Know Thy Impact

If you're familiar with the work of John Hattie, you know he has done a meta-analysis of 1200 studies of what works for students.  The good news.... very little of what we do harms students.  Most everything done will increase student achievement.  That's great, right?  Well, what we should be asking ourselves is, what works best?  

John Hattie stipulates the average effect size is .4 for all strategies/interventions.  So, if the proposed intervention has less than .4 of an effect size, we could probably do better. 

In Hattie's recent work, The Politics of Collaborative Expertise, he focuses on knowing thy impact.  (https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/corporate/global/pearson-dot-com/files/hattie/150526_ExpertiseWEB_V1.pdf)

Based on Hattie's work, Deb Masters has four questions we should be asking in our schools:

(http://visiblelearningplus.com/content/know-thy-impact-4-questions-help-you-pin-down-what-children-are-really-learning)

1. Does your school discuss, in detail, precisely what you want the impact of any changes to be?

2. Do your teachers have common conceptions of progress?

3. Do all educators in the school believe their main role is to evaluate their impact? 

4. What is the impact of teaching in your school and how do you know?

It should be the basic expectation that we expect a year's worth of growth from a year's worth of education.  That is the minimum.  And that makes sense, right.  Take kids from where they are, add a year of school, and you get a year of growth.

If this is the basic expectation, we should be focusing on a growth model, not simply a percent of students who have attained proficiency.  Wouldn't it be better to right our school goals that all kids will attain a year's worth of growth?

In order to do that, we have to know our impact- whether it is in the instructional strategy that is used in a particular moment, an overall schoolwide intervention strategy or in professional learning.

So, what is your impact?

#KidsDeserveIt