John Hattie introduces Visible Learning: The Sequel

0:00 Of all the factors that affect students in schools, it's the teachers who have the greatest impact. That's what I concluded invisible learning 14 years ago. And whilst I still believe that now, I do think we need to change many of the questions we ask about teaching. We need to stop just looking at the strategies teachers are using and instead look more closely at the impact we have on students, both their content knowledge and their deeper knowledge and they transfer of knowledge and how they learn best. The problem is that we need to identify successful teaching and scaled up, we're very good. At finding the errors and finding the faults and fixing them. But we need to be a lot smaller about acknowledging and

0:46 recognising success and scaling it up. How we solve it. Well, ask less about how students engage in doing work and a lot of doing. There can be very little learning, instead, more about how students think, know and solve. We need to shift from focusing on the impact of talking to the power of listening. The Visible Learning sequel switches the discussion from teaching to learning. We need to get teachers to work together to diagnose, evaluate, think aloud and close these gaps in expertise. In five to 10 years we will see a massive breakthrough in the automation of classroom observation, and teaching will prove very much. Because of this, one of the more invidious

1:34 things we do is labeling. We're very good at labeling students, but we know that labelling leads to one of the largest negative effects on pupils achievement. Students are very aware of the expectations that follow from labeling and sometimes we don't give the same rich curricula to every student. I know in many countries there are high achieving classes that are grammar schools, comprehensive charters, trusts and I know the intention behind this is noble, but the impact can be devastating for so many kids. No kid is the winner from labeling. Why do we think a label as a solution? One of the new focuses in the sequel is looking at the intentional alignment of.

2:20 Choosing the strategies, choosing the feedback, choosing the assessments, choosing the assignments. To make sure that students realise that we value both the content, the idea is the facts and we value the deeper thinking, the problem solving and the transfer. I think we need to be smarter about how we align our teaching methods and our assessments with those two major focuses of learning the the content and the thinking about the content. Mixing them together has been very confusing. Students, and unfortunately too many students, think it's a good learner as a as a student who knows lots. And that's not what we're looking for. We want the evaluative skills as well as the knowing lots. COVID certainly magnified the importance of

3:05 social and emotional learning. It's always been there, but right now, with the increased attention to that, we certainly could look at the social and emotional aspects of learning. Some students could be very bored. Some students can be frustrated. Some students have a lot of anxiety. But more importantly, we need to focus on the thrill of learning, that moment where they make that AHA connection and that joy that comes from solving problems and working with others to work out the answers to solutions. This is the way we need to bring the social and emotional learning to the fore. In the first visible learning book, I spent a lot of time on the data to derive a story. In the sequel, it's the other way round. I'm spending a lot

3:52 more time on the story and using the data to defend the story about how we think, the purposes of learning, the intentional alignment of our teaching strategies, our learning strategies, our feedback and our ways in which we create assignments and assessments. Spending a lot more time on developing assessment capable students and getting that balance of the teachers, the school leaders, the parents and the students. Coming together to have the best and most powerful way that we can have an influence on students learning so they could progress to greater achievement.