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).
