John Hattie

Announcer:  [00:01] Welcome to “Principal Center Radio,” bringing you the best in professional practice. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and champion of high‑performance instructional leadership, Justin Baeder.

Justin Baeder:  [00:12] Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. John Hattie. Dr. Hattie is the researcher and author behind the enormously influential “Visible Learning” series, including his synthesis of more than 800 meta‑analysis studies related to achievement.

Announcer:  [01:00] And now, our feature presentation.

Justin:  [01:03] Dr. Hattie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

John Hattie:  [01:05] It's great to be here talking to you, Justin, and to the listeners.

Justin:  [01:09] Thanks so much. Let's talk first about what you saw happening in the profession, perhaps in reaction to some of your previous work. How did you arrive at the conclusion that teachers' mindframes are so important? What was it that led up to this particular book?

John:  [01:25] Since I started on the whole visible learning notion, which actually I started in your old state, Washington, way back in the early 1990s, was trying to answer the question about how everything in our business seems to work. How come every teacher says they're above average and every school has evidence that they're doing a good job? Yet from the perspective of a student, that doesn't always make sense.

Justin:  [03:29] I couldn't agree more that teacher thinking, teacher cognition is so critical and so powerful. I wonder if you've seen what I'm picking up from a lot of our profession, this focus on teacher behavior.

John:  [04:51] The theme is absolutely correct. This is too strong, but I almost don't care how teachers teach. The whole debate we have about best ways to teach, about best practice, about resources, apps, all that kind of stuff is killing us as a profession. It's not how they teach. It's the impact of that teaching on the kids.

Justin:  [06:58] I'm very excited to hear you say that conversation is the way we get at that thinking. That's an idea that has captured my attention for the last couple of months, this idea that so much of teacher practice is hidden beneath the surface.

John:  [07:56] Justin, it's easier than that. If you want to save yourself time reading the book, just read that one chapter because the other lines are variants of that same theme.

Justin:  [09:50] For so long in our profession, we've been asking the question am I using best practices. I know that one of the reactions to your work sometimes has been that we don't really read the whole book. We just look at the list and say, “Well, I should be using these top practices,” and as you said, ignoring all the rest.

John:  [11:25] Don't get me wrong. There are higher‑probability interventions. The law of probability interventions. Yes, I would want teachers to use higher‑probability interventions. It's all looking backwards. It's all rear‑vision mirror stuff. I look at the research of what's happened in classrooms.

Justin:  [13:50] I wonder what you think about the issue of teacher evaluation when it comes to mindframes. This has probably happened to you over and over again in your career as an author and researcher that you will share something, share a new idea or share a new finding in a book, and then as practicing educators, we immediately misinterpret and misapply that.

John:  [15:18] You're absolutely right. I've talked to Charlotte, and Bob Bazalo, and many of the people who develop these instruments, and they're horrified at how they're misused because it's all about the use and interpretation.

Justin:  [19:12] I love a comment that you made earlier about shifting our focus from the question of “what works?” to the question of “what works best?” I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea of a competency trap.

John:  [21:01] Justin, let me start by saying you've got to beware of educators who have solutions. We have a tendency in our business to look for the latest bauble on the Christmas tree and say, “We've got to introduce this in our school,” whether it be a new curriculum, a new teaching method, a new whatever.

Justin:  [24:38] I think a lot about implementation, I think a lot about fidelity of implementation, and I think you're absolutely right. So often, we focus on a shallow teacher‑behavior level of fidelity. Honestly, as instructional leaders, we're often afraid to get into the thinking.

Justin:  [26:25] Just to make a comment on that, Justin, the biggest power of a school leader is they can have a major decision of what the narrative in the school is. I just want the narrative to be about impact, not about what we do.

Justin:  [27:27] That gets to my last question here. If you could wave a magic wand and get all of us in the instructional leadership business, if you could get all school leaders everywhere to do one thing, just by a wave of the magic wand, what would it be?

John:  [27:41] That's easy. Stop talking about what you do. Stop talking about how you do it. Stop talking about the students. Stop talking about what you do. Stop talking about your curriculum. All I want you to talk about, all I want you to privilege is the notion of expertise.

Justin:  [28:55] The book is 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning ‑‑ Teaching for Success. Dr. Hattie, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

John:  [29:02] Pleasure. Thank you, Justin.

Announcer:  [29:04] And now, Justin Baeder on high‑performance instructional leadership.

Justin:  [29:09] High‑performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with John Hattie? I think there is so much that we are doing, as a profession, that diminishes teacher thinking, that diminishes the importance of teachers' own cognition, reflection, and judgments about their practice and judgments about what their students need.

Justin:  [31:52] that have been resonating with me for the past year or so as I've been developing this program, developing the certification program.

Announcer:  [32:32] Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com/radio.