John Hattie

Written on the 21st of September 2006

After reading John Hatties “Teachers Make a Difference What is the research evidence?” article 4 or 5 times my feelings went from absolute fear (how can I be all this all the time to all students), to an acceptance that these are “goal posts” that as young new teacher I am now aware of, so I can always be striving towards and reaching.
Coming to my subject area as an artist (designer) rather than a qualified teacher has been an interesting process of growth and development. Over the last four years I have assisted classes ranging from Preschool to Stage 6 and been able to observe a lot of different teachers, which has helped me in my transition from Artist to Artist Teacher.






Reading Hatties article has clarified areas to focus on in the process of becoming a better teacher.

This year I have had the daunting task of taking on three different lots of 16 or so Year 7 students through the Introduction to sewing lesson. When I start to plan this lesson I am first faced with the obstacle of my rather small room (due to the fact that our new classrooms are being built as I write), due to the size of my room there is only 10 sewing machines and 4 overlockers and 2 tables for cutting out.
Teaching in these conditions an activity that requires machines (that can break or get knotted up at any moment) and being the only one who can fix the machines and mostly without an assistant has given me an insight into how flexible and adaptable you have to be as a teacher.

“Expert teachers adopt a problem-solving stance to their work.”


As the year has unfolded I have been able to come to each group with a better understanding of how the lesson can be improved. Bringing to each group my previous experience therefore becoming better at “anticipating problems and then improvising” in any new situation.
One thing I quickly learnt was that through out a very active lesson of one and half hours you have to have points of contraction because the nature of these types of lesson are that students are up to different things at different times, (some people cutting, sewing, pinning different parts of their projects), so they are incredibly expanded throughout most of the lesson. To counter act this expansion (which if left unchecked can get out of control), I always bring the students in at the beginning of the lesson, sit them in a circle and outline what they are going to be doing that lesson, ask what they would like to achieve in the lesson and talk about new skills etc. Then throughout the lesson I will pull them into silence for a moment to clarify, restate, or highlight something that has come to my notice as I observe and help the individual students. At the end of the lesson after they have tidied up I once again form a circle with the chairs and have a feedback session with show and tell, reinforcement of lesson, achievements and outcomes and of course encouragement and complement.

Through studying John Hatties article “Teachers Make a Difference What is the research evidence?” I have been able to reflect on myself as a teacher and as a learner and the many different teachers I have had and what made them great teachers.
I use great teachers instead of “expert” because even through I have a total appreciation of what Hattie is seeking to uncover, highlight and therefore influence change in a society where teachers are for the most part undervalued and are ‘rewarded primarily by experience irrespective of excellence”, I have problem with the term ‘expert’… who can really define what is an expert?

On the one hand as a teacher I find these great goals to strive for but as a clarifying term to pit one teacher against another and to be labelled as experienced and expert etc, I find these terms to be somewhat limiting.
In my own experience as a learner and through discussions with past and present students from different backgrounds I think that to try to find a way of monitoring, clarifying and group teachers into categories in an objective manner would be extremely difficult because learning is such a subjective process.

I agree of course that by just leaving it as that, (in the to hard basket) it is by no means gong to improve the quality of teaching in society but I think that researchers have to be mindful of the subjective nature of learning. Hattie states in his conclusion that this research is one of the few that has been ‘based on evidence from classrooms, particularly considering the effects on student learning’, this is a start to a more thorough understanding of how to clarify teachers and I realise that I myself would have to do more research to form a deeper understanding of such a complex topic.