Narrator: Welcome to Part 2 of our interview with John Hattie. Part 1 addressed what Visible Learning is and its value to educators. In Part 2, John Hattie discusses how to apply and transfer knowledge of what meta-analysis shows to be the best strategies for teacher effectiveness and positive student outcomes. Here are Pam Austin and John Hattie.
Pam Austin: I do want to go more deeply into a few chapters that you devoted to surface, deep, and transfer learning. Can you tell us the difference between each one of those? You mentioned those terms, but when I think about teaching and learning, why are they so essential? That surface, deep, and transfer learning, for learning? You know, for our listeners that may not be familiar with these terms, we want them to be very familiar with them.
John Hattie: Yeah, look, a lot of Visible Learning books in the content area is structured around this notion of surface, deep, and transfer. And, again, it comes from the, so often the bipolarity of saying we don't want kids to know facts. "We've got Mrs. Google and we've got Siri, we've got Alexa. Why do kids need to know facts?” I want them to know the deep understanding. Why can't we do problem-based learning and inquiry-based learning and discovery learning? Well, the reason we shouldn't use them is that they're notorious failures, because they're based on a polarity that deep is good, surface is not good. And, by surface, what we mean is the contents, the facts, the knowledge. By deep, we're talking about how you relate those contents back. How you form higher-order pictures, how you do that self-regulation, that kind of processing.
By transfer, can you then apply it to a new situation? And our argument is the proportions are critical. When you're first attacking a problem in literacy, let's say, there is a certain amount of content and facts you need to know. And then there comes a point where you need to go beyond that, to the deep learning. Problem-based learning has been a failure primarily because it's introduced too early. I know this is not school, but it's a good analogy to look at medicine, where problem-based learning is used a lot, in first-year medicine. We don't need to do another study to know it has a zero to negative impact on learning. But, when it's used in fourth year, it has an incredibly high impact.
So, when problem-based learning is learned when you can be assured that the students have the sufficient content to do the problem-based, it's successful. And this is why we look at the right proportion at the right time, of knowing the right stuff, to then tasks about how you relate it, and then how you transfer. And a very simple, simple thing to do, Pam, is construct your assignments around what you ask kids to do, because that's what they see as valuable. Construct them around that. And I've done that for 30 years in my own teaching at university. This is the content I want you to know. And I tell them, "This is the surface question," "This is the deep," I say, "I want you to relate it," and "Here's a transfer." And I don't do all three all times, but make it very clear to the student I value all three parts. This is the really key message we're trying to get across here with surface, deep, and transfer. All three are valuable, all three are done at the right time.
All these people who argue you don't need to teach content anymore because of Mrs. Google, not true. They do need to know. Now, you and I, Pam, as adults, particularly as we're teachers, we often don't make the distinction between the content, the relationship, the transfer. They're mixed up for us because we're actually pretty good learners. But if I ask you, for instance, to play Canasta or to play golf or something you've never done in your life before, I need to be very good as a teacher to know what the right content I need to teach you to start with, particularly to motivate you to want to keep learning. And then the deep. I don't know if you've ever played golf but it's a good example because in golf, every single golfer in the world has got 53 reasons how you can improve your swing, and they often tell you all 53 of them. And you don't know which are the most important ones because you don't have the deep knowledge to work it out, and that evaluative skill again, that works it out. It's the same with kids, whether they're 5 year olds, 10 year olds or 15 year olds. How do we get there? And that's why we use a lot in our curriculum planning, particularly in our assessment planning, and also in terms of the strategies we use. And how do you triangulate those to say to kids, "This is what's valuable to know, this is what's valuable to relate, and this is what's valuable to transfer?"
PA: I do want to shift to a particular type of instruction. I want to focus on phonics, and why phonics is important. When we think about phonics as surface learning, would you agree with that? Why is phonics such an important step in surface learning?
JH: Reading requires skills, and if you don't have those skills, you struggle to read. One of the skills is phonics. Now, I take the line of phonics and related skills. I think we overemphasize phonics. There's phonemic awareness, there's lots of other parts of the skills of learning as well. And I remember many years ago when I moved to Auckland, in New Zealand, my predecessor in the position I took was Marie Clay, who invented Reading Recovery, and what a wonderful, wonderful human being she was. And I used to meet with her for lunch once a month, and I remember saying to her one day, "Marie, you don't have phonics mentioned within the whole Reading Recovery." And she said, "No, I call it listening." I think that was a really incredible insight for me.
We overemphasize phonics and we have these teachers who don't like it and won't do it, and it's false, and it's decoding, and all these things. It's hard to teach and the teachers require knowledge to teach it. But kids have to be able to listen to sound, and phonics is one of the skills, and listening to letters, listening to sounds. And, so, I struggle. I learned years ago, Pam, never to become an expert on reading because, oh my gosh, the reading teachers fight so viciously about this, and I think they miss the point.
If you can read, then whole language and balanced reading is very successful. If you can't read, then you need the skills of reading. One of those skills is phonics, the key skill is being able to listen. That's why one of the best predictors of kids learning to read is, can they rhyme? That's why in preschool we spend a lot of time...I've got my grandchildren living with me at the moment, a 1 and a 4 year old. They're into rhyme all the time. They like songs, they love repetition, they like the sounds. And that's what the key skills, and that's why phonics is so important. It is a surface-level skill, it is necessary for kids who cannot read to learn those skills. But I'd rather your listeners think of it in terms of, what are the skills of listening? I think then we can break down this war of, do you use this rather than that, at the right time? If kids can read, they probably don't need to be taught phonics. But if they can't read, then phonics is a very successful, one of the successful strategies and skills to learn to read.
PA: Right, to get to that surface knowledge so that we can move in deeper. If students can't pull the words from the page independently, they're never going to get to that deep knowledge. And, when we think of phonics, we can say foundational phonics skills, advanced phonics skills, but the goal is to get that surface learning done. So, thank you for sharing.
I want to go back and reflect. In your book Visible Learning for Literacy, it also discusses how transfer learning occurs after deep learning. But, also happens during both surface and deep learning stages. Can you explain how transfer learning can occur in both stages of learning?
JH: One of the difficulties when you ever come up with a model is it looks linear. You write it on a page, it goes from left to right, and it implies there's a sequence. And I wished it was that simple. It's not a bad way to start. But most learning is pretty messy. And, yes, we use surface to deep to transfer as our notion. Sometimes, teachers might want to start at the deeper level, or transfer what they knew previously to new situations, to then move back to the surface. I wished it was as clean as we portray it. And this notion here is that...Phonics is a good example. You may have some skills in phonics, and this is a very common thing they do in phonics. Can you then decode ridiculous words? Words that don't exist? Because there's a skill in doing that. So, you're transferring it, then, to other kinds of tasks. So, yes, you can do transfer of surface-level knowledge, as well as deep. It's not a single package. And, certainly, we want to trial kids at various times to see whether skills they think they have developed or we think we have taught well can be applied to new situations. And that's why transfer can apply at each of the phases.
PA: And, hence, teaching is not an easy skill. We don't just go in and just teach. As you said, learning is messy. I agree with you John, on that one. It takes a lot of skill to go back and forth and understand where students are and to readjust that teaching and learning.
JH: Just on that, Pam. So, Pam, why is it then, my frustration? I spend quite a bit of time here in Australia in the political space because I have a political job here as well, and my frustration is that so many educators, so many teachers deny that expertise. I've kept going. I'm stunned by the expertise out of our profession, which we assume is common sense. I challenge any person who's not a teacher to come into a class of 25 to 30 5 year olds or 15 year olds and teach them for even half an hour, let alone an hour. We have massive skills. And all my work is trying to understand why that expertise is...And I just hope that your listeners will say, "Yeah, we're actually pretty good at what we do."
PA: Yes, yes. Definitely. And giving them the affirmation for the skill that they have to apply, and helping them refine that skill. I think that's what’s most important as well, so I agree with you with that, John. You gave us a summary of phonics and how we understand it as a surface skill. When I think about applying the science of reading and reading instruction, that's given a lot of attention nationwide right here in the States, as it should. It also seems that schools and districts are adding phonics to their instruction but are also continuing to hold on to instructional practices such as the three-cueing approach or visual memory for teaching, word recognition, even though cognitive science refutes its use in foundational reading. Again, I'm talking about that surface level. What will it take to convince schools and districts to move on from these instructional practices?
JH: What we do in our Visible Learning work in schools is we spend the majority of the time with schools teaching them how to evaluate their own impact. You go to a school and they say, "Oh, yeah, I've read those books, but that's not us. Doesn't apply here." And they're kind of right. So, we spend a lot of time getting them to evaluate what they're doing. And one of the things when I work with schools is to say, "OK, you're into three cueing. You're into visual memory, all this kind of stuff. Let's look at the impact of that." And you'll find pretty quickly, as virtually everyone else has, is they just don't make much difference.
So, this is why I want teachers to know their impact. This is why I want school leaders to help and resource understanding what the impact is. Because no one is going to get rid of their favorite method if we don't look at the impact on kids. And this is where I want to turn the conversation away from "Can we teach well?" to "What is the impact of our teaching?" I actually don't care less how teachers teach. I think we have spent far too much time on that, and it's misled us in the wrong direction. I don't care how you teach. I care about the impact of your teaching. And that means I'm going to have to help you look at and how you understand impact. What you mean by that year's growth. How many kids you're having that impact. And I'm going to have to spend time doing that. And then you'll soon find that some of the methods that I've been using, maybe in five, 10 years, some of these strategies that everyone else has found doesn't work doesn't work with you too.
On the other hand, Pam, maybe it does. I don't want to change it if that’s the case. The probability is that it doesn't work, and until we start mobilizing and utilizing evidence within school, and let's get real, evidence is a very contested term. It's not just the research in Visible Learning. It's the evidence that teachers have, moment by moment, that they use to make decisions. That is what I want to inform anything else. That is what really matters, and that's when you'll start to see that some of those practices that we've been using and is endemic through the textbooks, they have not made a difference, but they are seductive, they look nice. They have to go. And, so, I don't think having another war about phonics or whole language is going to make a difference. I think the war has got to be how we can, at each classroom and each school, look at the evidence of the impact that you're having in that very moment when it matters. And then you'll soon start to see that some of those methods disappear, hopefully, very quickly.
PA: With that in mind, I want to focus on the book Visible Learning for Literacy. In the later chapters, you really focus on determining impact, what we were just discussing just now. And you even have a formula that teachers can use to help evaluate student outcomes. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
JH: Yes, there is a formula. Effect sizes have been around a number of years. But the key statement you made there, Pam, was "use to help." It is but one method. I want triangulation. I want evidence from the test scores, from the assignments. I want evidence from the artifacts of the students' work. I want evidence from the student voice about whether they think they're progressing. I want to know what the teacher thinks about that, and I want to triangulate that, and through triangulating it, the teacher then learns, "Hey, maybe this is not right. I'm not having this impact that I thought I was having on these kids. When I look at their work, when I look at the effect size, it's not as high as it should be. I need to go back and revisit." Because the major message here is, I want to affect the interpretations that teachers are making. I want to affect their judgements.
The trouble with most tests and assignments and formula is they stop with the test, the assignment and the formula, and they're not interpreted. And, so, yes, we do spend a lot of time looking at effect sizes, and there's lots of good and bad things about effect sizes, and we can get into that in great detail, but that's not the point. The point is it is part of the arsenal. It is part of the toolkit. And, yes, the schools we work with, we do calculate effect sizes. It is one source of evidence. But what we're more interested in is, how do teachers change how they're thinking, keep doing what they should be doing in light of that evidence?
So, yes, we are great advocates of using those kinds of methods, using that formula, but what we want most of all to understand is, what do you mean, Pam, the teacher, by the notion of impact in your class, about this particular piece of curriculum you're teaching? How would you know that the students are retaining the standards you want? Not focus straight up front on the tools to do it. What's the assessment look like? What's the effect size? But what's your interpretation of them, and what would convince you otherwise? What would convince you that maybe you need to raise the ante and give more challenging work? Maybe the work's too hard and the majority of kids are not getting there. And, so, that's why all these formulas can be very good assistants to that interpretation.
PA: Triangulation, I love that idea, of looking at the evidence but looking at so much more. Which easily leads us into assessment. You know, what are some factors that you look for in a screener, in an assessment system, when we think about the evidence that we're finding for our students as they move forward in their learning?
JH: Well, no surprise, I'm a fan of the assessment if for no other reason my whole career was in psychometrics until Visible Learning came along. My fundamental argument is it's about the interpretations we make, not about the tester. Of course, I want great tests, but so often we stop there. It's about the interpretation. And one of the other things. Graham Nutthall did a lot of research. One of the things he found was that about 50 percent of everything taught to every class, the kids know already. I think that's taking scaffolding too far. And the argument that we're certainly trying to make is that using assessment for diagnosis about what the students know and don't know upfront, that screening notion.
Now, for many teachers it's a frustration because they find out that the kids already know what they're going to teach. Well, what do you do then? And if you're fast, you can change how you're going to teach, you can up the standard. If you prepared a beautiful lesson, you've got all the equipment and resources there, sometimes you keep teaching it. And this is why, when I mentioned earlier on in our discussions, Pam, moving away from measuring success by doing. Are they engaged? I want to measure success by, is it messy? Are they able to teach other students about these concepts?
And this is part of the assessment regime. But, certainly, this screening and progress monitoring, every now and then, dipping in and checking whether your assumptions about what the kids know and don't know. I'm brilliant at this, Pam. I go and I teach my classes at university, I ask the students questions, they give me the right answer. I give them a task to do, they really do it, they love it, they enjoy it. And, then, the next week, when I get them in and say, "Ask each other questions and give each other answers about what we were doing last week," it's barren. They know how to play the game. They know how to appease me. They know that they hope there's someone in the class that can answer these questions, and I stupidly assume that because one person answered the question brilliantly, all the students understood. This is why there's progress monitoring. This is why having a bag of kids' names and randomly pulling out a name and checking every now and then in the progress monitoring, and telling you about how well it's going.
The problem in too many classrooms is not that the work's too hard. The problem's it's too easy. And what a way to turn off kids off learning, by doing easy stuff. And that's why that diagnostic, that screening, that progress monitoring is so critical.
PA: Right. So, we're looking at not just administering the assessment, analyzing, and then changing your instruction, right?
JH: Yes.
PA: OK.
JH: When you give an assessment, at the end of that assessment I want you as the teacher to say, "What did I learn about what I taught well?” “What I didn't teach well?” “And who I taught it well, who didn't teach it well with?" And if you can't answer that, you've just wasted the kids' time. Assessment is interpretive feedback for teachers much more than it's interpretative feedback to kids. And if you don't believe me, next time you do an assessment, before the kids do it, ask them right up the top what they think their grade's going to be. By age 8, they're pretty accurate. Your job's to mess that up.
PA: What are examples of the best ways a school coach or literacy leader can support teachers in this work? What supports have you seen teachers need in implementing these practices? I think you've given lots of examples, but if you could be more specific and targeted, if I'm speaking of a school coach or a literacy leader.
JH: OK, Pam. I'm going to ask you, I'm your school coach or your school leader now. I'm going to ask you as a teacher of literacy, I want you to bring along two pieces of a child, student's work. Say, three months apart. And I'm going to get the other literacy teachers in the school, and we're all going to do this. We're going to sit down and talk about whether we think this is an example of three months' growth. You ready to do that, Pam?
PA: Yes, of course. I will pull some data from my students, maybe my most struggling student, so I can see if there's any impact on the instruction that I've given over the last three months.
JH: No, Pam. You're not going to see. The other staff are going to see. And what's going to happen, Pam, in that discussion, where one of your colleagues says, "Well, I actually can't see any growth. In fact, I think that this piece of work three months later is worse than what this kid was doing three months earlier." How are you going to react?
PA: I would be angry and insulted, and feel very defensive.
JH: This is why literacy coaches and school leaders are so important. They have to build trust. They have to make it safe for you to talk about, and it can happen that a kid is actually worse off three months later. Building that trust and building the climate in the school where it's OK for all of us to help each other to improve is the fundamental role of school leaders and literacy coaches. It's not to give tips and tricks. It's not to improve the goal swing and say, "I did this, why don't you try this?" It's to create a safe environment where I can hear your thinking about what you think growth, success, and standards are in literacy. It is building that confidence and that trust so that we collectively can say, "Hey, we can help each other make a difference and improve that kid."
And, so, you're right. Many teachers, quite rightly, get angry because they feel like they're being disciplined and evaluated and accountability in many of the discussions, which is why in many staffrooms we never have these discussions. But this is why those school leaders are so imperative, and if you go into successful schools, you will find safer environments for teachers to say, "Hey, I've got this kid and it's not working." Or, "Hey, let's look at the success of this kid." One of the things we do in our work, we actually start with the opposite. We start and say, "Bring along two pieces of work," and obviously, in the early days, we talk with the teacher first and we look for really wonderful examples.
Now, here's the hard task of school leaders, literacy coaches. During that discussion, at some point, the teacher has to take credit for that success. It's not what the kid did. It wasn't that the kid put the effort in. It was the fact that you, the teacher, enabled the situation where the kid could put that effort in. We are very, very good, and one of the hardest things we do is to get teachers to take attribution for success. It's very easy to criticize bad teaching. But if this is going to work, school leaders, literacy coaches, we have to acknowledge expertise as well. And, so, my argument, and my answer to you of that question, school administrators, school leaders, school coaches have incredible responsibilities to create those climates where evaluative thinking is normal.
PA: If you had to choose a focus for districts and schools to start on for implementing your work, what are some practices that you have seen, beyond building that relationship, the discussions, and the trust? What practices have you seen that have had the most impact, and what factors contributed to these outcomes?
JH: Well, Pam, what we do in our work is we do really good diagnostic work. Now, we actually don't do it. We get the school to do it, because as the theme of this whole podcast, we want to hear the interpretations. Yes, we triangulate it so that if the school's not doing well or if the school's doing extremely well, they are coming up with the same conclusions. And, then, we look at what specific things they're doing well at, not they're doing well at, and this is this notion of errors. They're opportunities. When you're not doing well at things, they are the ones that we focus on because those are the ones that we need to improve, and we can make big differences.
We do the progress testing. We work with the school in terms of giving them that kind of information that's grounded. But all the time, we create opportunities in those schools where we listen to the interpretations. Sometimes, schools get stuck on the interpretations about what has happened, and we say, "Well, what can we do that will make the difference?" So, we come up with agreements about where we're going to go next, and then we evaluate those. So, this virtuous cycle continues, of, we do it about every 12 or 14 weeks. If you do it more than that you tend to over assess, and you forget the teaching. If you do it more than 12 weeks...Sometimes, learning, it doesn't happen linearly. Learning can happen suddenly, it can be up and down. And, so, 12 weeks, it about captures it.
So, two or three times a year, we get the staff together in various groups. We look at the evaluative evidence. We look at the teachers talking about individual students they've picked out. Bring along two struggling kids, two kids near the bottom, two kids in the middle, kids at the top. How have they gone over the last three months? And how do you have those discussions? And that is what makes the biggest difference. We don't spend time teaching them how to teach. We have got a lot of resources we're building that helps understand what's happening in the classrooms, we can get a transcript relatively easily now of what's happening, and analyzed using artificial intelligence on the spot, that helps teachers then reflect on what actually they're doing. We say to teachers, "How much time in your classroom are you talking?" Most teachers say 40 percent or too much. We show that they're talking 95 percent of the time, that's easily fixed. Most teachers don't know.
So, how do you help them look at those resources and understand what's happening, but at all times getting them involved and having those discussions about how they're having the impact. Coming into other teachers' classrooms. "Help me watch these students today. What are they doing, what's going on?" Don't talk to them because that's disruptive, and I know you can't hear them thinking, but you can actually see a lot when you're watching other students about what's happening, and this is a lot of the work we do. And school administrators, you have to support this. You have to create this opportunity. You have to be there as part of it. And, as Helen Temperley has shown, that one of the most critical things for school administrators is they have to be physically present. Too often they're not there, and they're just etiquette from the back room. How are they part of the story? How are they creating this trusting environment? And we're doing this now, as I say, we work with about 100,000 teachers a year around the world. It's hard work. It's difficult work. It takes, sometimes, quite a lot of time to build that trust.
Our biggest problem, Pam, is actually the opposite end. When the principal changes, we have to start again. It's a really serious problem because many principals, it's much easier to worry about the timetable, to worry about the resources, and not be involved in the nitty gritty of the evaluative thinking, but this is what makes the difference.
I think every teacher in the world came into this profession for one reason. To have an impact on kids. I just want to remind ourselves of that.
PA: Right. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed this conversation with you. Learned so much, John.
JH: Thank you, Pam.
PA: Thank you for spending time with us today. This is Pam Austin, from Voyager Sopris Learning, bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.
Narrator: This has been an EDVIEW 360 podcast, produced by Voyager Sopris Learning. For additional thought-provoking podcasts and articles, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at VoyagerSopris.com/podcast, and on iTunes. Thank you for joining us.
*John Hattie is not affiliated with Voyager Sopris Learning. Nor does he endorse or make any representations or warranties regarding products associated with Voyager Sopris Learning.