John Hattie: fashionable teaching methods are a distraction

Academics should resist being “seduced” by whatever teaching method is in fashion and instead focus on evaluating their impact on students, according to one of the world’s most widely read education experts.

John Hattie, emeritus laureate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, releases his new book Visible Learning: The Sequel on 20 March, a follow-up to 2008’s Visible Learning, a highly influential text that spawned a series of books that have been translated into 29 languages and sold more than 2 million copies. 

While his original work was based on 800 meta-analyses to judge how teaching styles influence learning, the new book is based on 2,100 – and Professor Hattie has put all the data online to “challenge his critics to come up with a better story”.

But he said the new work is less focused on the data and more on the bigger story, which he summarises as: “It is not what you do, it is how you think about what you do.”

Professor Hattie said the “politics of distraction” was often at play in discussions about teaching methods, and almost any technique can be shown to have an impact on learning – but this often missed the point.

“I want to look at those instructors who are having a really positive effect and use them as the bellwethers of the university system,” he said.

“We have excellence out there but often we hide it behind: ‘You are not using this particular method.’ I’m not a fan of debating what the method is; I actually don’t care what method is used.

“I care about the impact of it and the evidence of this; on all students and different kinds of students. Let’s get away from our current debates about teaching methods and structures and start talking about impact.”

Flipped learning – the idea that students should learn basic content prior to class to allow more time for “active learning” – was the latest technique to be scrutinised by Professor Hattie in a landmark analysis published with Manu Kapur, professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH Zurich, last year.

They found many of the studies that purported to show the benefits of flipped learning did not involve any active study at all and where there was an effect, it was usually down to increased exposure to course materials. Academics should focus on course design, not mode of teaching, they concluded.

“The spirit is hardly ever implemented but the name is seductive,” said Professor Hattie of flipped learning.

“People implement it in 1,000 different ways but hardly ever as intended, so who can be surprised that you get massively variable results? The trouble is people pick out a model and say: ‘I’m doing that.’ I argue you need to go to the next step, and ask what was the impact you had.”

Impact, Professor Hattie said, cannot be judged solely by student evaluation. “I was in the business 50 years. If a student didn’t say: ‘He spoke too fast’, I didn’t believe them.”

It should also consider progress over time, how assessments are working and the stories that are being created, he said, adding that academics’ peers should be recruited as critics to help with such evaluation.

Another problem with focusing on teaching methods, according to Professor Hattie, was that they tend to prioritise either surface-level content – such as facts – or the deeper learning around concepts and relationships, when what is needed is both.

“Instructors say: ‘We want you to think like a historian or a statistician’, but students know it is the facts that are really valued – 90 per cent of our assessments are about the facts.

“I have no trouble with that, but we overemphasise it. I want the facts and the deeper stuff. The argument in the book is that maybe we should think about giving them two assignments: one about the facts and the content, one about the writing.

“We need to be much more specific to our students that we value both. Most of our teaching methods are all over the place in the eyes of students, and we need to be smarter about that.”

Professor Hattie – who described himself as a “nerdy researcher who sits in the back room playing with data” – has now notionally retired and has left much of the implementation of his thinking to consultants. Ten thousand schools are now adopting his visible learning techniques across the world.

Universities, he said, were a lot harder to work with, especially as “people in universities who worry about teaching are usually already good at teaching. The others it is hard to get them to take this on.”

That will not stop him trying, of course, and he said the main difference between now and pre-retirement was “I’m still doing a lot of the things I was doing before but not getting paid for it.”

The book has been described as not about providing “easy hacks” to help students get good grades but about “changing the culture of education”. Achieving that, you sense, would be reward enough.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com