High Value-Add Schools: Key Drivers of School Improvement, CESE

High Value Added Schools


The research paper identifies elements of focus for High Value Added Schools.


1. Effective Collaboration
2. Engaging and sharing in professional learning
3. Setting whole-school goal and strategies for change
4. Using explicit and effective teaching strategies
5. Creating an environment that promotes learning and high levels of student engagement
6. Setting high expectations for achievement


The research demonstrates the link nicely with some of the main influences of Visible Learning, which include:
1. High expectations
2. Explicit and timely feedback
3. Collective Teacher Efficiency


The focus of the review was to identify commonalities within the schools that have demonstrated significant growth within various areas of the school environment.
It is of interest to consider what is being done in schools to establish growth and to consider what is relevant to a school's context.


Utilising the HVA document enables schools to analyse and reflect on the overall performance of the school on an ongoing basis.

Mentors and Proteges: A Critical Review of the Literature

Mentors and Proteges: A Critical Review of the Literature, Merriam






Currently researching into the role a mentor has within the education setting and as a school leader.
Some key points I discovered from the article:
1. Effective mentors generally had themselves a critical mentor in their early stages of their careers
2. Mentoring within adult development requires a powerful interaction to exist between the two participants.
3. Mentor must be experienced, loving, be demonstrating quality practice and prioritise the shaping of the protégé/ mentee
4. Levinson suggests mentors and protégé need to have a common understanding about who they are as educators and the type of educator they want to be
5. Levinson suggests ideally there should be 8-15 year age gap between the two participants
6. Sheehy suggests the absence of a mentor has a huge impact
7. Sheehy suggests all those whom had gained recognition during their careers had a mentor at some point earlier on.


The underlying question for researchers appears to be not how mentoring leads to material success but how it relates to adult development and adult learning?


This leads me to consider the following questions which apply to any mentoring relationship regardless of occupation;
1. If the research demonstrates it is an important element for the mentor and protégé to share similar personality traits, should organisations then be allowing protégés to chose their own mentors? And what impact will this have on the quality of performance the protégé can achieve? 


2. In education does an influential teacher play the same role as a mentor?


Interesting read, would love to hear your thoughts on the article.

Hattie & His High Impact Strategies for Teachers

John Hattie synthesised over 500,000+ studies related to student achievement in his book Visible Learning. He showed that teachers can make a difference despite other circumstances that may impede learning.
In fact, Hattie found that most teachers have some degree of impact on their students’ learning. However, some teachers have far more impact than others.

What Should Teachers Do?

John Hattie discovered that teachers are far more likely to have a large and positive impact if they:

• Are passionate about helping their students learn
• Forge strong relationships with their students
• Are clear about what they want their students to learn
• Adopt evidence-based teaching strategies
• Monitor their impact on students’ learning, and adjust their approaches accordingly
• Actively seek to improve their own teaching

You are far more likely to have a low (or even negative) impact if you:

• Repeat students
• Label students (fixed mindset)
• Have low expectations

Hattie’s Top 10 Teaching Strategies

According to John Hattie, high-impact, evidence-based teaching strategies include:

• Direct Instruction
• Note Taking & Other Study Skills
• Spaced Practice
• Feedback
• Teaching Metacognitive Skills
• Teaching Problem Solving Skills
• Reciprocal Teaching
• Mastery Learning
• Concept Mapping
• Worked Examples

Teaching strategies that had little or no impact included:

• Giving students control over their learning
• Problem-based learning
• Teaching test-taking
• Catering to learning styles
• Inquiry-based teaching

Curriculum Matters Too

John Hattie found that what you teach matters too.
Specifically, students achieve better results when they are taught:

• Core and subject-specific vocabulary
• Phonics and phonemic awareness
• Comprehension skills

Other programs that have a significant, positive impact on student performance include:

• Creativity Programs
• Repeated Reading Programs
• Visual Perception Programs

Programs that had little if any impact included:

• Perceptual Motor Programs
• Whole Language Programs
• Sentence Combining Programs
• Extra Curricula Programs

Other Key Insights

John Hattie wants others to know that:

• Your actions can make a difference despite other hurdles that your students may face.
• Some approaches to your work as a teacher are likely to have a far larger impact than others, so it makes sense to start with those.
• No approach to teaching will work for every student, all of the time. Therefore, you need to be always aware of the impact that you are having on your students, and to adjust your approach when necessary.

The above findings are clear cut. However, much of John Hattie’s work needs careful reading to appreciate the subtle nuances of his findings. For example, Hattie found that homework has a marginal impact. This true when you average out different studies. However, a careful reading of the underlying research shows that homework has virtually no impact for young students, and quite a lot of impact in senior secondary school. Furthermore, other research (found in a different section of Hattie’s book), shows that study tasks help students do better at school, which suggests the nature of homework may play a role. Also, Hattie found that:

• Ability grouping was not particularly helpful and that mixed ability groups were better. However, he also found that within-class ability groups in reading outperform mixed ability groups.
• Piagetian programs had a large impact on student results, where the underlying research actually showed that it was students’ Piagetian levels that correlated with achievement. Students operating at higher Piagetian levels were much more likely to achieve better marks than peers operating at lower Piagetian levels.
• That problem-based learning was less effective than alternative approaches, but that teaching students problem-solving strategies had a large impact on their subsequent results.

The Story Behind the Numbers Reading Week 1 Term 1 2016

Hattie's - Six Signposts towards excellence in Education

1. Teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning.

2. Teachers need to be directive, influential, caring, actively and passionately engaged in the process of teaching and learning.

3. Teachers need to be aware of what each and every student in their class is thinking and what they know, be able to construct meaning and meaningful experiences in light of this knowledge of the students, and have proficient knowledge and understanding of their subject content so that they can provide meaningful and appropriate feedback such that each student moves progressively through the curriculum levels.

4. Teachers and students need to know the learning intentions and the criteria for the student success for their lessons, know how well they are attaining these criteria for all students, and know where to go next in light of the gap between students’ current knowledge and understanding and the success criteria of ‘Where are you going?’, ‘How are you going?’, and ‘Where to next?’.

5. Teachers need to move from the single idea to multiple ideas, and to relate and then extend these ideas such that learners construct, and reconstruct, knowledge and ideas. It is not the knowledge or ideas, but the learner’s construction of this knowledge and ideas that is critical.

6. School leaders and teachers need to create schools, staff-rooms and classroom enviornments in which error is welcomed as a learning opportunity in which discarding incorrect knowledge and understandings is welcomed, and in which teachers can feel safe to learn, re-learn, and explore knowledge and understanding.

Visible Learning- The Story and How can teachers be Visible Learners?

A summary outlining Hattie's belief of what visible learning is and looks like in the classroom for both the teacher and the student. 

-    Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when learning is the explicit and transparent goal, when it is appropriately challenging and when the teacher and the student both seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained.

-        Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when feedback is given and sought, and when there are active, passionate and engaging people (teacher, student, peer) participating in the act of learning.

-        Visible teaching and learning occurs when the teacher views learning through the eyes of the student, and the student observes teaching through the eyes of the teacher, which is the key to ongoing learning.

-        Students who are their own teachers exhibit self-regulatory attributes that seem more desirable for learners (self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-assessment, self-teaching).

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-       Teachers should think of themselves as evaluators of their effect on students.

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      Teachers use evidence based methods to inform, change and sustain these evaluation beliefs about their effects.

-        Teachers must look at what each effect has on each student and think about how resource (peers) can be used to move students from what they can do now to where the teacher considers they should be, and how to do this in the most efficient and effective manner.

-        Teachers must adapt their mind frame.

-        The act of teaching requires deliberate interventions to ensure that there is cognitive change in the student; thus the key ingredients are being aware of the learning intentions, knowing when a student is successful in attaining those intentions, having sufficient understanding of the student’s prior understanding as he or she comes to task, and knowing enough about the content to provide meaningful and challenging experiences so that there is some sort of progressive development.

-        Teachers must know a range of learning strategies to supply the student when they seem not to understand.

-        Teachers need to be able to direct and redirect in terms of content and maximise feedback. 

-        Learning intentions and success criteria must be shared with and understood by the learner. Therefore the learner can than experiment (right or wrong) with the content and the thinking about the content, making connections across the ideas.

-        Teachers need to share their teaching strategies with the students and their colleagues.

-        Passion reflects the thrill as well as frustrations of learning.

-        The greater the challenge the higher the probability that one seeks and needs feedback, but the more important it is that there is a teacher to provide feedback and to ensure that the learner is on the right path to successfully meet the challenges.

-        The excellent teacher must be vigilant to what is working and what is not working in the classroom.

-        Visible Teaching and Learning requires the teacher and student understanding the skills and having the knowledge (first by teacher, than student).

-        Teacher must know when learning is occurring and when it is not, when to experiment and when to learn from the experience, learn to monitor, seek and give feedback, and learn when to provide alternative learning strategies when other strategies are not working.

-        What is most important is that teaching is visible to the student, and that the learning is visible to the teacher.

-        The more the student becomes the teacher and the more the teacher becomes the learner, then the more successful are the outcomes.

-        80% of class should be student talking and learning not teacher talking.

-        Overlearning can assist in developing fluency in learning. Over learning is what happens when we reach a stage of knowing what to do without thinking about it; its critical feature is that it reduces the load on our thinking and cognition, allowing us to attend to new ideas.

Conclusions

-        When teaching and learning are visible, there is a greater chance of students reaching higer levels of achievement.

-        To make it visible requires accomplished ‘teacher as evaluator and activator’, who know the range of learning strategies to build the students’ surface knowledge, deep knowledge and understading, and conceptual understanding.

-        Teachers need to have skill to get out of the way when learning is occurring and students are making progress to achivieng the criteria.

-        Visible teaching and learning requires a commitment to seek further challenges (for the teacher and the student)

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      Two of the essential ingredients to Visible Learning are challenge and feedback.

-        The greater the challenge the greater the need for feedback, leading to the greater the chance the learner is on the right path to successfully meeting the challenges.

Outcome of Schooling - Visible Learning

Hattie formulated the notion of Visible Learning whereby the teacher becomes the learner and reflects on their own development and progress as an evaluator and activator and whereby the student becomes the teacher engaging in learning that encourages life long learning to take place.

This post gives a clear reason as to why Hattie undertook his research and the impact that schooling has on the future of our students.

Hattie notes the following statistics regarding the outcome of schooling:

-        -Schools focus too much of achievement, focusing solely on achievement can miss what students know, can do and care about.

-        -It is about engaging students in learning in order to keep them in learning

-        -Learning must be productive, challenging and engaging to ensure the best chance that student’s stay in school.

-        -In Levin’s (2006) research, drop out students earn average $23,000 US, high school completion earn 48% more and university completion earns average 78% more.

-        -High school graduates live 6-9 years more than dropouts and are 10-20% less likely to be involved in criminal activities.

-        -Teachers must encourage students to be critical evaluative thinkers (therefore students are better adapted to critically reflect on political issues and able to examine, reflect and argue with reference to history and tradition, while respecting self and others).

-        Critical evaluation is at the core of the Visible Learning Theory.

How do we as teachers obtain critical evaluation and what does it look like in the classroom for teachers and students?