Number 4 of the 6 Most Impactful Instructional Strategies
This article is the fourth in a series of the six MOST IMPACTFUL instructional strategies for educators from John Hattie’s study. To learn more about this study, read this introduction article and catch the first article here.
What is it?
As a teacher, you know your students well. You know their favorite sports teams. You know the type of food that grosses them out. And from an academic perspective, before you teach certain lessons, you can accurately predict which students will struggle understanding the concept and which ones may need to be further challenged.
Hattie found compelling evidence that this type of knowledge can have a powerful effect on student learning. He refers to it as Teacher Estimates of Achievement, and when implemented accurately, it can create an effect size of 1.29 and greater. (Remember, anything above 1.0 has the potential to increase student learning by 50%, which equates to nearly two grade levels per school year!)
The crux of this student learning impact is a strong belief that ALL students in your classroom have the ability to achieve at a high level; thus, you must create challenging but attainable expectations for ALL students.
At the same time, because you know your students well (based on previous assessments and achievement benchmarks), you use that information wisely:
to influence your instructional choices
to proactively plan potential interventions that will help students who struggle
to create learning extensions for students who may already understand the concepts from the lesson
Where’s the Research?
Hattie found that the research related to “teachers’ judgment of students’ achievement” was extensive and culminated in 124 different studies involving almost 39,000 students! The research by Hoge & Coladarci (1989) and Sudkamp, Kaiser, & Moller (2012) produced astronomical effect sizes of 1.76 and 1.62 respectively. A more recent study in 2016 yielded an effect size of 1.00.
What does it look like in the classroom?
This question is challenging for me to answer because every classroom is unique and you collectively know your students better than anyone else in the world! However, to get your brain thinking, here are some factors that could be evaluated to maximize the student learning impact in your classroom:
Establish positive relationships with all students in your classroom. Hattie is adamant that positive student-teacher relationships are the key to high levels of student learning.
Lesson pacing: The amount of content in a textbook NEVER determines when to slow down and when to speed up a lesson; students (and their learning) do!
Student grouping: Hattie believes that mixing students based on their ability levels produces the most positive results for learners at all levels.
Classroom activities: Creating a variety of opportunities for active student learning (Jigsaw Method, science labs, Socratic seminars, etc.)
Questioning strategies: When low-level (comprehension and understanding) questions are needed and when high-level (application, analysis, and evaluation) are appropriate.
Difficulty of tasks assigned: Create high-expectation goals for all students in your classroom.
Reflection Time:
Do you genuinely believe all students in your classroom have the ability to achieve at a high level?
When planning your lessons, do you consider the following two questions:
What am I going to do if the students don’t learn? (remediation intervention)
What am I going to do for the students who already have learned? (extension intervention)
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