The big idea of this book is:
Know thy impact!

Jenny and I both instantly connected with Hattie's explicit thesis because that is exactly what we are learning to do in this program.

When teaching and learning are "visible" - when it's clear what teachers are teaching and what students are learning, student achievement increases.

Expert teachers don't stick with specific teaching strategies - rather, they regularly focus on evaluating the effects they have on students and adjust their teaching methods accordingly.

This metanalysis is considered by many to be education's Holy Grail due to the sheer number of research studies which were conducted over a 15 year period of time. Hattie's explicit thesis of "Know thy Impact" can be at the forefront of our instructional design process as we move ahead as innovative educators. Our goal as teachers should be as constant evaluators of the effectiveness of our instruction on each and every child.

Hattie has taken essentially everything that has happened in education in regards to achievement and placed it along a continuum to identify the positive effects vs the negative effects.

One of the most important discoveries from the research was that almost *any* intervention can claim to "work" and had an effect size above zero which simply means that the intervention had *some* positive effect on achievement.

Hattie argues that for years we've been making false comparisons. We've been comparing the effects to zero.

Instead, we should be comparing the effectiveness of a method or practice compared to ALL the other things we do.

The average effect, if we compare everything is .40. Less than 0.3 is a small effect, 0.3-0.6 is a medium effect and -more than 0.6 is a large effect.

The "hinge-point" of an effect size should be 0.40 which is about the average effect of what we expect in a year of schooling. Therefore, we should aim to implement interventions with 0.4 and above because those are the ones that will truly improve student achievement.

Probably not surprising is that the meta-analysis found that retention has a decrease in student achievement.

Perhaps a surprising finding is that class size reduction from 30 to 15 students only has a .20 effect on student achievement.

About half of teachers have a positive effect on student achievement. These teachers are using evidence based teaching practices, asking and collecting evidence about the effectiveness of their instruction and making adjustments as needed based on the data.

Hattie argues that teachers need to become effective evaluators of their own practice and that the teacher's mind frame in which they see it as their role to evaluate their effect on learning. Effective teachers change what is happening when learning is not happening - making calculated interventions, providing students with multiple opportunities and alternatives to learn at both surface and deep levels.

The average effect size of feedback on achievement is 0.79 - almost double the average of other schooling effects placing feedback among the top ten influences on achievement.

Where am I going?: Students will be more successful if they can answer the question of where they are going with a mastery-related goal. Teachers can do this by creating clear and challenging learning goals and making sure they are transparent to students.

How am I going? Teachers should provide feedback to the student relative to the starting or finish point, not in comparison to other students.

Where to next? Many students find this most empowering because it helps them choose the next most appropriate challenge and can help them to develop self-regulation through the learning process.

Hattie's Big 3 questions "Where am I going?, How am I going? and Where to next?" helped provide me with a framework of how to provide effective feedback to my struggling readers. It will be critical to move beyond task level feedback (right/wrong answer). Providing process level feedback can help students develop learning strategies and recognize relationships between ideas. Ultimately I would like to be able to provide self-regulation feedback which allows students to be reflective and think of which strategies they found most effective in becoming a stronger reader. Throughout this course, we have been asked to consider our audience and Hattie's questions helped me target the type of feedback that research has shown will provide the greatest impact on learning.

The purpose of this book is for teachers to becoming evaluators of the effects of their own teaching. At the end of each chapter and in the appendix, Hattie provides teacher friendly discussion questions and exercises at the end of each chapter. In the spirit of sharing what we are learning in this program, Jenny and I participated in a "Visible Learning Exercise" with our staff. In teams, teachers placed an x in the column of influences that they believed had a high, medium or low impact on student learning. Topics ranged from home environment, reducing class size, graded homework, silent reading, using simulations and gaming and many more. Teachers were then provided with the research findings and compared them to their own beliefs. Teachers were shocked with some of the surprising findings that were contrary to what we learned in our credential programs as "Best Practices". Without being lectured or forced, teachers immediately looked to what research shows has the highest impact.

These were the Top 5 High Impact influences on student learning according to Hattie's meta-analyses. Hattie suggests that effect size should serve as a starting point for discussions and not an endpoint for making decisions. He does not endorse any specific curriculum or programs, but rather argues that teachers should constantly be looking at the effects just as we did in our action research projects. It is our hope that these staff discussions will be springboards for change in our elementary school.

To help push ourselves to the important step of "Where to next?", teachers were allowed time to reflect and discuss how to adapt certain strategies they were already using in order to increase student achievement.

Key takeaways for teachers:

Make sure there are clear learning intentions in place.

Set challenging success criteria that is absolutely obvious. Students should know what success looks like at the beginning of the lesson.

Know when students are not progressing.

Provide feedback.

Teachers are visible learners.

We believe the author would have agreed with the sentiment behind this famous quote by the incomparable poet Maya Angelou.