S8 E4: Brace for impact: Unifying classrooms through mission-based learning, with John Hattie
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Hi, it's Susan. Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to let you know that nominations are now open for the Science of Reading Star Awards. Learn more and nominate a literacy leader from your life at amplify.com slash S-O-R Star Awards. Now on to the show.

I want the knowledge. I want the precious knowledge. But I want also the kids to know what to do when they don't know what to do. I want them to become their own teachers. This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading, the podcast from Amplify, where the science of reading lives. Today, I'm so excited to bring you a conversation with one of the biggest names in education,

John Hattie, Emeritus Laureate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Professor Hattie has authored more than 60 books, including 40 on visible learning, which we'll talk about in depth.

This was an expansive conversation in which we talked about everything from his meta-analysis research, to the importance of studying excellence, to his thoughts about AI and education. One note before we get started. When we connected with Professor Hattie halfway around the world, it was bright and early in Australia. So be aware that during the conversation, you might hear the occasional sound of a pooch who was perhaps eager for his morning breakfast.

With that heads up out of the way, here's John Hattie. Well, Dr. John Hattie, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. What an honor. It's good to be here, Susan. Thank you.

Before we jump into all the fun and fancy of this episode, I wonder if you might introduce yourself to our listeners and talk a little bit about what motivated you to come into this field of education. Look, yeah, I was brought up in the south of New Zealand. I now live in Australia. But when I was a teenager in a small rural country town, I started an apprenticeship as a painter and paperhacker.

Oh, and after I realized that I there wasn't many skills in it and I didn't even have those. And I worried that my rest of my life would be spent in the small country town. And so I found out that if you became a teacher, they paid you to be trained. Wow. Yeah, I had no resources otherwise. So I'll try that.

And kind of as an accidental decision, but it worked obviously to a point where I was a real teacher for a couple of years and thoroughly enjoyed it. And I thought, okay, if I'm going to go on and do my PhD and it doesn't work out, I can always go back to something I really enjoyed. And so that was kind of why I got into education.

I love that you said real teacher. Do you consider yourself not a real teacher now? Well, when you work with real teachers, they make a very big distinction about have you got chalk dust under your fingernails? Obviously, I would argue, having been an academic for 50 years, that involved an incredible amount of teaching. So yeah, I think I'm a teacher, but I do want to acknowledge that teaching a group of five-year-olds or 15-year-olds is quite different to teaching a group of 25-year-olds.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, chalk dust under your fingernails, I don't even know if our new teachers would understand what that is like. So maybe it's whiteboard marker on the end of your fingertips or something. Probably, yes. And I remember my very first week of being a real teacher, I got into a huge coughing fits because I hadn't been used to the fact that there was chalk dust every minute, every day. And I'm sure no new teacher knows about that. It's the smell of that felt pen that probably upsets them. Yeah.

Maybe that's true for sure. Well, for teachers and many others, your most well-known book is Visible Learning. But before we jump into that work, how many other books have you published? And what's some of the content of some of these books? I'm almost embarrassed to this day and age of climate change because I've destroyed a lot of trees.

The answer to your question is 74. 74 books? Yeah. Wow. And I know you've done a lot on the visible learning content, but what are some of the other content that you've done with? It's interesting, Susan, because visible learning was not my career at all. My academic life has been psychometrics.

measurement statistics. That's what I've worked in my whole life. My first book was on three-mode factor analysis. Now, aren't you dying to rush out and buy a book on three-mode factor analysis? Amazing. What was impressive about it is it stayed in print for 25 years. Wow. No, the reason for that, in those days, they printed them and they printed 200 and it took two or 25 years to sell 200. Wow.

I've written books on self-concept, on performance measures, on reputation enhancement. I worked with a team that had the largest sample of adolescents in prison. And so I've sort of been in lots of different areas and visible learning was kind of a hobby that I had on the side for various reasons. And I decided when I moved to New Zealand that I would stop talking about it, but write the book up to get it out of my system.

There you go. And it took over. Yeah, it did. So be it. I'm very grateful for the fact that you could be an academic and your whole life and no one could care. The fact that people care kind of is honoring. So thank you. We're going to jump into visible learning, like I said in a minute. But before we go there, what was your favorite book to actually author?

It's probably the third in the series with Greg Yates on how students learn. I've known Greg for many years and he wanted to come on sabbatical to where I was at the time in Auckland. And I said, well, why don't we do something together? And he's just a stunning storyteller.

Like he's mesmerizing as a storyteller, but he hasn't written a hang of a lot in his career. And so I said to him, why don't we write up the stories? And so he spent every morning writing up these stories. We'd meet and we'd talk about it, we'd add to it. And that was probably the most funnest book of the lot. That's great. That's great to hear. We'll link our listeners in the show notes to that because we're going to move from that and really talk about visible learning. How do you feel about the book Visible Learning being the most viral one?

Well, it's kind of nice. I never anticipated that. And what it's done, Susan, in my life is, and particularly as an academic, I now have the world's best critics. And I mean that very, very positively.

as an academic you thrive on the fact that people even care about reading your work let alone critiquing it and I've learned a lot from my critics and I'm very grateful that I'm in that situation where people are prepared to take parts of it apart and I've learned a lot from the critics some of them you just think well they've missed the point completely but in general it's been very good so

Thank you for that, critics. Thank you for that to those who read it and who want to follow up and know more. That's a really good point. We'll come back to some of the details of that. But for those listeners, I can't imagine we have any listeners that aren't familiar with this book, Visible Learning, and we'll talk about the second one that you have too. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit about the content that's in that and really what the purpose was for you to author that book? Well, it started like when you're in psychometrics, you go into an education department and you are welcomed,

Everyone wants to, well, you know what it's like. I'm sure that every single person loves doing their courses on measurement and statistics and research design. It's just wonderful from my point of view. But you're kind of like, you're not a real person because you don't study kids in classrooms. And so everybody I met, particularly academics, told me that what I had to study was communication or technology or curriculum. And what I thought was, isn't it fascinating that everybody knows the answer?

passionately, and it's all different. And so when you talk to teachers, come and watch me, this is how I do it, as if that's generalizable, they're all different. And I never met a teacher or an academic who said they were below average.

And they're teaching. And that sort of, I was a kid. I know that's not true. And so I started the research in the area. And this was back in the 1970s. And it's the same message. Every article showed that it worked. And then along came along Jean Glass in 1976, my first professor.

I went to a major conference where he presented this notion of meta-analysis, the collection of other people's work asking two questions. What's the magnitude of the effect? How big is the effect? And what are the moderators? What makes the difference to that? Maybe I could look at that and see if that could help.

And so, obviously, it took me a long time, many, many years just collecting data, being a squirrel. And I played with the data and looked at it. And the thing that really surprised me and still does to this day is 95% plus of things that we do to students enhances their achievement. Almost everything works. No wonder every teacher can find evidence that what they do works. There is a big normal distribution out there.

And it's centered around that effect size 0.4, which is quite a large effect, actually. And it kind of says loud and clearly that as a profession, we have well over half our teachers having what I'd consider a pretty dramatically positive effect on kids and half that are less than that. So could I come up with a story that related those effects above the average compared to those below the average and get away from this notion of bad teaching is those that have a negative effect because there's almost no one there.

And that was the hardest part, coming up with that story. But it's fascinating to realize just how many excellent teachers we have, how much expertise we have. And one of my frustrations, Susan, particularly as I've had a government job here in Australia for the last nine years, is why as educators we deny that expertise. We have this false assumption that all teachers are equal. We have this false assumption that just watch what I do.

It's not. It's the incredible thinking that goes on about what they do that makes the difference. And so if anybody out there is listening or wants to start a career, let me tell you right up front, study excellence, study expertise. There's oodles of it out there. And we aren't very good at that. We're very, very good at finding problems and fixing them. But we're not as good and we're not have the courage to study expertise and scale it up. And that's my mission. Scale up the expertise we have.

Well, to be fair, you did in your book, you did find some things that don't have as big effect as others, right? And there are some negative effects, like labeling students. Take two students of the same personality, the same behavior, the same achievement, and you label one. Minus 0.6. Turn those two kids. Because the expectation effect is so dramatically powerful, not only from the teacher's point of view, but from the kids and the parents and the other students.

And retention, holding kids back a year. Boredom, one of the biggest emotions in classrooms, minus 0.4. Yeah, there are negative effects, yes, but not nearly as many. So let's not deny them. But you're right, there's too many effects below 0.4, which quite often dominate the discussions we have in the staff rooms, in the media, amongst the politicians. And they don't have as big an effect as the expertise of the educators.

You know, in our pre-call, you said something that we wrote down and you said, "Evidence gets in the way of a good opinion." What do you mean by that? Well, it comes back to this notion of my critics. Like some of the things I've said and found, some of our colleagues do not like. Some of them attack me personally, some just don't like it, some dismiss the whole work, et cetera. And I'm saying, "But wait a moment, the evidence says this. You don't have to like it.

Take the classic ones, class size, teacher subject matter knowledge. They have very small effects. Now, my argument is that's the evidence. Let's accept it. And let's ask, why is it so low? And that's when you start to get some answers. You don't have to accept it being low. I don't like it low. Like teacher subject matter knowledge doesn't make sense to me. It shouldn't be low. But if you run ahead and deny the evidence, then quite frankly, you're putting your head in the sand.

but if you ask why and it's taken me 10 12 15 years to work out why subject matter knowledge is such a low effect and i think i now have through our more recent studies we understand why i talk about it in the sequel about why it's such small and as a consequence we can improve it but yeah some people get very upset everybody has an opinion though the one that i don't like is best practice and we know that teachers are very generous and they give away their best practice they give away their resources and what they forget

It's the thinking that goes on moment by moment in the classroom as they're implementing those resources that make the difference, not the resources. Interesting. And that upsets a lot of people. But then I'm an evidence-based person. Sometimes I don't like the results, but that doesn't mean you get a denial. But some people want to deny it. Some people want to get angry with it and say,

Sometimes evidence does get in the way of a good opinion. It's a great statement and I've thought about it over and over. Before we leave this though, we can't wait till we jump to the second edition of Visible Learning to actually answer the question of why is it that you think teacher content knowledge didn't have an effect? Well, here in Australia over the last 10 years, we've spent probably a billion dollars on taking teachers out of school and improving their maths and science content. And it's made a zero difference.

And the reason for that, you've got to have, and I introduced this in the sequel, this notion of instructional alignment. You've got to teach in a particular way. Like if you teach, and we've done a synthesis of 20,000 teachers, classroom observations, and we know that teachers talk 89% of the time. They ask 100 to 200 questions a day that require less than three word answers. 90% of their feedback, 90% of their content is about the facts. Now,

We might not like that, but that's the nature of what kids experience. If that is the nature of your classroom, then all you need to do is be one page ahead of the students. All you need to do is make sure that the students follow your instructions, are compliant and do what you wish. However, if you had more student questions about their work they don't know, and on average, in any one class in that first model, the class asks two questions a day about their work they don't know.

But if you have more student questions, if you have more student talk relative to your talk, if you have a better balance of the facts and the knowledge, oh my goodness, subject matter knowledge matters. So when we took all those teachers out, proved their maths and science, they went back into the old transmission model. It's no surprise the effect is very small. How does that go, Susan?

That's really interesting. It makes me think of, and I'm going to probably get this wrong, but it makes me think of some of the content area books that you've helped author. So like visible learning for science and visible learning for social studies. There's an instructional model in there. And I remember it as a triangle, right? There's a base level of knowledge that kids need to know. And then they get a little bit deeper in that knowledge and then they transfer that knowledge. Did I get that right? Perfect.

And in my jargon, I talk about the cognitive complexity, going from the facts to the relating the facts to the transfer. But Susan, sometimes it's best to do the other way around and say,

What is it that we want the kids to transfer? What is it we want them to deeply know? And then what knowledge do they need to do it? And you realize about 60% of the stuff you teach is irrelevant. Like one of our latest books, Room for Impact, this was one of the hardest ones that I wrote with Aaron Hamilton and Dylan William, is saying how do we get teachers and principals to stop doing things that are inefficient?

Like we realized during COVID teaching that we didn't have to talk 89% of the day. In fact, we couldn't on Zoom. We didn't have to ask all those load of questions. We had to teach kids to work alone and work with others. And we realized that when the Zoom was over, we could go and have a coffee. We could go walk the dog. We didn't have to have that relentlessness of us being the performer.

And if you look at the evidence of COVID, not that I'm saying COVID was a good thing, it wasn't. Four meta-analyses already with an effect size of minus 0.12, which is unbelievably trivial. And in your country, when I looked at the NAIT results, which everyone got really upset about, the effect size was minus 0.08. Your country did half.

what the rest of the world did in terms of improvement, you did much better. And so I think we've got a lot to learn from that. Not that I'm arguing that Zoom teaching is necessarily the best, but that balance of the deep and the surface, I think we've really got to get it right. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I do know that people tend to throw out that base of knowledge of, you know, it's not that the facts are important, the facts are important, but you have to build on those facts in order for kids to get the impact.

And the argument I put is I want teachers to be greedy. I want them to have the facts. You've got to have facts. Why does problem solving teaching have very low effect sizes? Because too often it's taught before the kids have the knowledge and skills to go into it. But when you have both, wow, it makes a dramatically powerful difference. For sure.

All right. So at least for me, visible learning was really a first introduction to both the concept of meta-analysis and effect sizes. And I know there's a lot of conversation about both of those things, but why do you think it's beneficial to educators to understand both meta-analysis and effect size? And maybe you can even do your John Hattie definition of what both of those things are. Yeah.

Look, someone goes out there and decides to study the difference between, say, a teaching method, the jigsaw method, or the difference between achievement in males and females, or class size, or teacher subject matter knowledge. So they do a study. They publish it.

Another one does a study on something, different country, different place, different age group, whatever. Let's say on the difference between boys and girls. And then another one, then another one, then another one. And along comes a meta-analysis person who says, let's collect all those articles. Let's code them.

And you can see it's real squirrel-like behavior. Let's code what country it was in, what age group it was in, what subject it was in. But the key thing is we're also going to code how big was the effect, like the magnitude, the size, kind of like how damaging was the earthquake. We want a magnitude effect. And they work out what that magnitude effect of the difference between males and females. And then they say...

And the second question is pretty important. Does it differ, males versus females, in maths, in English, in five-year-olds and 15-year-olds, in New Mexico, where you are, and in Melbourne, Australia, where I am? And all those things we look at, and that's what a meta-analysis is. Now, what I do is I come along and I do a meta-analysis of the meta-analysis. Wow.

Wow. Mind-blowing. Well, that's how I can get up to about 400 million kids is by building and standing on the shoulders of others and asking these questions. And I ask about the relative effects. And when you look at something like gender, because the difference between males and females is about 0.04. It's tiny. And we all know that the difference between boys is ginormous.

The difference between girls and gynomas, the average effect is very small. And that's another one that a lot of people get upset about because they have an opinion that males and females learn differently. There's no evidence for that at all, but people get upset with that. But put that aside. So I come along as a meta-meta-analysis, and I'm very grateful to Jean Glass from Colorado who put all this together.

made it possible to do this. And so you can start to see that you have this sort of high level spaceship view of all the research to say what things have the biggest effects, what have smaller effects. But we mustn't forget those moderators because every teacher in the world says to me, context matters. My class is different. This school is different. And you talk to a teacher, the first thing they want to tell you is about their school. Now, here's a hard one, Susan.

I struggle to find any moderators that make a difference. Really? It doesn't matter. Of course it matters for the teacher in the classroom, but in terms of what is the biggest difference to five-year-olds and 15-year-olds and 25-year-olds, males and females, people in the US, people in Australia, that isn't hardly in effect at all. We do have a science of teaching. We do know a lot about how to be a great teacher, and it doesn't differ.

Now, I want to jump a little bit here, Susan, and I'll take the blame for this. One of the mistakes I made is not being more clear that what I talk about are probabilities. If you use this high effect size, it's a high probability. What matters, Susan, is how you implement it in your class. Hence the argument, know thy impact.

I got in the early days, teachers say, oh, the jigsaw method, incredibly high effects as I'm going to use it. It didn't work. Well, let's talk at your implementation. And I'm not sure we're as good at talking about our implementation as teachers and educators, as we are talking about this is how we teach. So a lot of our more recent work has been looking at that nature of that implementation, the quality of it, about helping teachers understanding what their impact is. So my work is kind of pre that.

Yeah, I'd like teachers to use high probability interventions, but you've got to implement it well with fidelity, with appropriate dosage, with appropriate quality. Educators don't like the word fidelity. It's the F word, right, in education. Yes, yes, yes. But I'm sorry, if you implement it poorly, you've got to expect you only get poor results. We'll be right back. It's November, so it's the perfect time to show our appreciation for a special group of Science of Reading champions.

We recently asked the finalists for the 2023 Science of Reading Star Awards to offer some of their thoughts on the importance of knowledge building. We'll be sharing some of what they had to say on upcoming episodes of the podcast. First, here's Giovanna Mack, winner of the grand prize, the 2023 Changemaker Award.

Jovana is a lead content teacher from Louisiana, and we asked her how knowledge and knowledge building helped her district shift to the science of reading. When we first began our journey into CKLA and shifted to the science of reading, we really didn't appreciate the importance of the knowledge strand and how it could impact student learning. As a matter of fact, you know, I feel that we kind of shied away from it initially because

However, as time progressed and the need for our K-2 students have grown, we now understand the importance of it and how to use that portion of the lesson to help build students' background knowledge. To comprehend a story or text, our lower elementary students really needed a threshold of knowledge about, you know, varying topics.

And we have our tough state standards that we have to also be mindful of. So with that increased demand for our students to have prior knowledge about varying content, we really had to give them a platform to grow from and that was the Knowledge Strand. So through knowledge building, students are better able to comprehend text and apply to their real life. Just recently, I was in a kindergarten classroom.

The students were engaged in the knowledge portion of the lesson about Humpty Dumpty. I could hear the students making up their own rhymes and just being completely engaged in the lesson. Lessons like the one that I witnessed in that kindergarten classroom really helps to prepare students using the knowledge stream for that next phase of their literacy journey. That was Javonna Mack, lead content teacher with Caddo Parish Public Schools in Louisiana.

Find more information on the science of reading star awards at amplify.com slash soar dash star dash awards. And now back to our conversation with John Hattie. Going back to a meta-analysis, what do you think is lost in the work of a meta-analysis? What do we lose there?

Well, the best criticism I've ever received was from many years ago from my colleague, Alison Jones, and she listened to me give a presentation. And then she said in her unbelievably interesting way, John, I'm impressed that you know what happens in classrooms to the second decimal point. Ouch.

And she's got it right. Like, it's all that nuance of what happens in the classroom. And, you know, that's why I spent some time trying to look at classroom observation. And I think, you know, my partner, Janet Clinton, developed this app that we use for many years. It's on your iPhone where you turn it on, you teach your lesson, you turn it off, and then you get a transcript.

99% accurate of what happened in your classroom. You get it automatically coded through artificial intelligence. And we stopped just about three or four years ago because the cost of updating it started to go into the millions. And there are groups around the US now that are that close to breaking through an automatic coding of classrooms. That's going to add an incredible richness. Oh, I bet. Oh, yeah. So that detail of what happens in the classroom, that's not really captured that well in meta-analysis. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, for me, I think about Visible Learning, the first edition. I see educators really using this as a resource book, right? And so they look at it when they're trying to focus on improvements. How do you think educators can best make use of that content? And in relation to that, what cautions do you have about using that content?

Again, in the early days, I had a ranking of all the influences. And that probably led to more misinterpretation than anything. And about six years ago, we decided to abandon that and never use it again. And we haven't. Because people were looking at it and saying, I'm going to do these things at the top. I'm not going to do these things at the bottom. And one of the things that I've also, as I've worked on this explanation,

I have a good colleague, Michael Scriven, who I've worked with for many years, who unfortunately passed away. And he's kept saying to me time and time again, it's all about explanations. It's all about the story. And that's the hard part. So I spent a lot more time on the story. And one of the things that come out, Susan, is it's not what educators do that matters. It's how they think about what they do that matters. And spending a lot more time looking at that thinking, those ways of thinking, what I call the mind frames,

Take one very powerful mind frames about expectations. You know, teachers have low expectations of what their students can do. They tend to have for all the students and they're unbelievably successful at not having growth. The average effect of low expectation teachers is 0.06. But you have teachers with high expectations. They tend to have it for all the students.

All that other argument that they have it for males and females and African-Americans different. Yeah, it's in there. But when they have higher and their effect size 0.96. Now, do they do different? Yes and no. If you just took a video of their classroom with the sound off, took a transcript, you wouldn't find much difference. But when you actually look at how they think, it's dramatically different. Like take differentiation. Low contrast.

expectation teachers think differentiation is different activities for different students. High expectation teachers resist the word differentiation. They say, no, I expect all my students to be successful, but I allow different ways in different times to get there. And if you read Carol Ann Tomlinson, for example, that's exactly what she says differentiation is. But

That different grouping, I think, is just a disaster. And so that way of thinking about expectations is very, very powerful. And it's above expectations.

what teaching method should I use? What lesson plan should I use? And that's why this notion of how teachers think. And that's why when we work with schools, and that's the other thing that's happened in my life over the last 10 years is as a team now, we go into about 10,000 schools around the world over a year and working with those schools. And it's very much focused on how they think and getting them away from, this is what I do. You can have my resources. Come and watch me teach. I don't want to watch a teacher teach.

I want to watch the impact of teachers on kids. That's a massive mind frame difference. And it's this notion that I'm trying to keep pushing, know thy impact. It's how do you, Susan, use the test scores, the assignments you give the students, the artifacts of the students' work, your noticing in the classroom, and the student's voice about learning? How do you triangulate those

to make the best decision about where to next, and then go to an effect size like teacher collective efficacy, which is a really tough one but a very powerful one, how do you get other teachers to question and critique your interpretation and hear their interpretation based on the same evidence? Now that's when you start to see massive acceleration is when we start to critique each other's interpretation. Because go back to that low expectation teacher. They have the same data.

But they say, oh, yeah, but the kids, they're not the right kids. You need to understand their poverty. You need to understand they're a second language student. They come up with 53 reasons why they can't be successful. Why do the teachers down the corridor have exactly the same different way of thinking? Incredibly powerful. It's how we think and being understanding what that is.

So how do you give advice then to either teachers or maybe more importantly, building leaders or any kind of leaders to let's work on changing thinking or think about the thinking for teaching? What does that advice look like? Well, firstly, with your sentence there, Vivian Robinson, my colleague, has told me for many, many years, don't ever ask about changing a teacher. In every school we've ever worked in, everywhere around the world, we've found pockets of excellence.

you don't want to change them yeah every teacher wants to improve so we're an improvement model not a change model and a lot of professional learning works on the assumption Susan that you come to my session and you listen to me as if you came into the room with nothing you have a very strong Theory of Teaching I have to respect that by understanding your way of thinking about your teaching so what we do when we start is we have this notion of a school capability assessment

One of the things we know from the research is that when teachers and school leaders choose professional learning, they tend to choose that which they're already pretty good at. So let's look at what we're good at, what we're not so good at. Let's look about where there's pockets of success and there's pockets of problems. And let's help the school leader, the building leader, to have the courage to call that. Let's work on a coalition of the success and invite the others to join. Let's have a common language about learning in the school. Let's hear the student's point of view.

One of the things we do is we ask the teachers, what does it mean to be a good learner in the school? And we get very rich descriptions. We ask the students and more times than not, the students thinks a good learner is someone who comes along, sits up straight and watches the teacher work. Compliance. And when you put that up in front of teachers, they're shocked. That's not what happens in my class. Well, actually, that's what your students are saying. And so then you've got momentum.

to start listening different, to start critiquing different. And yeah, it's not easy. Now, a lot of people say, well, does it change the maths and reading scores? Yeah, it does. And we've got a lot of evidence for that. But it often takes two to three years to see that difference. Now, a lot of school leaders say, not prepared to wait two or three years. Well, no.

We have ways of showing you that we can get gains in the first six weeks. But if you want long-term systematic change, you have to have a whole way of thinking across the school that is common about how we think about our students. We need a climate and a culture that's inviting. And let's be clear, Susan, you ask the students, do you want to come to school to learn the stuff the teachers teach you? 95% of five-year-olds say yes.

By the end of elementary, start of high school, four out of 10 say yes. We know in COVID, all the research we did in COVID, why do kids want to go back to school? To be with their friends. They didn't say to be with you. No, I'm going to capitalize on that. But we need to be a lot more inviting. Like the biggest predictor of adult health, wealth, and happiness is not achievement at school. It's the number of years of schooling. Now, it changes dramatically how we think about our school. Like we're the only people paid.

Kids compulsively have to be there. We have to make it inviting for them. So that culture across the school and what keeps me going, Susan, I see so much success. I see so many great schools. I come across your country. I'm there in a couple of weeks. You cannot believe how much excellence we have.

But you'd never know that from the media. You'd never know that from the educators themselves. We have incredible success and our job is to scale that up. That's a really good point. You use that word impact often. I hear it, I see it in your writing. Every time you're interviewed, you use that word impact. Talk to me about why that's the number one word in your vocabulary, or at least from my point of view. Yeah, it is.

I think it's the case that every one of us that came into schools, everyone came in for one reason, to have an impact on kids. So that's all I'm doing is reminding teachers why they chose to be there.

I also want to have a dialogue with you and with anyone about what we mean by impact. It doesn't like high achievement. Yeah, that's a nice end, but it's an end, not a beginning. And both our countries, we're a bit obsessed about high achievement, and I think it leads us down the wrong path. If you have a high achieving school where all the kids are cruising and not making at least a year's growth for a year's input, that's not a good school. Yeah. If you're in a low achieving school where all the kids are making more than a year's growth, that's a brilliant school.

What do I care about? My argument is I want to know about your impact on the climate. Is it inviting? So that you teach the learning strategies so that kids can progress towards achievement.

And it's that direction that I care. And you can see, I do care about climate. I do care about where the kids feel they belong in the classroom. I do care about how they think about what learning is, what strategies they have. I do care that they are able to work alone and with each other, respect for self and respect for others. One of the misunderstandings, and it probably hasn't helped from my overzealous discussion about this, is that impact isn't just test scores. It's not just achievement.

It's part of it. Remember, I'm greedy. I want all of it. It's all that information that comes together. And I think that when you ask teachers when they walk into a room and when a building leader walks into a staff room, I want them to say, my job here today is to evaluate my impact. And all good things follow. So we work with schools to get a better, clearer understanding what impact is. Another thing is shadow a student during the day, particularly in a high school. They walk into the first class. Teacher says, this is what we care about in this school. This is how we do it.

You walk into the next class, this teaches, this is how we do it in the school. And it's different, dramatically different. And the kids are used to it. They know it doesn't matter. That's not good enough. What do we stand for here in terms of learning? And like my critics say,

Yeah, but learning is always about something. You ignore knowledge. No, I don't. Actually, precious knowledge is really critical in this. And we talked before. I want the knowledge. I want the precious knowledge. But I want also the kids to know what to do when they don't know what to do. I want them to become their own teachers. Five-year-olds can do it. Go into a class of five-year-olds. They're brilliant at teaching each other. They're brilliant at teaching themselves. They're brilliant at asking questions, open questions. They're brilliant at seeking help. Go into a class of nine-year-olds. They sit there and wait.

Why? Why do you think that is? Our way of thinking what teaching is and what learning is. It's easier for me to talk to the kids and if they don't get it, to tell them again. It's much easier to be that transmission teacher. We are performers. Again, go back to COVID. We couldn't be a performer. We had to get the kids to be performers. And it's that release of responsibility that

And like our argument is that, like, I'm not a fan of things like student control of learning because, you know, novices don't know what they don't know. They need us. Yeah. My notion is I want students to learn how to be their own teachers. And if you're our own teacher, you're a teacher, Susan, you know when you don't know how to get help. You know where to go. You know to do what error management is when you make mistakes and you stop and say, no, that's not why I'm going to go back.

A lot of our students think it's a massive mystery. Like when you ask students, they don't care less about how you teach. They care about how you learn. And when we looked at that 20,000 hours of teacher transcripts and asked, we wanted to find examples of when a teacher thought aloud or when a teacher asked a student to think aloud. And in 20,000 hours, we found exactly zero. Learning is a massive mystery and it shouldn't be.

Hence, the ocean. I want to make that learning visible. Is it visible? No, it's hard. Most learning is invisible. But it shouldn't be such a mystery. Like that kid sitting in your class saying, "How did you do that? How did you do that?" They want to know that. So, I mean, you just said something really interesting about the title of the book, both Visible Learning and then in a minute we'll talk about that second edition. But the focus on visible learning edition number one

Was it on learning or was it on teaching? Well, the irony is the first book, I'm embarrassed to say this, I never had a chapter on learning. I made up for it in the sequel. And I actually, in the early days, didn't want to talk about teaching. I want to talk about the impact of teaching. And that changes things dramatically. Yeah. We've had lots of debates out there about what good teaching and what good teachers are. And my argument is simple. Good teaching is that which has the maximum impact on the students. And we know how to do that.

we know how to recognize those teachers we know who they are yeah it's not difficult but unfortunately most of our dialogue has been about how we do it uh you look at the models of teaching yeah you do this and you don't do this well that's not my argument at all

It's interesting because it circles back to what you said about here's a great resource that I used in my, I created this resource. I did this great thing. My students learned so much from it. Here you go, teacher, you try this too, but it really isn't the resource. It's the thinking. So that sort of goes back to this teaching and impact kind of idea, doesn't it?

Totally. If it was, as you said, every teacher would be brilliant because now with ChatGP and Claude and all these other things, they can create a lesson plan in an instant. They're actually very, very good. If it was as simple as that, we don't need teachers. But we do need teachers because it's their interpretation of that. It's their implementation. It's how they make those decisions moment by moment to do this rather than that. That makes the difference. That's really interesting.

All right. So we've gotten through this word impact, visible learning. What about visible learning edition number two? What's new and different? Why the new edition? Did you ever think you'd do it? Wow, I have all the questions. Well, I've resisted doing a second edition. Part of it is you write a book that did have some interest out there and you said, you know,

what's a second edition? It's just going to be tweaking the edges. It's going to be adding more data. So I said to Bruce, my editor, I said, no, I don't want to do it. And he pressured and pressured and I resisted and resisted. I said, look, what I care about is the story. I'm going to do a second one, but I'm not going to call it second edition. I'm going to call it a sequel, kind of Star Wars-like. The first book was about here is a lot of data and therefore there is a story. The second is about here is a story.

and there's the data. Like in the second book, I don't have as much data. About six years ago, I decided, like one of my observations is, I've been doing this work now for a number of years, and no one, no one has come up with a different explanation. Now, I understand it's tough because there's a lot of data in there. So about six years ago, I said to the team,

let's release all the data so we've got a free website called meta x that's got all the data in it updated quite recently so anybody who wants to collect you don't have to spend 40 years collecting it like i did i'm giving it away free there it is wow and so in the new sequel the data's not there you can go get it on weather access free i spent a lot more time up front on the story

And look also at the work we've done with many hundreds of thousands of teachers over the last 10 years of implementing it in schools. We include some of that in it. So I'm spending a lot more time on the SQL, on the story, on the big messages and using the data to buttress it rather than, as I did in the first book, put it up front. Now, here's another problem, Susan. Even my best friends, my closest colleagues, get really upset when a new meta-analysis comes along and it changes the average effect size from 0.64 to 0.62.

How can it be different? Which was right? Which was wrong?

And like, obviously, if you have a meta-analysis based on 10 studies and you have a new meta-analysis come along, it's going to change. Yeah. And so I didn't want to get into that whole debate about, oh, which one do we believe is the first book right or the second book? So that's why I said, no, of course it's going to change when you add. And I add a new measure into the new book called robustness, which gives an indication on a one to five scale. If the effects has a robustness of one, expect it to change when new data comes.

The other thing, no surprise, is that research didn't stop in 2008. People have produced more meta-analyses, and they still are since I published the book last March. And I do keep up to date with those things. And so I've gone from 800 to 2,100. But here's the good news, Susan. There won't be a third edition. You say that now.

No, I'm going to take what I did in Metarex and put it all online and let others take it over and add to it because I want the story contested a lot more. You actually have talked about that a couple of times, inviting the critics, inviting the skeptics, come look at it. Help me dig into this a little bit deeper. How many people have you had take you up on that offer?

I've got plenty of critics. In terms of new explanations, as I say, at this stage, no one. Some have taken it, like my good colleague, Russell Bishop, and applied it, for instance, with minority students. And he's developed his story, which resonates very closely with mine.

But I really do welcome any others who want to take it. Now, what has happened since is a lot more people are looking at meta-analysis of meta-analysis. Like we've done it in achievement. We've done it in learning strategies. We've got one coming out on self-concept and self-efficacy. Others have looked at it in motivation. And so that's been a very healthy development. And obviously, I welcome that. So it has moved that on. And it's

a lot of criticism of the work. And, you know, criticism isn't always a negative thing. It's like, could you do this better? Or how could you do this? And as I said, I talk about it in chapter two in the book, what I've learned from my critics. And I have learned a lot from them. Now, some of them, like the ones that attack me personally, yeah,

That goes straight onto the rubbish bin. I learned years ago that in academia, you attack ideas, you don't attack people. But unfortunately, some people still want to attack. We've talked about evidence gets in the way of a good opinion. People want to dismiss it. They pick up one thing, usually it's class size. Oh, he doesn't understand class size. Well, I think I actually do understand class size. It does have a small positive effect. It is a positive effect.

but they don't want to go to that next step to understand why it's so small. So they dismiss the whole thing. Well, that's their right. It's sad. I would be horrified if they then walked into a class and dismissed their kids' critique.

And occasionally I get, ironically, I usually get it in a handwritten letter of vicious vitriol that comes. Now, obviously, I rip that up and throw it away. But my despair is that teacher walks into a classroom. What if a kid disagreed with them? That's scary. Now, there's not many of those. But yeah, I welcome the criticism. I welcome the critique because that's how you grow up.

That data that you've put online, has anybody tapped into that to extend any research or do anything with that? Yeah, a lot of people have. I guess quite a hundred plus thousand hits a year. A lot of teachers and educators do it to look up. And we're always looking around for philanthropy funds to improve it. So if anyone's out there who wants to help us improve, we've got big plans to improving it, but it's not cheap to improve those kinds of things, but it works okay. It works very well. And it's used quite a lot. Yes.

That's great. We'll link our listeners in the show notes to that so that they can get access to it as well. Are you working on a new book at all? Do you have another book in you? Oh dear.

I feel guilty that I'm destroying too many trees, Susan. Like I retired four years ago from academia. I retired from my government job on the 1st of July. So I do have time on my hands. I do spend a lot of it with my grandkids. But yeah, I have got some other books. We've just produced one on visible learning for English as second language learners. We're looking at one on special education and new teachers. Working on my second book with my son.

on what it means to be a learner in a classroom. We're finishing off a book at the moment on 10 Mind Frames for Culture and Climate. Wow. So I'm still pretty busy. I still enjoy it.

The other thing that's happened to me is in the early days, a lot of the books I wrote were by myself or with a few colleagues. Since then, I have broadened dramatically the number of colleagues I've written with. And that, quite frankly, brings an incredible richness to me and I hope to the book. So working with others is a really fun thing to do. Earlier in the podcast, we were talking about the Building to Impact book that you wrote with several other authors. We had Doug Reeves on Anarchist.

an episode talking about that book and actually talking a lot about de-implementation. But I will say that Doug Reeves also mentioned, maybe not on the podcast, but maybe in the pre-call, how great it was to work together with you. So that's really amazing. Well, he's also pretty amazing to work with. He was an author on that book and I've known him for many, many years. And it's kind of like Michael Fullan and the Doug Reeves. Their obsession is about implementation,

And one of the things that fascinates me as I go around schools and ask school leaders, what's their model of implementation? They don't have one. Hope, I'll monitor it. Now, if you were setting up a local coffee shop from day one, you would worry about your implementation. You worry about scanning up your success.

And so what we did, you know, with Doug and some other co-authors, is looked at all the implementation models and their effect sizes in business and computing and policy. Like if you went into the government here in Australia and you didn't know Prince methodology for implementation, you wouldn't be employed. If you didn't know about health, about getting to outcomes, if you didn't know about agile methods, implementation is it. Why is it an education? We've hardly got anyone. Tony Brake has a very good model of implementation out of California.

Michael Barber has one of the best in deliverology. I'm struggling, but every day, every educator, their fundamental purpose is implementation. That's where Doug Reeves is so powerful, is that all his work, when you listen to him, it's about how you implement this. It's not talking about this, it's how you implement it. And that's really, really powerful. That's a really, really good point.

You've talked a little bit about some books that you have. What about any other concepts, ideas that you're tracking as we look maybe beyond 2023? I think the biggest thing

The two revolutions that are hitting us now is the one that I think is going to come within the next two or three years, and that is the automatic coding of classroom observation. Across your country, around the world, that's working on it. We worked on it for about seven or eight years. We were quite successful in what we were doing, but over the last three or four years, it's exponential in growth. And I think that's going to open up. Now, it's got some incredible negatives. When we did it, for instance, in one country, it was,

We got into big troubles because the parents insisted in finding out how many minutes each teacher spent with their kid. Some states in your country banned what we were doing because they said you will have evidence of incompetence and it will be misused against teachers. It has got some downsides, but it's also massive upsides in terms of better understanding what happens in those classes. I think it's going to be a massive revolution for the good, but with some problems.

And obviously the artificial intelligence engines that are in our pilots, the chat GPGs, the clouds, we've just actually written the paper, which again, it's open and free and I'll send it to you if you want to put it as a link. If you think it's a problem now, it's got a growth that's dramatic over the next two or three years. And like I'm using it now to create lesson plans. I use it to code various things. I'm using it for lots of different ways of doing it. And like in my country, most states have banned it. Now,

We know in education, every time you ban something, it's going to have a dramatically revolutionary positive effect. So I'm pleased that it's going to have a bit. It's going to have some downsides. We're going to have to change how we think about what we do. Go back to, do you remember those 21st century skills everyone talked about?

Oh, yeah. People still talk about them. I know. We're a quarter of the way through and we still haven't got them right. And our argument in the paper is that the 21st century skills now are going to include things like probative questions. We're going to have to teach our students to ask questions because that's what these things depend on. You ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. And I saw an ad in your country about a month ago, which I was quite excited about. First time someone's advertising for a probative engineer.

In the engineering business, they want people who can ask the questions better. That's great. You're going to have to do assessment credibility.

And we know with all your fake news, et cetera, you're going to have to teach the students what's right, what's wrong. You can't just believe it because it came off the internet. You're going to have to teach evaluative thinking. And the one that I think is the big difference is that if you go on to chat GPT, like I did about a month ago to teach me and update my Spanish, and it was really, really good. And I said, I'm struggling with this, and it came up with a lesson. But the thing it did at the end which really stunned me is I said,

I don't know what to do next. What do I do next? And it said, well, given you've done this, this, this, and this, this is what you do next. Wow. Now that, if you're a teacher, is a massive threat to others. Yeah. So my argument is the fourth skill is wise choices.

We're going to have to teach. Now, sometimes on those systems, they come up with crazy choices or not so good choices. So we're going to have to teach our students how to make wise choices, how to evaluatively think, how to assessment credibility, how to ask the right questions. Now, go back to those old 21st century skills. They seem so dated. LAUGHTER

Oh, that's so true. Oh, well, anything else you want to tell our educators out there? You've given us so much good advice, so much good information. Anything else you have for our listeners? I think it's that courage, school leaders, to focus on starting up the success that you have. It's one of the hardest things to do, but it's the right thing to do. For those teachers, stop talking about your teaching. Start talking about what do you understand by learning? And then

ask what's the optimal teaching depending on where the kid is in the learning cycle listen to your students thinking aloud you think aloud make what they care about every day how do i go about learning this make that your day job make that that make mistakes and show the students that mistakes are opportunities to learn not embarrassments ask your kids

Make your class inviting. And remember notions like engagement, inviting, follow learning, don't proceed it. Don't come up with real world, interesting, authentic tasks. Teach the kids to learn. And that's what turns them on to the engagement and the invitation of learning. And it's that notion of let's get out there as a profession and say, we have expertise. You just can't take a person and dump them in a classroom and expect them to have the kind of impact.

that many of the teachers are having now. How do we tell our parents? How do we send kids home every afternoon to talk about learning at home? Not as most parents ask at the tea table, what did you do today?

tell me about a frustration tell me about a learning activity and how do we get our kids advertising that schools are exciting places to come to to learn because quite frankly if they're not they need to be and right across your country there are stunning instances of it so you can see my passion is that it is that expertise we have if i have any influence at all on anyone i want to reintroduce that word expertise

Well, thank you for that, Dr. John Hattie. It was such an honor to have you on today. And I know our listeners are going to enjoy this. And I love ending with the word expertise. So thank you very much. I love talking about the stuff. So thank you. Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with John Hattie, Emeritus Laureate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.

We certainly won't be able to link all of them, but check out the show notes for links to some of Professor Hattie's books, including Visible Learning, the sequel. We'll also have links to other resources, including his Visible Learning website. We'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. Share your thoughts in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading the Community.

Science of Reading, the podcast, is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the science of reading, go to Amplify.com slash CKLA. Next time on the show, we're bringing you another great conversation about the critical role of knowledge and knowledge building with Dr. Margaret McCowan.

Dr. McCowan helps us rethink some common practices for vocabulary instruction and offers a vision for effective vocabulary development. I think unfortunately for a lot of kids, vocabulary is just, I got to memorize these definitions.

And somehow these definitions are, you know, the real thing. You know, somebody sent them down from Mount Olympus and I just have to learn them. Instead of, you know, your language is something that you use and manipulate. That's coming up. Don't miss any upcoming episodes by subscribing to Science of Reading the Podcast wherever you find your podcasts. And please do us a favor and consider rating us and leaving us a review.

It will help more people find the show. Thank you again for listening.