused collaboration though will lead to bountiful learning and better teaching.  This year our PLCs will focus on the successful establishment of the 90-minute literacy studio including RTI efforts, and the implementation of RTI in math instruction. Hence I imagine our collaborative focus will be based on learning goals embedded in those efforts.

Hattie's research suggests specific lesson design strategies including the following:

• "Interventions must provide some cognitive conflict: the mind grows as we learn to become conscious of, and so take control of, its own processes; and the cognitive development is a social process promoted by high-quality dialogue among peers supported by teachers."(p39)
• Create interventions that "increase the proportion of children attaining a higher thinking level, such that the students can use and practice these thinking skills during the course of a typical lesson."
• "Teachers need to listen as well as to talk" and give every child a voice in the classroom.  This can be done in a multitude of ways including class discussion, small group, peer tutoring, teacher-student work, blogging, comment threads, letter writing and other online shares such as email. Teachers can monitor this with the question, Who is doing the talking?

Hattie encourages teachers to help students develop an optimal disposition for learning by helping students to gain "motivation to learn, strategies to learn, and confidence to learn." He offers many strategies for this including the following:

• Teachers need to know how students process self information so that they can develop/enhance students' confidence in tackling challenging tasks, resilience in response to error/failure, openness and willingness to share with peers, and pride in investing energy into endeavors that will lead to successful outcomes. Creating mind maps at the start of the year can assist this process.
• Students are "choosers" who will protect, present, preserve and promote their sense of self--teachers need to guide students' individual and collective choices towards what the learning team (students, teachers, families) consider worth knowing. 
• We need to make schools inviting places, and help students to co-create the environment so that all consider the environment and learning valuable and "worth knowing."
• Identify students who exhibit "hopelessness," and work to understand why the learner is hopeless and how you can turn that learner into a hopeful, confident learner.
• "The more transparent the teacher makes the learning goals, the more likely the student is to engage in the work needed to meet the goal." (p.46)  "Students confidence grows as they make progress in skill acquisition. . ."
• Establish visible ways of knowing that the desired learning is achieved.  These transparent learning intentions build trust between teacher and student as well as knowing whether the student has gained the concepts and understanding relative to the intention of the learning endeavor i.e. lesson, unit, project. . .
• We need to provide students with transparent road maps for their learning that helps them know when and where to invest energies, strategies, and thinking. These paths will be complex, not linear as we do not learn in linear ways. Cluster and differentiate activities, expect unintended consequence and keep children aware of where they are on the learning path.
• Educators have to teach students how to set mastery goals and what successful attainment of those goals look like which results in greater motivation and important consequences. Teachers with a mastery approach that encourages questioning, learning from failure, new learning, and progress better effected student learning and performance.
• Often teachers will end a class with a comment about behavior rather than a comment about learning--our focus should be on learning first because schools are for learning, not obedience.
• Adapt plans to individual student's needs. 
• Success criteria needs to be explicit, easy to understand and easy to judge at the end of a task by both student and teacher. (see checklist for planning p. 51)
• Creating just-right challenges for students is imperative and leads to optimal learning and valuable feedback which inspires further learning. We have to be careful that we are not creating "busy work" rather than work that is learning and challenging. "The teacher's aim , therefore, is to help students gain a reputation among their peers as good learners" since a "major source of commitment to school learning comes from peers.
• Teaching children to self monitor appropriately by predicting achievement, understanding success criteria and developing resilience is essential. 

Hattie dismays at teachers' self-creation of learning materials, "creating more seems among the successful wastes of time in which teachers love to engage."  This is a comment I'll have to think more about since the creation of materials by teachers for students is often a process of responding to specific students in specific contexts--a valuable process for a student-centered approach.  Hattie offers an Internet resource of materials for teachers to access--often accessing and interpreting those materials takes more time than simply creating your own and learning during the creation process. (p.57).  I believe there is a good balance to the use of well established, researched materials and hand created materials that respond to specific contexts.

Progression is an important aspect of visible learning. Hattie offers the following suggestions:

• "It is more critical to analyse closely how students progress."  Different students will demonstrate different progressions in learning.
• "Progress is among the most critical factors for judging the success of schools."

Chapter four clearly demonstrates the professional and collaborative responsibilities of the educator when it comes to guiding students toward success by promoting an optimal disposition for learning and structure for implementing successful learning tasks and units.  I look forward to trying out all that Hattie suggests during PLC, RTI and classroom instruction.  

Just Write?

Most educators who tweet and blog feel comfortable writing.  I've been wondering lately if the reluctance to sharing ideas and experiences in education may be due in part to the fact that some educators are not comfortable with writing.

It is frightening to write at times as there's always the chance you'll err.  You may write something that gets misinterpreted.  You might misspell a word or use a term incorrectly.  Your writing might be judged by too much repetition, common cliches, elaboration or confusing text.  Others may misconstrue your words or possibly quote you out of context.  When you write, you put yourself out there, and yes, that can be disconcerting.

On the other hand, if you don't share, your wonderful ideas stay dormant and potential is stalled or hindered.  Just think, your idea could make a significant difference for a child, teacher, administrator, classroom, school or system.  Your perspective could change others' perspectives for the better.  You could help someone make an important turn in their career path and impact many.

So, just do it, and don't be afraid to ask for your readers' consideration and support.  Be prepared to right any errors you make and reword phrases that don't make sense or send the wrong message.  After all, we're all humans, but as Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."






Related Post by Godin: Talker's Block

Conference Sharing?

A Collection of Conferences I've Attended, Presented At and/or Intrigue Me

School systems and individual teachers spend considerable dollars attending workshops and conferences?  At its best, this activity translates into greater student-centered, successful teaching and learning for not only the conference attendee, but for the entire organization.

What protocols are in place for your systems' professional development experiences? Do attendees regularly report out the conference's findings and information? If so, how do they share the knowledge--through blogs, tweets, in-person talks, email, other?  What kind of sharing is best received?

Several educators in my system attended a math professional development event.  They all shared their learning and thoughts in separate Google docs and emails. The notes ranged from formal to informal discussion, and the notes were sent both during the conference and well after it.  The notes were received with a variety of responses from those who were appreciative to be able to share in the experience and knowledge to those who felt burdened by the sharing.

I generally write blog posts before, during and after a conference to prepare for the conference, solidify my questions and thoughts, invite the inquiry and response of colleagues near and far, and to outline next steps related to conference learning and ideas.  I typically email and tweet the links to these posts to colleagues in my system and PLN.  I also share the links to conference information for those who want to learn more.  Hence, the conversation is there for the taking if they are  interested.

I'm an educator that likes to be in the know.  I believe that optimal communication and sharing paths lead to better performance and service in an organization.  When I can't attend a conference, I like to get a feel for the conference's premise, tone and information from colleagues in my PLN and school system.  Generally PLN members are quick to tweet out essential points which are easy to follow via the conference's #.  Many also blog summaries and follow-up actions and points.

Yet, too much information can be overwhelming and serve to turn off colleagues rather than rev them up with enthusiasm and shared learning. Therefore, back to my original question: What are your system's expectations and protocols related to conference sharing?  How does your system utilize new information and perspectives garnered by a conference event?  What protocols are in place for funds spent on conferences in relation to innovation/information gained and shared?  As a conference attendee and presenter, your thoughts will help me when preparing workshops and sharing from workshops.  Thanks in advance for your consult.