What's helping to preserve small chunks of my sanity lately is a book called Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning by John Hattie. He wrote his original book titled Visible Learning in 2008, and it was a pretty intense, data-laden complex read. But this recent 2012 release has all sorts of easier-to-understand goodness just for teachers. As the title states, the focus is on maximizing the impact of influences on student learning. He points out that, when you look at everything that influences student learning, almost everything works. ("All that is needed to enhance achievement is a pulse.") That means that simply providing proof that something works isn't enough; teachers must reflect on what they're doing in the classroom and see if it is having a positive effect that is worthwhile and making a visible difference in student learning. Below are some nuggets from the first chapter, which have gotten me all fired up as of late:
"The remarkable feature of the evidence is that the greatest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers."
"Fundamentally, the most powerful way of thinking about a teacher's role is for teachers to see themselves as evaluators of their effects on students."
"What I am not saying is that 'teachers matter'; this cliche is is the most unsupported claim from the evidence in Visible Learning...What does matter is teachers having a mind frame in which they see it as their role to evaluate their effect on learning."
My take on the above quotes is this: teachers can't make instructional, curricular, or assessment-related decisions with a "what's easiest for me" mindset (the rationale for such decisions often comes wrapped in a thin veneer of student-centeredness, unfortunately). I've seen that too often, and I've seen student learning suffer as a direct result--with everyone scratching their heads wondering why students aren't getting better at this whole "learning" thing when all the decisions being made are geared towards making adults' lives easier (or maintaining the status quo) instead of doing what's right for student learning. I've said it before and I'll say it again-what's easiest for us is rarely what's good for student learning.
Educators need to shift their mindset and start making decisions based on looking at what they're doing in the classroom and the size of the dent it's making in student learning. Teachers need to, according to Hattie, "know thy impact" and evaluate themselves and their classroom practices so they can help students be better learners. How do they need to evaluate themselves? By examining their classroom practices through the eyes of their students.
John Hattie's Summary: Know thy impact from Cognition Education on Vimeo.
We can't give students the skills they need to become their own teachers if decisions are being made that only benefit the teacher, not the student. Teaching students to be their own learners, independent learners, is hard work on everyone's part. It can feel overwhelming at times. It requires lots of formative feedback, observation, data collection, time, conversations, assessments, reassessments, metacognition, failure, and the teacher knowing a range of learning strategies to teach to students to give them tools in their learning toolboxes so students know how to fix what's broken when failure strikes hard and often.It takes work. Lots of it. But the end result is so worthwhile.
What it boils down to is this: We're here for the students, not ourselves. Decisions need to be made after looking through the eyes of students, not at our own self-interests.
