Readings

Pulling the Threads Together -

• Starting With Hattie

• Praise - Class Dojo and Stickers

• Formative Assessment - Feed-back and Feed-Forward

• Inquiry and Thinking

• Final Thoughts

Starting With Hattie

Professor John Hattie undertook the largest ever meta-analysis of quantitative measures of the effect of different factors on educational outcomes. His book, Visible Learning, is the result of this study. If anyone is qualified to state what really works, it is he.

The evidence from many decades of research on what really enhances student learning points to solutions such as improving teacher and school leader expertise, ensuring that teachers and school leaders work together on common understandings about progress and high expectations for the impact of their teaching, school leaders who focus on developing collective expertise among their teachers, systems that have robust discussions to decide the purpose and desired outcomes of their schools and students who want to learn the skills they need to become their own teachers.

Hattie states the most ambitious and vital aim of schooling: for every student to gain at least a year’s growth for a year’s input.

“All students deserve at least a year’s progress for a year’s input, no matter where they start.”

Accepting this means that we stop using terms like achievement standards, tails, gaps and flatlining. These terms confuse and distract.

Those starting behind will need much more than a year’s progress if the gap is to be reduced. It is more an equity than an excellence problem. A belief that we can make a difference for children from poorly resourced families is a critical starting point, and the mantra needs to be,‘I can make a profound positive difference to every person who crosses the school gate into my class or school regardless of their background.’

Poverty and low family resources are no excuse for not making a major contribution to students, although they certainly make for a tough start.

“It is vital that we are advocating finding success in whatever way possible, creating the circumstances for success and removing barriers (especially low expectations and explanations of why we cannot effectively teach these students) to allow the best opportunities for all.”

Praise - Class Dojo and Stickers

Two readily identified fallacies are that

(a) people learn more when they receive praise

(b) people need continual praise to establish and maintain feelings of self-worth.

Despite thousands of projects, neither statement has any serious support. Praise makes people happier, sometimes, and in some places. It can steer you toward wanting to do certain things, or induce you to stay in the field. But it does not assist you to learn. We know of no research finding suggesting that receiving praise itself can assist a person to learn or to increase their knowledge and understanding.

Research into the classroom use of praise by teachers was reviewed by noted researcher Jere Brophy, who found that praise often is used for interpersonal reasons, or as a management strategy. But the research found that praise did not serve as viable facilitator in academic classroom learning.

Intermittent and unpredictable reinforcement produces strong and persistent habits, whereas constant and predictable reinforcement leads you to stop efforts once reinforcement is no longer present.

If we want to produce people who lack persistence and self-control, who are accustomed to immediate gratification as their default position, then rewarding them on every single opportunity is one known technique.

Students need clear indications that the worthwhile target they are harbouring is becoming real. But they do not want to waste energy being worried about their standing on your approval index. The important thing is to set a positive and friendly climate - one of mutual respect and trust.

Carol Dweck on Praise

In a now famous 1998 study of children aged ten and eleven, psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller asked 128 children to solve a series of mathematical problems. After completing the first set of simple exercises, the researchers gave each child just one sentence of praise.

Some were praised for their intellect -

‘You did really well, you're so clever';

Others were praised for their hard work -

'You did really well, you must have tried really hard.'

Then the researchers had the children try a more challenging set of problems. The results were dramatic.

The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new approaches. They also showed more resilience and tended to attribute their failures to insufficient effort, not to a lack of intelligence.

The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure, tended to choose tasks that confirmed what they already knew, and displayed less tenacity when the problems got harder. Ultimately, the thrill created by being told 'You're so clever' gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance.

When asked by the researchers to write to children in another school, recounting their experience, some of the children labeled as 'clever' lied, inflating their scores.

In short, all it took to knock these youngsters' confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.

Stephen Grosz on Praise

Praise doesn't build a child's confidence, so what does?

Shortly after qualifying as a psychoanalyst, I discussed all this with an eighty-year-old woman named Charlotte Stiglitz. Charlotte - the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz - taught remedial reading in northwestern Indiana for many years. 'I don't praise a small child for doing what they ought to be able to do,' she told me. 'I praise them when they do something really difficult - like sharing a toy or showing patience. I also think it is important to say "thank you". When I'm slow in doing something for a child, or slow to help them and they have been patient, I thank them. But I wouldn't praise a child who is playing or reading.'

No great rewards, no terrible punishments - Charlotte's focus was on what a child did and the effort they put into doing it.

I once watched Charlotte with a four-year-old boy, who was drawing. When he stopped and looked up at her - expecting praise - she smiled and said, "There is a lot of blue in your picture.' He replied, 'It's the pond near my grandmother's house - there is a bridge.' He picked up a brown crayon, and said, 'I'll show you.' Unhurried, she talked to the child, but more importantly she observed, she listened.

She was present.

Being present builds a child's confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive, if we've not been attentive to her?

Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But this attentiveness - the feeling that someone is trying to think about us - is something we want more than praise.

Alfie Kohn on Praise

Studies conclude that rewards are ineffective. In the process of writing a book on the subject, I've found hundreds of studies showing that rewards are strikingly ineffective at producing lasting change in attitudes or behaviours. Once the rewards run out, people go right back to acting the way they did.

Rewards don't create an enduring commitment to any value or action; they merely change what we do.

Consider the questions that children may ask themselves. Threaten a punishment and a child will come to ask, "What am I supposed to do, and what will happen to me if I don't do it?" Bribe him by dangling a reward and he'll wonder, "What am I supposed to do, and what will I get for doing it?" Notice how similar these two questions are, and how different from what we want children to ask:

"What kind of person do I want to be?"

Good values have to be grown from the inside out; bribes and threats at best change children's behaviour only for a while.

Rather than bolstering a child’s self-esteem, praise may increase kids’ dependence on us. The more we say, "I like the way you...." or "Good ______ing," the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, our decisions about what’s good and bad, rather than learning to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and dole out some more approval.

Mary Budd Rowe, a researcher at the University of Florida, discovered that students who were praised lavishly by their teachers were more tentative in their responses, more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice ("Um, seven?"). They tended to back off from an idea they had proposed as soon as an adult disagreed with them. They were less likely to persist with difficult tasks or share their ideas with other students.

In short, "Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK. Surely this is not what we want for our daughters and sons.

Rewards simply control through seduction rather than force, according to University of Rochester psychologists Edward Deci, Ph.D., and Richard Ryan, Ph.D., and all techniques that rely on control ultimately undermine what children need in order to make good decisions and take responsibility for their actions. Studies have shown, for example, that kids whose parents reward them frequently are less generous than their peers.

Other research shows that the more students are led to focus on getting good grades, the less interested they will be in what they are studying, the less creative their thinking will be, and the more they will try to take the easy way out. Again, it makes sense: The more children see the "A" as the goal, the more they will come to see the learning itself as something to be gotten over with. The practice of paying kids for top grades -- offering, in effect, a reward for a reward -- doubles the damage.

It's not the reward itself that's objectionable -- it's the practice of using something as a reward that causes the problem: "Do this and you'll get that." This feels controlling, causes dependence, and may spoil our relationship with our children. We risk coming to be seen as goody dispensers who have to be pleased rather than as loving and caring allies.

If our long- term goal is more ambitious than getting kids to obey mindlessly, then we'll have to take the extra step of bringing them in on the process of making decisions.

You might say to your seven year-old, "I've noticed that lately it's taking you a long time to get dressed in the morning, honey. What do you think we can do to solve that?"

Rewards may be effective at training a pet, but raising good kids means working with them rather than doing things to them.

Shirley Clarke on Praise and Mindset

A fixed mindset is the result of a continual focus on your ability rather than your achievement and effort. Praise to young children reinforcing 'cleverness' or intelligence and exclaiming over speed of mastery gives a clear subliminal message: to get approval you need to master new things quickly, with little effort, both of which will earn you the 'clever' label. The more your ability, your speed and lack of effort are praised ('Well done! You hardly needed to think about/work at that at all! Clever girl!), the more you don't want to lose that position of greatness, so the less you want to engage in tasks which require time or effort or might lead to some kind of failure. People with a fixed mindset avoid challenging tasks for fear of failure, thus missing many valuable learning opportunities.

Studies show that rewards - a concrete version of grades - given to a select few for their achievement, effort or behaviour, reinforced fixed mindset, for both those who get the reward and those who don't. Children do not need rewards when the culture is focused around all children competing against themselves and their own previous achievement. When there is a growth mindset culture in which the learner’s achievement is celebrated verbally and personally, and the goal is to strive for excellence, stickers and stars seem tokenistic and patronising.

Class Dojo - Class Don’tjo

Nearly all research points to public discipline as ineffective or counterproductive. There are many many reasons not to use publicly-displayed, one-size-fits-all behaviour systems.

• They are public

• They undermine a sense of community

• A child’s dignity, privacy, self-respect are no less real or important or valid, than yours

Undermining a child’s privacy and dignity, damages their relationships:

with their peers, with you, and with themselves.

Displaying these charts publicly is in effect using public shaming as a way to control children’s behaviour. This is completely incompatible with creating a safe and nurturing environment. We can manage our classrooms without using shame to do it.

• They track behaviour, but they do not change it.

• They do not effectively allow for individual development, needs, situations, or progress.

• They create comparison and competition instead of building community.

We want our children to learn to

• be kind

• collaborate

• support one another

• be tolerant of others who are different from them

• never take pleasure in someone else’s pain

• ensure their successes don’t come at someone else’s expense

We don’t want our children to see their classmates as competition - rather as a family full of people who help one another, and where different people work on different skills in different ways, at different rates, at different times, using different tools.

Other reasons not to use a one-size-fits-all behaviour system

They are reward-based. The research on rewards is pretty clear. As Alfie Kohn says “This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings in the field of social psychology: the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward...”

More specifically, researchers have found that people’s interest in a task ordinarily plummets when they are acutely aware of being evaluated on their performance — even if the evaluation is positive.” (The Schools Our Children Deserve)

All of the following count as rewards:

• actual trinkets from a treasure chest or class “store”

• a sticker on a chart

• special play time/extra interval/a class party

• the simple act of moving a clip or card “up” a chart

In the short-term, rewards work, if by “work” you mean that they produce compliance in the form of desired behaviours.

They do not build

• children’s self-regulatory capacities

• decision-making skills

• intrinsic motivation.

• We want our children to do the right thing because it is the right thing, not because it will earn them a treat.

• Behaviour systems are about the teacher controlling the kids, not about the kids learning to control themselves.

• Behaviour is a skill, rather than an innate expression of character

• Behaviour can be learned

If behaviour can be learned, it can be taught

If we think about behaviour as a teachable skill, just like reading, it becomes pretty obvious that we can’t expect every child to go about learning to behave in the same way, at the same rate. Just as children start school with a wide range of reading abilities, so, too, do they start with a wide range of “behaving” abilities.

• A child who struggles to read will figure out compensatory strategies, some of which are adaptive, and some of which are disruptive.

• A child who struggles to read is already aware that others can do so.

• A child who struggles to read probably doesn’t know why he or she is struggling.

• A child who is an excellent reader will probably not be motivated by the strategies that are helpful for more typical, or struggling readers.

• A child who is an excellent reader may be embarrassed if attention is constantly drawn to his or her strengths.

• If behaviour is a skill, like reading, every child arrives with a different level of ability.

• If behaviour is a skill, like reading, we cannot blame or shame a child who struggles with it.

• If behaviour is a skill, like reading, children’s individual abilities and progress (or lack thereof) have reasons behind them.

• If behaviour is a skill, like reading, it is our job to figure out the reasons.

Sticker-Strategy Replacement

Have a plan, a toolkit, a bank of strategies to manage your classroom consistently, calmly, and thoroughly.

Talk about how we want our class to be, develop a “code of cooperation”, and show examples of what those expectations look like.

• Help students manage themselves.

• Create classroom expectations together

• Describe explicitly what those expectations look like throughout our day and our school.

• Use children’s literature to discuss classroom behaviours, relationships, and feelings.

• When expectations are not met, use logical consequences.

• Acknowledge positive behaviours

• Use one-on-one conversations and personal behaviour plans when needed.

• Use a "Take a Break" space.

This is not a traditional "Time Out". This is a place in the classroom where children can take a moment to decompress, take a breather, or think about making different choices. Children will often go there on their own, but sometimes will be asked to go there by their teacher. The child will only stay there for about 1 or 2 minutes - use an egg timer so they don't stay too long.

• Have a basket with some helper tools in it -

• A mirror because sometimes it helps a kid to see the emotion on their own face in order to recognise it. Squishy balls for squeezing the tension away, a few cue cards for self calming. A timer to remind kids not to stay too long. A stuffed toy for a little snuggle

Other Keys to Success

• Build a relationship with your students and their parents.

• The first thing each child needs learn from you is that you love them - unconditionally.

• Consider where a child comes from before he/she gets to school and use that information.

• Have high high expectations for your students

• Ground those expectations in trust and faith that children, given the right support, and the right environment, can manage themselves successfully and positively.

• Provide lots of freedom and lots of choice in your room.

• Remind children that freedoms and choices are privileges.

• Have a very specific understanding of what constitutes “problem behaviour.”

A behaviour is only a problem if it interferes with a child’s safety and learning or the safety and learning of others. Period. A behaviour that is annoying to me is not automatically a problem.

• Be Fair.

• Explain Fair doesn’t mean same.

• Fair means everybody gets what they need.

When the children understand what “fair” means, you can meet those needs without worrying about accusations of favouritism.

• Normalise the tools that help children manage their own behaviour.

Children need to know it is okay to ask for help with their behaviour. If a child asks for a break from the mat, she can have it. If he knows he will do better in line by walking with me, he can. If she can’t stop chatting with her neighbour, help her find a place to work alone. Leaving the mat, holding my hand, sitting alone, are not punishments. These are choices and tools that help children be their best selves.

• Choice is a privilege. Let children choose which “work” to do first.

• Children like having choices, having a say in the path their day takes.

• If they are not managing those choices well, the privilege of choice is lost. You will rarely need any consequences other than “loss of choice”.

• Look for patterns. If you are constantly correcting the same behaviour

• from the same child at the same time in the same spot every day, ask

• is there a way to break the pattern?

• Don’t have “systems” - have relationships.What works for one does not work for another and makes things even worse for a third.

• Do family building - whanaungatanga - all year.

• Do challenges together.

• When a problem arises, consider your options before speaking.

Rather than call out a student for misbehaving pull them aside, ask them to leave the room to think about it, or do a quick check in.

• Use humour - never ever use sarcasm.

• Engagement matters. If children are engaged, they misbehave less.

• Ask the child face to face and quietly, what is going on?

• Don’t assume why a child is misbehaving, ask. Ask how they think their day is going?

• Take this opportunity to build a deeper relationship.

• Wipe the slate clean every day

• Be excited about learning and your class. Motivation is contagious. When one child gets excited and has an opportunity to share that enthusiasm, the contagion spreads.

• Do lots of activities on what self-control means and how when we catch ourselves and get control over our behaviours, we can be proud.

• Communicate the goal - for everyone to the right thing even when no one is watching.

When we try to teach children how to act, and react, we have to keep in mind the long term effects. We want to be teaching children to do the right things because they are the right things to do. We want to grow young people who have an internal moral compass that guides them to make good choices because they are good choices, not because we are “paying” them.

Paying them is a broad term. We pay them with praise, stickers, marbles in a jar, stars, lollipops, extra minutes at interval etc. This is bribery. It is done with the best intentions, and we often see short term benefits. The children become quiet, they stay in their seats, etc. The fact remains, they are doing it for the payment. They are focused on the prize, and when the prize is gone, they no longer have any reason to do it.

When no one is “paying” them to take turns, be kind, or listen, they are left with a poorly developed internal motivation. Instead, we have been feeding the bribery centre in their brain.Rewards and punishments actually trigger activity in the addiction centre of the brain. We are encouraging our children to become addicted to reward – praise, stickers, sweets, class parties, etc. This does not build self motivated learners.

It builds addicts.

To some Class Dojo specifics:

What is Classroom Dojo is really doing to children’s focus and engagement?

• If you are a child who is generally a hard working, motivated learner, you now become a hard working, motivated “behaver.”

Your attention is continuously being drawn away from your work to notice how you are doing on your points, or how someone else is doing. Even if the points are not being changed regularly, your attention is now divided - pulling your thinking and attention away from learning.

• If you are a child who is usually on task and doing well, but sometimes slips up, your mistakes are now made bigger.

Your slip-ups become public errors, and they suddenly become a much bigger deal.

• If you are a child who is often getting into trouble, your troubles are there for everyone to see.

You get a continuous reminder of your failures.

Often teachers will say my children love Class Dojo, however, when they get down to what it is about it their children love, the argument breaks down.

• They love the avatars.

Use RazKids and give them avatars there to encourage reading. Don’t use Dojo just because of the cute monsters.

• They love the rewards.

Well who wouldn’t? We all love sweets. But again, rewards don’t build learners.

• They love what their parents say.

That is, they love praise. Of course they do. But we need to be careful about using praise as a reward. And of course, not all the kids love what their parents say...

Again, the most important thing a teacher can do is build relationships with their children, and build a classroom community where respect and contributions are valued and expected.

We need to use careful language with students that encourages positive behaviour and builds identities for students as contributing members of the class.

We need to teach children that feelings, good and bad, are normal and ok. They can handle these feelings appropriately and safely, and they can set goals to improve.

Teaching is interacting, active, engaged and engaging.

Teaching is not sitting at a desk grading children’s behaviour and typing in reasons for that arbitrary grading.

We want teachers conferencing with children, providing quality feed-forward and feed-back for each individual learner.

The locus of learning is with the child.

The focus of learning is on the learning and not on the behaviour.

When you are tracking behaviour, sending out updates of the grading and the reasoning every few minutes, there is no time for the above. The locus has then moved to you, the focus has then moved to behaviour.

If the learning is powerful, relevant, challenging, achievable, targeted at each individual according to their needs, interests and at their general level of capability, behaviour is generally not an issue.

Formative Assessment - Feed-back and Feed-Forward

Shirley Clarke and Hattie

The most powerful educational tool for raising achievement and preparing children to be lifelong learners, in any context, is formative assessment. The research evidence for this is rigorous and comprehensive. Hattie (2009) has contributed significantly to the evidence about what works and doesn't work in his ground-breaking book Visible Learning. Over a period of 18 years, Hattie attempted to answer one simple question; what do we do in schools and how much impact does it have? He synthesised over 900 meta-analyses, involving over 50,000 studies and 240 million students, in order to answer his question. He established an 'effect-size' for the different elements of education and calculated that the midpoint effect size is 0.4.

Any influence on learning' below 0.4 needs to be reviewed and questioned, as its worth is suspect. Anything above 0.4 is worth doing, and the greater the effect-size, the more worthwhile it is. Once you reach an effect-size of 1.0, the progress, for a child, is the equivalent of being one year ahead of where he or she would have been. Hattie's 150 elements of education are rank-ordered, with the key aspects of formative assessment at the top of the list, as shown in the table below.

Assessment literacy is the term used in many countries to describe learners who have clear understanding of what and how they are learning and can self-assess and improve their learning - the basic elements of formative assessment. Classroom discussion is central to formative assessment - talk partners discussing questions asked by the teacher and cooperatively discussing and improving their learning. Feedback and providing formative evaluation are key to formative assessment, because they are the means by which we progress - learning from teachers and peers. Meta-cognitive strategies form the foundation of formative assessment, as part of a growth mindset culture, where pupils know that their learning disposition at any one time is as important as the skills or knowledge in question.

Necessary Components of Formative Assessment

• A learning culture, where children and teachers have a growth mindset, self-belief, meta-cognitive skills and the belief that all can succeed

• Involving pupils at the planning stage to enhance motivation and ownership

• Talk partners and a 'no hands up' culture, where children are resources for one another and all can be included in class discussion

• Mixed-ability learning, with differentiated choices, so that self- esteem is intact and expectations are high;

• Clear learning objectives shared with pupils, not necessarily at the beginning of a lesson, but sometimes after their interest has been captured

• Effective questioning, especially at beginnings of lessons, to establish current understanding and prior knowledge

• A continual quest to find out how far children are understanding their learning, so that individual and class feedback and the direction of the lesson can be adjusted appropriately

• Examples of excellence analysed and shared, before children produce their own 'product'

• Feedback from peers and teachers which focuses on successes, where the excellence is and where improvements are needed

• Cooperative peer Feedback in which examples of improvement are modelled via mid-lesson learning stops, so that feedback and improvement-making is immediate and part of the lesson

• Effective ends to lessons, where learning is summarised and reflected upon.

When we interview students on what they understand by feedback and why it is important to them, one theme emerges almost universally: they want to know how to improve their work so that they can do better next time. Students tend to be future-focussed, rather than dwelling on what they have done beforehand and left behind. They are aware that past products are imperfect specimens but want to move on, and are willing to learn more new stuff provided their teachers play the same game. They will continue to exert effort provided the past efforts are treated with some respect. What they do not welcome is critique, which they find unnecessary, lengthy, personal, and hurtful. Of course they expect mistakes and want mistakes corrected. But they are sensitive to the climate under which criticism is given. Often, what a teacher intends as helpful critical feedback turns to personal ego evaluation in the eyes of the receiver.

The dilemma is that students want and need information on 'where to next', but teachers often act as though that is achieved through negative feedback. Student work must be corrected, and mistakes therein can be manifest, numerous, and highly visible. But negative feedback can be problematic. Students may feel there are many reasons why they are not responsible for the “problems” identified in their work. They may believe that the level of effort they put in was substantial, but has gone by unrecognised.

At times we have found students ignore a teacher's copious comments on written work, which they find irrelevant to their moving forward.

Besides this natural empathy gap, another hidden factor in receiving criticism concerns its volume. The principle 'bad is stronger than good' means that we mentally balance one bad event against perhaps four or five good ones. If the ratio of good to bad events drops under three we can expect trouble. Yet, when we critique our students' work, the number of negative comments can easily exceed the number of positive statements. We are not suggesting that students need a continual supply of positive affirmations (which produces its own problems), only that they will remain sensitive to the balance between positive and negative events in their lives.

We have also noted that some instructors appear to administer feedback and marking procedures in a mechanical way, in the belief that all students are somehow 'the same'. However, it is apparent that learners need different types of feedback depending on their current skill level.

Beginners need feedback based on content knowledge as they are striving to build basic knowledge and vocabulary. Hence, they need assurance and corrective feedback, often in the form of decisions such as correct versus incorrect, or right versus wrong.

Intermediate learners have acquired basic concepts but need help linking ideas together, seeing relationships, and extending the basic ideas. They need assurance that they are applying the right methods and strategies or suggestions for alternative strategies (for instance, 'strong use of adjectives', 'good use of the acceleration principle', or 'a well-constructed argument, but have you thought of what this implies for the future?').

At more advanced levels, helpful feedback takes the form of supporting the self-regulated or more conceptual learner such that sincere efforts to extend and apply knowledge even further are actively recognised.

In short, different types of feedback work best depending on the individual's phase of learning - corrective feedback is suited for novices, process feedback is needed as the learner becomes proficient, and elaborated conceptual feedback becomes effective with highly competent students.

In the VL synthesis, feedback was associated with an effect size of 0.73 indicating it is one of the most powerful factors implicated in academic learning and resultant achievement.

The not so good news is that the variability of the effectiveness of feedback is huge - certain types of feedback are more effective than others — so we need to be able to specify the forms it should take and when it is associated with strong learning gains, and when it is not.

Receiving feedback enables the learner to close a critical gap, specifically the gap between current status and a more desirable level of achievement. Feedback is not the same thing as reward or reinforcement, which are terms that refer to

motivational factors. Instead, feedback refers to the process of securing information enabling change through adjustment or calibration of efforts in order to bring a person closer to a well-defined goal.

In short, receiving appropriate feedback is incredibly empowering. Why? Because it enables the individual to move forwards, to plot, plan, adjust, rethink, and thus exercise self-regulation in realistic and balanced ways. This mental processing view of feedback brings with it an important caveat. Feedback works because the goal is known and accurately defined through realistic assessment. This is why assessments become vital in all forms of teaching and formal instruction. Students see assignments and assessments as what the teacher actually values. The sooner the outcomes are known and articulated through objective measures or assignments, the more the student can focus on achieving them.

Assessment information is powerful if teachers and students have clear notions of what success looks like while they are engaged in the activity that leads to the assessment. Clarifying the criteria of success is not merely saying 'You must get at least a B', but showing students worked examples at various levels of success. Or in this case, going a step further, showing students worked examples of an A and a B and a discussion of how they are different.

Formative Assessment - Ten Points - Angela Stockman

1. Formative assessment is a verb, not a noun.

It’s an action performed throughout the learning experience, not something that students are given to complete at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of it.

• Peek over your students’ shoulders as they work

• Capture evidence of their progress toward the established learning target

• Use what you learn to inform your feedback and what you teach next.

2. What matters is their assessment and your assessment, not the assessment.

When teachers and students establish clear targets and outcomes, studying how they are achieved can happen in a variety of organic ways without disrupting the learning experience by stopping to test or quiz.

• What matters most with formative assessment is our assessment of growth and why it is or isn’t happening.

• Rather than “building” formative assessments identify assessment moments that occur within the learning experience

• Establish solid habits of documentation.

• Our savvy analysis of this evidence and timely response is what matters most, not the construction of disruptive tasks and tests.

3. The only summative assessment that benefits learners is one that also serves as a formative assessment.

If we aren’t using summative assessment findings to inform instruction, then why use them? Assessment of mastery should inform continued learning and teaching moves.

4. Learners do not have to complete the same task at the same time in order for teachers to conduct a formative assessment.

You can study learners practicing targeted skills and demonstrating knowledge of critical content in varied contexts. Collecting wide and varied evidence about how learners approach a target helps us better understand how and why they are successful (or not). When we assess all learners using the same tools at the same time, our perspective about the target, performance, and process is quite narrow. It’s hard to uncover powerful interventions this way.

5. The more certain you are of your expertise, the more likely bias will compromise your formative assessment practices.

Historically, teachers have been expected to have answers and solutions. Certainty and pride are the unfortunate byproducts of this phenomenon, and they close our minds and narrow our vision. It’s okay to own our expertise. It’s also important to put it aside long enough to consider ideas and approaches we may not have otherwise–especially those that fly in the face of our expertise.

6. Formative assessment will make your students your very best teachers.

Presume competence and let learners try the hard stuff. Don’t expect mastery. Expect them to begin and to persevere and to make their learning visible along the way, so you can study it.

If you try this, it will change the way you define teaching.

7. The best formative assessments focus our eyes on the learning behaviours that matter most.

Rather than checking for correct answers, processes, and products, formative assessment inspires us to study how and why and when. The answers to these questions fuel our best interventions.

8. Formative assessment inspires us to redefine our narrow definitions of data.

The data collected during formative assessment experiences are often qualitative. We document with purpose, using the tools that can best help us capture learning as students make it visible to us. We curate this data in varied spaces, using displays that differ from typical quantitative data displays (for example, SeeSaw app).

9. Feedback is the byproduct of formative assessment done right, and grades are the byproduct of formative assessment gone wrong.

When we grade formative assessments, we penalise learners for failing to master content and skills that haven’t been taught or practiced. This is inappropriate and unethical.

10. Physical education teachers, music teachers, coaches, and counsellors were doing formative assessment before formative assessment was cool.

Eager to understand how great teachers use formative assessment to help learners grow? Seek out the best physical education teachers, coaches, music teachers, and counsellors you know. Ask them how they assess the learners they serve. Ask them how and when they intervene. Ask them how they got better at growing great learners. We have much to learn from them

Inquiry and Thinking

Hattie on Thinking and Inquiry

In Visible Learning for Teachers (p. 159 ff) John Hattie claims that “the major argument in this book underlying powerful impacts in our schools relates to how we think.

It is a set of mind frames that underpin our every action and decision in a school; it is a belief that we

• are evaluators

• are change agents

• are adaptive learning experts

• are seekers of feedback about our impact

• are engaged in dialogue and challenge

• are developers of trust with all

• we see opportunity in error

• we spread the message about the power, fun, and impact that we have on learning

John Hattie believes “that teachers and school leaders who develop these ways of thinking are more likely to have major impacts on student learning.”

Hattie’s 8 Mind Frames

1. My fundamental task is to evaluate the effect of my teaching on students’ learning and achievement.

2. The success and failure of my students’ learning is about what I do or don’t do. I am a change agent.

3. I want to talk more about learning than teaching.

4. Assessment is about my impact.

5. I teach through dialogue not monologue.

6. I enjoy the challenge and never retreat to “doing my best”.

7. It’s my role to develop positive relationships in class and staffrooms.

8. I inform all about the language of learning. - I speak “learnish”.

Hattie - Surface and Deep Thinking

When you are learning something new, you need a greater proportion of surface to deep thinking, but as you become more proficient, the balance can change to more deep thinking. Consider, for example, the following seemingly sane and sensible teaching programmes providing deep learning:

• inquiry-based learning - 0.31 effect size

• individualised instruction - 0.22 effect size

• matching teaching to styles of thinking - 0.17 effect size

• problem-based learning - 0.15 effect size

• whole-language learning - 0.06 effect size

• student control over learning - 0.04 effect size

The average effect-sizes of these programmes are very low, well below the average of many possible influences of 0.4. It is not that they are not worthwhile programmes. The problem is that too often they are implemented in a way that does not develop surface understanding first.

Hattie states the solution is less about twenty-first-century or inquiry learning and more about knowing when to think surface and when to think deep. It is about the appropriate proportions of surface and deep in any series of lessons, and about knowing when to move from learning more ideas to relating and extending these ideas. When we learn new material, we might need a higher focus on surface, but as we become more proficient, the balance should shift to the deeper.

Finding out what teachers want you to know and giving it back to them in assignments and exams is commonly seen as a key to success. Such narrow excellence tends not to favour twenty-first-century deeper-thinking skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration.

The art of teaching is to balance the need for surface knowledge with deep processing of this knowledge. Deeper-thinking skills need content on which to work. You cannot use deeper-thinking skills unless you have something to think about.

Carol Lynch on Inquiry

The New Zealand Curriculum sets direction for education in New Zealand and provides the scope for each school to develop their own curriculum in response to their needs. It also clearly states the cornerstones of effective teaching in the New Zealand context. Effective Pedagogy, pages 34 and 35 are arguably two of the most important pages in the New Zealand Curriculum document.

In reality we often address what will be taught before addressing how teaching will take place.

The implementation of Teaching As Inquiry, one of the aspects of Effective Pedagogy (p35) has the potential to significantly raise student achievement by improving teacher effectiveness. A data driven process where teachers deliberately inquire into the impact of their teaching on their students' learning, Teaching As Inquiry builds reflective practice as teachers identify their own learning needs as well as their students'. Supported and challenged by their colleagues, teachers discuss and provide evidence of the effect their teaching actions are having on their students' learning.

Teaching As Inquiry provides the process, vehicle and context for school leaders to bring together and apply many of the components of effective leadership that have been identified in our recent New Zealand publications.

The process of implementing Teaching As Inquiry allows school leaders to work in the Leadership Dimensions that have been identified as being the most effective:

• Promoting and participating in teacher learning and development.

• Planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum.

Strongly linked to all aspects of the key findings of BES Teacher Professional Learning and Development, school leaders can be assured that the process of implementing Teaching As Inquiry is an effective model for sustained teacher improvement and improved student learning.

Teaching As Inquiry focuses on student achievement. The underlying focus is on raising student achievement by teachers changing and improving their practice. This can be done by having each teacher undertake an extended inquiry into their teaching practice within a curriculum area identified by examination of data.

So what does this look like in practice? What are the practical aspects of leading the process in schools?

BES School Leadership & Student Outcomes; Identifying What Works & Why, identifies five dimensions of effective leadership derived from direct evidence.

The effect size of each dimension gives an indication of the leadership impact on student achievement.

Dimension 4 - Promoting and Participating in Teacher Learning and Development has the greatest effect size.

Leadership of the process of Teaching As Inquiry sits firmly in Dimension 4, while also being closely linked to the other 4 dimensions.

'The more leaders focus their relationships, their work and their learning on the core business of learning and teaching, the greater their influence on student outcomes'. - Professor Vivianne Robinson - A Friendly Guide to Using the Leadership BES (Best Evidence Synthesis) for School and Principal Development April 2010.

Final Thoughts

The mind may not designed for thinking, as it is slow and effortful and outcomes of thinking are often uncertain. Excellent teachers therefore need to understand thinking, realise how difficult many tasks are for beginners, and find ways to encourage students to build confidence and invest effort to learn various strategies to thus think and learn. It is less about the 'knowledge' to be learnt but more about the ways to progress from not knowing to knowing. This means that many of us as learners need a trusting, fair and safe environment to acknowledge that we 'do not know' and will make errors in learning. Such learning takes time but one of the teacher's roles is to maximise the efficiency of the time available, to provide many opportunities to learn the same ideas over time, and to ensure time is spent on learning and not merely doing 'something'. It can be most powerful for teachers to construct dialogues in classrooms if for no other reason than they can then 'hear the learning', whereas, too often, classrooms are dominated by monologue and recitation.

It may seem ironic, but we are successful in learning when we forget our learning! Most of us forget how we learnt to walk, talk, and do arithmetic. Good spellers 'know' when a word is misspelled but forget how they learnt to make these distinctions. This underscores the importance of overlearning, or teaching for automaticity. Because we can only place so much load on our cognitive skills, we need much overlearning before we can learn more complex tasks. This is a major reason why we need explicit teaching to not only learn the ideas but also to relate these ideas and see connections, relationships, or 'coat-hangers' between the ideas. Complex learning rarely happens by osmosis, discovery, or having a 'guide on the side'.

We need to develop a language and vocabulary of learning, and we need multiple strategies of learning.

We need to place more emphasis on building the learner's confidence in being able to attain the success criteria.

There are many social aspects of learning - the climate of trust to welcome errors in learning, the teacher and peer relations, and the beliefs about ourselves and confidence to succeed. This entails developing an ability to delay gratification, to create space to 'not know', and to develop aspects of self-control to see learning as not about me as 'a personality, but about me as 'a learner'.

Learning is optimised when teachers see learning through the eyes of the learner, and when learners see themselves as their own teachers. As the songwriter Phil Collins noted: in learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.

Visible Learning means an enhanced role for teachers as they become evaluators of their own teaching. Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers.