9 Things We Learned At the Visible Learning World Conference 2016
Use marking to motivate; everyone's priorities are wrong; we've become trapped by history; and six other pointers and discoveries we encountered at the third annual Visible Learning World Conference…
If you were to present Visible Learning model of teaching in the form of a conversation, it might look a little something like this:
‘What works?’ ‘Everything.’ ‘OK, so what works best?’ ‘Let’s find out, and do more of that.’
The Visible Learning theory first came into being with the publication of a book of the same name by education researcher John Hattie, which brought together 800 meta studies involving a total of some 80 million students and examined the data to try and identify the most effective ways of improving learning in schools.
In the years since then, the theory has been put into practice in schools and settings across the world via the Visible Learning plus development programme. Since 2014 there has also been the Visible Learning World Conference (VLWC), the first of which were held in Brisbane and San Diego.
This week, the VWLC came to London, for two days of informative talks, incisive exchanges and productive networking hosted by the training provider, Osiris Educational. Teachwire was there for day one – here are the lessons we came away with…
1 | Teachers should see the classroom through their students’ eyes
Proceedings kicked off with a keynote speech by John Hattie, in which he set out some key Visible Learning tenets – beginning with the idea that seeing the classroom through the eyes of the children is crucial. Teachers won’t discover more about their students’ learning by observing and listening to other teachers, Hattie argued – instead, teachers would be better served by trying to evaluate and learn from the things pupils say and do in the classroom that teachers typically don’t notice, or aren’t privy to.
2 | Know thy impact
Another point touched on in Hattie’s keynote was that a number of factors such as class sizes, frequency of homework, presence or otherwise of technology by themselves don’t seem to make much difference to performance, yet are often cited as having a huge impact when presented via graphs with misleading scales.
Teachers and leaders should instead embrace the mantra ‘Know thy impact’. Principals should articulate what progress looks like to their teachers; teachers should listen to the student voice and try to understand how they think; and schools as a whole should find ways of monitoring their success.
3 | We’re obsessing over the wrong things
From there, Hattie moved on to a point that would become one of the day’s recurring themes – that many people (and politicians in particular) obsess over details that make little difference to how children learn.
Between two kids of the same ability level, the school system, for instance, will make little difference. What does make a difference is the competency of teachers – and whether those teachers are willing and able to have their methods scrutinised according to how well the pupils are learning.
The point was picked up in a subsequent talk given by Mick Waters, on how ‘learning arenas’ (be they classrooms or schools themselves) are organised, and whether this can have an impact on outcomes.
Early on, Waters highlighted how politicians were responsible for causing confusion around the purpose of education – that while students can be taught academically, socially, morally, culturally and in several other ways, the ‘academic’ has been emphasised almost to the exclusion of everything else, as illustrated in the slide below.
4 | The school rituals we take for granted have some historical origins
Waters went on to outline the way in which certain rules and systems have become deeply embedded within Britain’s schools, while being often inconsistently applied and rarely age-sensitive.
There then followed a whistle-stop tour of social history, from public schools basing their school systems on traditions inherited from universities (homework), the church (collective worship) and the military (assemblies) prior to 1870, to the later adoption of measures derived from factories (bells) and the prison system (playtime).
From here, Waters alighted on the post-war fashion for schools to become friendlier, more domestic spaces (carpeted areas, breakfast clubs) and finally the influence of commercialism (email/data) and practices borrowed from the service sector (set targets) that have changed the character of schools since 1970.
5 | Visible Learning methods have had noticeably positive effects in the real world
Senior staff from Pembroke Dock Community School – a primary with over 650 pupils in a Communities First area – presented a case study, which detailed how they had put Visible Learning methods into practice.
These included the adoption of strategies such as learning ladders, and ensuring that pupils were active in both their own learning and that of others (including having Y5 pupils act as literacy/numeracy leaders and help with assessing lower year groups).
The school also set about establishing a success criteria and adapted James Nottingham’s Learning Challenge to teach pupils that it was okay for them to make mistakes. Here, let the pupils themselves explain:
6 | Co-operative peer improvement can be extremely effective
On a related note, Institute of Education associate Shirley Clarke gave a presentation of the various forms of feedback – self, peer, teacher – that vividly demonstrated the potential for co-operative peer improvement to get children engaging with what they’ve learnt, and considering how they’ve learnt it.
In one of several videos included as part of the talk, we watched pupils filmed as they carried out an instructional writing classroom activity. Rather than simply marking each other’s work, the pupils were shown trying to spot each other’s mistakes and actively challenging each other to improve on what they’d written – albeit with the pupil whose work it was holding the pen and having the last word over any changes.
7 | Teachers’ marking should start with the needs of the child and proceed from there
Moving on to the feedback given from teachers to students, Clarke pointed out how comments on English marking often try to initiate a dialogue – ‘What did the witch’s face look like?’ – rather than prompting the student to improve the piece and extend their knowledge, as a comment such as ‘Write two more sentences to describe the witch’s face’ might do.
Other strategies for this might include asking students to look up the dictionary definitions of misspelt words, and leaving a whole other page free in students’ exercise books to allow room for such comments and the student’s responses.
The same principle could also apply in maths, by following the guidance of the National Centre for Teaching in Mathematics and instructing students to continue number patterns, for example, or to answer the same task using a different method.
8 | The difference between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ learning – and the different approaches they require
As noted by John Hattie, surface learning takes place when children encounter a subject or area for the first time, while deep learning describes what happens when children begin to extend what they’ve learnt outwards, making connections and relating it to other areas.
The thing to note is that certain approaches, such as memorisation and testing, will not be important at the surface stage, but can have a huge impact once the child has that knowledge and begins to build upon it at the deep learning stage.
9 | Collaboration is key
And finally, one more prescription from Hattie – it’s vital to maintain a collective responsibility for student learning.
There needs be a greater willingness among teachers to challenge each other, share knowledge within their own school and with other schools, and apply that knowledge – and fewer instances, particularly in the staff room, of teachers working in isolation.
For more information, visit vlworldconference.com or follow @osirisedu.
