What Teachers Do Matters--John Hattie

Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie VISIBLE LEARNING FOR LITERACY—Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning 

The star practitioners, Fisher and Frey, and the leading researcher Hattie’s collaborative work, Visible Learning for Literacy, Implementing the Practices That Work Best to accelerate Student Learning is an absolute must read for K-12 educators. Their mission and message continues to be loud and clear. What we do matters, and how we do it matters even more (Hattie, 2012).

Doing what matters requires making important and relevant choices on what works.  Moving away from what we always have done to embracing the evidence of what is to be done requires courage and conviction.

What Fisher, Frey and Hattie teach us is a skilled teacher must make the learning visible.  Teachers make the learning visible by being explicit on what is being taught, why it is important and relevant, and how students can monitor and measure their success.  An expert teacher utilizes feedback that acknowledges where their current level of performance is and implements the next steps needed to close the gap to reach mastery.  Resiliency is celebrated as students learn and navigate through mistakes, with a mindset these missteps are opportunities to grow and acquire the self-regulatory skills needed to strengthen their understanding.

Fisher, Frey, and Hattie encourage educators to be ever so mindful of this learning process with our students. This gives us an amazing opportunity as educators to be reflective of the specific effective teaching practices we implement to make the surface learning transfer to deep learning, and made meaningful as they apply and innovate in new ways. “Literacy matters” and “what teacher do matters” when they…

●      Scale learning to move from surface, to deep, to transfer, and match approaches to their students’ conceptual levels of knowledge.

●      Monitor their impact and use that information to inform instruction and intervention.

●      Reject instructional practices that harm learning.

●      Make literacy learning visible to their students, so their students can become their own teachers” (p .167).