One of the blogger initiative questions this week is: All new teachers should learn___before entering the classroom. In my opinion every teacher, new or not, needs to become familiar with John Hattie’s work on Visible Learning. Of all the strategies, programs, etc. that are in our teacher toolbox, we should be selecting strategies that make the most impact on learning and achievement. Hattie conducted a meta-analysis of more than 800 studies and some of the results are surprising.
The single most effective strategy a teacher can implement is for students to set goals and monitor their own progress.
My mentor is a university professor in middle level education. She has often asked me to present my latest adventures to her MLE curriculum students. I presented Hattie’s work on Visible Learning for Teachers and many students were enlightened.
“Knowing a student’s learning style has been driven into our heads and now you are telling us it’s not as important as we think,” one MLE student commented.
Certainly learning styles is best practice, however nearly everything works to some degree. Why not first implement those strategies that maximize our leverage?
I think Hattie’s work directly connects to the strategies involved in implementing standards based grading. Jump to slide 19 of the presentation for proof.
Curiouser and Curiouser 
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