Why are so many of our teachers and schools so successful? John Hattie at TEDxNorrkoping — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Translator: Yohanna Cordeiro Reviewer: Denise RQ
2. 0:12Given what you often hear in the media
3. 0:17from politicians and often from many parents,
4. 0:21it can't be that bad out there in classroomland.
5. 0:27Certainly, if I ask you to think about
6. 0:29the teachers that had a positive, profound effect on you,
7. 0:35and you think of them -
8. 0:37for me, there's Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. O'Neil, is Rob McDonald -
9. 0:42and if you actually look at what those people,
10. 0:44what the attributes of those teachers were,
11. 0:47it's often because they had a passion
12. 0:50that they wanted you to share
13. 0:52about what they loved the most.
14. 0:55Or sometimes, it was because they saw something in you
15. 0:59that you didn't see in yourself.
16. 1:01Folks, the fact that you can think of some of those teachers,
17. 1:06[is because] there's expertise out there in our business.
18. 1:10There is a lot of that kind of expertise that's going on,
19. 1:13but at the moment, our politicians, our voters are saying,
20. 1:18"We have a problem. We have to fix those teachers.
21. 1:22We have to come up with teacher-proof ways so kids can learn,
22. 1:26we have to find ways
23. 1:27in which we can use carrots and sticks, and performance pay,"
24. 1:31and all these kind of things.
25. 1:34Well, in one sense, the focus on teachers is right.
26. 1:40Certainly, the work I've been doing, and many others,
27. 1:43is that the biggest source of variance in our business
28. 1:45that we have control over are the teachers.
29. 1:50On the other hand,
30. 1:51we have to be very careful that we don't misuse that information,
31. 1:54and then focus on individual teachers
32. 1:56as if the system is bad and needs to be fixed.
33. 1:59And my talk today is about identifying, the need to identify their expertise,
34. 2:04the need to acknowledge that it's out there,
35. 2:07the need to esteem and privilege it,
36. 2:09and the need to, certainly, find out and understand that notion of expertise.
37. 2:15We have a strange profession, in that unlike many other professions
38. 2:19like medicine, engineering, and painting, and paper hanging,
39. 2:24in our profession, when people first start off,
40. 2:27we expect them to be experts, the first-year teacher;
41. 2:32actually, they expected to be rated outstanding in their first year,
42. 2:36and in many ways, we see them as similar to 20-year-old veterans.
43. 2:41If you look at other professions, like medicine,
44. 2:43they start with the registration years, they have practices,
45. 2:46they call it the practice of medicine.
46. 2:48Painters and paper hangers go through an apprenticeship.
47. 2:52And they have a series of steps before they get there,
48. 2:54and I think that's the kind of thing we need to think about in our profession.
49. 2:59Certainly, what I've been doing is trying to say:
50. 3:01can we take all the studies that we know of in our business -
51. 3:04and certainly, there are many -
52. 3:06and see what's up the scale
53. 3:07in terms of what influences student achievement;
54. 3:11what's the zero things, what makes no difference at all,
55. 3:14and what things decrease achievement?
56. 3:16What I've been doing for the last 25 years is screwing a way collecting data.
57. 3:22I have close to a quarter of billion students in the database
58. 3:26to try and say: if I could take all the influences
59. 3:28from the home, from the family, from the principal,
60. 3:31from the schools, from the finance, from the policies, from the curriculum,
61. 3:34from the teacher, from the strategies; I've got them all.
62. 3:38And I turned them all around, and I say, "Well, what's the effect?"
63. 3:42Well, I get a distribution like this.
64. 3:45And you can see here the zero point, the red zone.
65. 3:49This is the kind of influences which negatively affect achievement.
66. 3:55And here's the good news:
67. 3:57there's not much we do to the kids that harm them.
68. 4:0395 to 98% of things that we do in the name of enhancing achievement
69. 4:07does enhance achievement.
70. 4:10All you need to enhance achievement is a pulse.
71. 4:14And so when politicians, parents, and everyone gets out and says,
72. 4:18"We know how to fix schools," they are right.
73. 4:20If they say they can improve achievement, because everybody can,
74. 4:25that's one of our problems of our professions
75. 4:27because we have lowered the base so far to say, "Can we improve achievement?"
76. 4:32The teacher who comes and says,
77. 4:33"Look, this is the performance of the kids at the start of the year,
78. 4:36and this is their performance later, at the end of the year,"
79. 4:39to me, they're criminal.
80. 4:41We need to get rid of those teachers, because everybody can do it.
81. 4:45But obviously, you can see this average which I want to talk about today,
82. 4:49this 0.4.
83. 4:50The number is not critical, the relativity is.
84. 4:53Because what I want to find out
85. 4:54is one of the common stories about what is up there in that green zone
86. 4:59compared to what's in that yellow zone.
87. 5:01I'm sure everyone of you here that's listening and watching,
88. 5:05who has a child in school,
89. 5:07if I said to you, "Do you want your child in a school
90. 5:09with a teacher who has a systematic impact in the green zone or the yellow zone?"
91. 5:13That's easy. Yeah? All right.
92. 5:17So let's start and look at some of the effects.
93. 5:20And I want to start with looking at structural things.
94. 5:24I'm going to suggest to you
95. 5:26that many of the things on this list dominate our debates about education.
96. 5:31"We have to give more money," "We have to fix the class size,"
97. 5:35"We have to do ability grouping."
98. 5:37We have to come up with
99. 5:38different kinds of schools and charter schools."
100. 5:41So what do you think the effect of those are?
101. 5:46Do you think they are going to be above the 0.4 or below the 0.4?
102. 5:51I've got 200 different things, so where would they rank?
103. 5:56Well, I can't find a single structural effect that's greater than 0.4.
104. 6:03The majority of things that we debate in education doesn't matter much.
105. 6:09And I say "we" because I include teachers in that, along with the rest of us.
106. 6:13The structural things? Yeah, we need to get them right!
107. 6:17But in terms of the hierarchy of this business: no.
108. 6:21So what about these ones?
109. 6:22What about some attributes of the students?
110. 6:24We all know that if only schools had the right students, life would be easy.
111. 6:29So, you can see some of the attributes up there.
112. 6:32So what do you think their effects are?
113. 6:34Greater than 0.4 or less than 0.4?
114. 6:37Does it matter who the kids are?
115. 6:41No.
116. 6:43What works in our business, works for most kids if not all kids.
117. 6:47It's very far and hard to find differences.
118. 6:52What about programs?
119. 6:54I say here, deliberately, 'deprograms' because is what you hear all the time,
120. 6:57"You've got to have problem solving, deep thinking,
121. 7:00individualized instruction, problem-based learning,
122. 7:03you've got to match kids' learning styles with their teaching."
123. 7:09So what do you think?
124. 7:12No, they don't matter.
125. 7:16And I want you to remember this
126. 7:18because I'll come back to this in a moment.
127. 7:21Technology - Oh, come on!
128. 7:25All we need to have is laptops and technology.
129. 7:27And then things will be marvelous.
130. 7:30Now, you know the answer, don't you?
131. 7:33No!
132. 7:35The interesting thing about technology is that we've been doing these researches
133. 7:39for almost 14 to 15 years, asking the impact of technology,
134. 7:43and the common claim is, "Ah, but wait.
135. 7:46The technology revolution is re-coming upon us.
136. 7:48This new thing is going to come out, this new app, this new Internet, whatever.
137. 7:52For the last 14 to 15 years, that effect-size has not changed.
138. 7:56Technology is the revolution that has been coming for 35 years
139. 8:00and it's not here yet.
140. 8:04These are the kind of things I'd argue are the politics of distraction,
141. 8:10The kind of thing we talk about in our business so often,
142. 8:13which means we avoid addressing what really matters in schools.
143. 8:18And I get so frustrated when you read the media, when you listen to debates -
144. 8:22everywhere: in classrooms, in staff rooms, in professional development sessions -
145. 8:27particularly in the media and amongst our politicians,
146. 8:29they want to solve these things.
147. 8:31Why?
148. 8:32One reason, it's simple: you can see a lot of these things.
149. 8:35You're not going to be able to see easily what's on the other side of the equation.
150. 8:39And so one of my missions, in this TEDx talk today is:
151. 8:42can we, when we hear these kinds of discussions,
152. 8:44ask those people to go into another room so we can talk about what really matters?
153. 8:51Let's get to the good story.
154. 8:53Now, the first thing with those numbers, they're dramatically different.
155. 8:57And my point is that the biggest effect in our business is expertise of the teachers.
156. 9:04It's the teachers who work together.
157. 9:09I'll say that again: teachers who work together,
158. 9:11collectively, collaboratively, to understand their impact.
159. 9:16And that's probably the biggest, single most fact in this business:
160. 9:20that teachers, and principals, and systems go into classrooms,
161. 9:24they go into schools, they go into systems,
162. 9:27who say, "My job is to understand my impact,"
163. 9:29are the ones that have the biggest effect.
164. 9:32Not the teachers who say,
165. 9:33"My job is to cover the curriculum," "My job is to get kids through the exams."
166. 9:38It's teachers who say, "I want to understand my impact."
167. 9:40It begs the moral purpose question: what is impact?
168. 9:46And that's a really critical question. It's not just scores on tests.
169. 9:51One of the things I think is critical is how do we get kids to reinvest
170. 9:56in this business called learning so they want to do more of it?
171. 10:00Certainly, if you look at the evidence
172. 10:02of what's the best predictor of health, wealth, and happiness in adult life,
173. 10:07it's not achievement at school.
174. 10:10It's more than years of schooling.
175. 10:13So how can our schoolings be inviting places
176. 10:15to get kids to come back to?
177. 10:18That's a really critical part of knowing our impact.
178. 10:23It is understanding very clearly, in every lesson, and every day,
179. 10:28what the student knows already,
180. 10:31because that's the starting point
181. 10:33to then say, "Now we need to know what success looks like."
182. 10:37So you don't go in there, and just create a set of interesting materials,
183. 10:40and hope every kid has at some point, a starting point,
184. 10:43but knowing deeply where a kid starts.
185. 10:46But it's also showing the students, upfront, what success looks like
186. 10:51as they are beginning this task.
187. 10:53Could you imagine if I said to you,
188. 10:55"Now I'm going to take you out, and I'm going to play this game.
189. 10:58I'm going to ask you to play it, but I'm not going to tell you the rules."
190. 11:01Some of you would sit on the sidelines,
191. 11:04some of you might actually get in there and try the game.
192. 11:06But you could imagine chaos wouldn't be out of the picture,
193. 11:11and certainly, many of you would start to drift away from it.
194. 11:14Some of our kids in our schools love playing that game;
195. 11:17they'll do anything we ask them to.
196. 11:20But there is a large group of students out there, the ones that often question,
197. 11:24the ones that we often call sometimes the 'naughty kids' -
198. 11:26because they don't play the games we want them to -
199. 11:29[who] the more you can show them what success looks like,
200. 11:32as they're starting ...
201. 11:34It's a bit like a video-game for those of you, like me,
202. 11:37who have been through the Angry Birds fetish:
203. 11:40it knows exactly
204. 11:42what your prior achievement is, your last score, and then sets a target,
205. 11:47a goal, a success, kind of using the Goldilocks principle -
206. 11:50not too hard, not too easy.
207. 11:53Then it powers in feedback and information that gives you multiple tries.
208. 11:57A lot of deliberate practice you put into it to reduce that gap.
209. 12:01And then what happens?
210. 12:02They increase the standard. They increase the success.
211. 12:05And you ought to reinvest and reinvest.
212. 12:08It's no different than in our schooling,
213. 12:10except the critical difference is that, so often in our schools,
214. 12:13the students don't know what success looks like in a series of lessons.
215. 12:17Errors, mistakes -
216. 12:19what's the point of going to school if you know it already?
217. 12:23The reason you go to learn it is because you don't know.
218. 12:26And not knowing is an incredible opportunity.
219. 12:28How can we get our schools and our classrooms
220. 12:30to create climates with a lot of trust
221. 12:33so that it's OK to make mistakes and errors?
222. 12:38Maximizing feedback to teachers -
223. 12:40How can we get teachers to get feedback about their impact?
224. 12:43That's the point of assessment in schools.
225. 12:45To help teachers understand their impact.
226. 12:49And I mentioned before about those deep programs:
227. 12:51well, look here, it's simple.
228. 12:53If you want to think, you have to have something to think about.
229. 12:57It's the proportion of knowing lots of stuff,
230. 13:00and then moving on to relate and extend those ideas.
231. 13:04And if you're learning something for the first time here today,
232. 13:07you need a lot of surface detail
233. 13:09before I can get you then to start thinking of connections;
234. 13:12it's that proportion.
235. 13:13And is knowing when, as a teacher,
236. 13:15to move from knowing stuff to relating that stuff, the key.
237. 13:19Then there's that Goldilocks principle of challenge: not too hard, not too easy.
238. 13:23And then, asking the students, teaching them the learning strategies
239. 13:27so they can deliberately practice
240. 13:30with a lot of coaching from us, as teachers,
241. 13:34to reduce that gap from where they are to where they want to be.
242. 13:39And certainly, my message here today is this notion of expertise
243. 13:43is incredibly powerful in our business.
244. 13:46Now, today, we're in Sweden.
245. 13:50In the PISA rankings, you rank in the top 10-20 in the world.
246. 13:55That means there's 150 behind you.
247. 13:59My estimate here, in this country, using the kind of data that I have
248. 14:03is I would estimate around 50-60% at least of your teachers
249. 14:07as having the kind of impact in the zone I was talking about before.
250. 14:12And so how can we acknowledge this kind of expertise that's around us?
251. 14:16How can we build that coalition of the willing and of the successful
252. 14:21to help run and have a major say in our schools?
253. 14:25How can we get a ladder of excellence in our business?
254. 14:29How can we get away from this notion,
255. 14:31that unfortunately, is common throughout education,
256. 14:34that all teachers are equal?
257. 14:36You know that's not true.
258. 14:39Every student knows that's not true. Every teacher knows that's not true.
259. 14:42But our business is already premised at the moment
260. 14:45on this notion that that ladder is flat,
261. 14:47that the one-year-old teacher and the 20-year-old teacher[are the same].
262. 14:51I can assure you expertise is not highly correlated with the years of experience
263. 14:55so it's not just years of experience I'm talking about.
264. 14:58And how can we get teachers on this right now?
265. 15:00In other professions, our doctors, our engineers, painters, and paper hangers
266. 15:05they start at the bottom.
267. 15:06We don't say when we go to a doctor who's reasonably new that they're no good.
268. 15:11There are minimum standards.
269. 15:14They have to do;and agree to do no harm.
270. 15:17In the same way that many of our brand-new teachers
271. 15:20are passing their minimum standards;
272. 15:22the minute those brand new teachers have an enthusiasm and new ideas,
273. 15:26that gives them a heck of a good advance, compared to many others.
274. 15:30And how can we get, like in other professions,
275. 15:32some steps in our ladder
276. 15:34so that we constantly ask what is the impact you're having?
277. 15:39How do you demonstrate the impact you're having?
278. 15:41And as you do that, and convince the profession of teachers,
279. 15:45we can then advance up that ladder.
280. 15:48And then, when we get to teachers who are near the top of that ladder,
281. 15:51we get them more involved in giving back to their profession,
282. 15:55and being involved in helping others up that ladder,
283. 15:58and setting the standards of excellence,
284. 16:01and trying to find ways in which we can convince our community
285. 16:04that we do have a lot of excellence in our business,
286. 16:07but not everyone's excellent on day one.
287. 16:11And so my message here, in this TEDx talk today
288. 16:14is that in the profession of teaching,
289. 16:17we have a inconsiderable amount of expertise.
290. 16:22Bring on the debate about expertise and teachers.
291. 16:25There are so many of those teachers
292. 16:27who can participate and have a say in that debate.
293. 16:30Thank you.
294. 16:32(Applause)