Panania North Visible Learning
‘Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and helps them become their own teachers. Visible Learning aims for children to know the secret of what they are learning, what success looks like and what they need to focus on next. All levels establish learning intentions and success criteria with their students’.
Visible Learning was introduced by John Hattie in his groundbreaking meta study Visible Learning (2009). Hattie compared effect sizes of many aspects that influence learning outcomes. Hattie points out that in education most things work. The question is which ones work best and where to concentrate our efforts.
His most recent research synthesises 1400 meta-analyses relating to the influences on achievement in school-aged children. It presents the largest ever collection of evidence-based research into what actually works (and doesn’t work) to increase student achievement. He uses effect sizes to compare the impact of many influences on student achievement, where an effect size of 0.4 represents one year’s growth over the course of one school year. An effect size of greater than 0.4 indicates the potential for accelerated achievement.
In 2017, Panania North staff attended the ‘Corwin Visible Learning Foundation Seminar Series.’ Our staff discussed the most important messages from the Visible Learning research and understood what does- and doesn’t make a difference to student achievement.
The ‘Evidence Into Action 1’ seminar allowed our staff to learn what evidence we needed to collect to know if we were a Visible Learning school. We received tools and processes for gathering data.
What followed was the ‘Visible Learning Into Action 1’ seminar. Staff gathered and examined evidence on what was occuring in classrooms, with a focus on understanding the characteristics of visible learners and measuring their impact on students.
2018 was welcomed with a Visible Learning staff development day shared amongst other schools from the district. Through a collaborative approach, staff discovered the five strands of Visible Learning and were up-skilled on the difference between the influences that ‘do’ and ‘do not’ make a significant difference to student achievement. The seminar provided practical activities and take-away tools (for example: metacognitive strategies, our school’s own Visible Learning health-checklist and skills to calculate effect sizes).
Our staff collaborated and established the school's 2018 milestones that ultimately would direct us through to 2020. Based off Strategic Direction 1 ‘Visible Learning’, we believed that we needed to;
- Build Assessment Capable Learners who can explain and understand progress, articulate where they're at, where they are going and what their next steps are.
- Promote visible learners who confidently and consistently seek, receive, act on and give feedback.
- Develop a common language for the effective learner qualities and process of learning across the school
Teachers at Panania North Public School are continuously gathering, analysing, interpreting and using information about students’ progress and achievement to improve teaching and learning. We hope you have enjoyed our journey from the beginning to now, where we are still discovering, researching and implementing ways to achieve our three milestones.
