Goodbye, Mr Tomlinson

PUBLIC-private schooling debate misses the point.

John Hattie points out that parents have no rights when it comes to choice of teachers.

BEFORE academia claimed him, leading education researcher John Hattie was a classroom teacher himself. When he looks back on that time, he identifies the expertise of one of his own schoolteachers as embodying the practice that he would later define and document.

Growing up in the small New Zealand town of ­Timaru, which in the pre-television age was a place of small hor­izons and limited ambition, Hattie lucked out with his upper secondary maths teacher: “Mr Tomlinson was his name and he knew how to push us. He had a bunch of kids of varying ability and he set the bar high. Not too high so that we gave up, but he pushed in a way that he didn’t miss anyone in the class. He taught us to love maths and how to achieve in the end-of-year exams. That contrasts with our English teacher, who loved the subject and was good at it but was someone who didn’t set the bar high.”

If we’re lucky, we’ve all had a Mr Tomlinson, someone who sees something in us — a nascent talent, a set of possibilities that often seems hidden to ourselves — and then does everything to bring it out. Hattie calls this “high-impact teaching”, and says that as much as anything, it’s the art of moving students from surface thoughts to deep thinking, and of developing higher-order skills. But the international student assessment data suggests that not nearly enough of this is happening in Australian schools. Hattie goes so far as to say that too many of our academically able students, often in high-­fee-paying private schools, “are cruising and that’s a major problem. When you go into these schools and ask, ‘What growth are you adding?’, it turns out they are not adding much at all.”

Ironic isn’t it? The tortured, decades-long debate over public versus private schooling has missed the point. As Hattie says, “The talk in Australia is always about variability across schools, when we know that the real issue is the variability among teachers. We go on and on about giving parents the right to choice of schooling. But when it comes to what matters, parents have no rights when it comes to choice of teachers. We’ve created a false debate.”

In schools that apply Hattie’s methods, resourcing is directed towards having the entire teaching faculty performing to the standards of the most effective teachers. The hand-on-the-hip atti­tude of “I’ve been teaching this way for 20 years and it’s worked for me” is replaced by a set of procedures designed to achieve collective impact and to boost individual student growth. Clearly, there’s a lack of this across the system. So how do we replicate more of what works?

“The single biggest issue facing educators in this country is the need for a common perception of what progress looks like,” says Hattie. “That requires great leaders to have that conversation. To make sure teachers bring examples of student work to the staff­room and debate it. To consider the magnitude of change, and what growth looks like. I don’t think it’s fair that every time a student gets a new teacher, that it’s more or less random as to whether they’ll continue improving.

“Expert teachers understand the Goldilocks principle of challenge: that if you set the challenge too high, then you won’t go there, but if it is set too low, then what’s the point? Interestingly, computer games work like this. They give you lots of opportunities, they pile on the feedback, and if you are anything like me, you spend hours practising how to get there. And when you do, they raise the bar again.”

Hattie points to video games and his other recreational love, coaching cricket, as activities that promote specific feedback and that reward hours, if not years, of work. The father of four boys who were schooled across different systems in different countries, he says, “If my boys had been taught one thing, that effort matters, I would have been very happy. I didn’t learn this myself until I got to university. We still have a tendency to say that if you do well, it’s because you’re talented, whereas in places like China and Hong Kong they don’t do that. They don’t even have that kind of language. They say, ‘You succeeded because of the effort you put in.’ It’s why I talk about the need for deliberate practice. You need teachers who will give students precise feedback so that they know where to go next. The schools that do this are about far more than grades and marks. They are places where errors and mistakes are welcomed because that’s how you learn. Unless we encourage this, we will have a lot of passive kids doing the minimum. And we should keep in mind that the kids who knuckle down and get the right answers don’t always succeed in life.”

After the publishing success of Visible Learning and a prominent role as a policy adviser to the New Zealand government, Hattie wrestled with a question that, to him, seemed entirely obvious: How is it that good ideas in education don’t grow? Where was the upscaling, he asked himself. Part of the answer, he concluded, lies in the way teaching is still organised: “It’s a strange profession because it’s the only one where the kids come to school to watch us work.”

Inverting that notion and turning schools into places that put the work of students at their centre is not just a mental exercise for Hattie. Taking a cue from the corporate world, Hattie owns the intellectual copyright for the Visible Learning model of high-impact teaching, and this approach has now been adopted by 6000 schools in New Zealand, Europe and Australia. According to Hattie, this has produced “some stunning schools” where, in part, the measurement of success is what the students say themselves.

“The big difference you see in these places,” says Hattie, “is that the kids speak the language. They talk about impact. They ask, ‘How do I know this work is good enough? Show me the curriculum so that I can see where I am and where I need to go.’ We’ve got schools where six-year-olds do this. Which is why my mantra to my training team is always that I don’t care whether teachers are satisfied with the professional development. What I care about is the impact on the students.”

Coming from anyone else, this could get a lot of backs up. But it’s a measure of the man that Hattie has far more disciples than detractors. I’ve watched him in seminars with groups of educators and he’s constantly urging them to share their data and encouraging networks of co-operative learning: “Look at what’s happening here in Year 4 writing. They’ve achieved a big lift. How did they do it? Talk to other schools about it”, and so on.

Hattie’s latest research challenge involves working with colleagues on a project known as the Science of Learning. Through a partnership that brings together ACER, the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland, and MGSE, the $16 million study will consider the barriers that prevent students from reaching their potential. It reconnects Hattie with his core discipline of measurement: “We’ve got oodles of tests for achievement but I want to measure learning. We know it’s hard work for a lot of kids. And that’s it’s not just a question of doing more — more maths or more writing. It’s really about how you go about processing and extending various ideas — how you move kids from surface to deep knowledge.”

Hattie’s concern is that too many of our children are stalled in their learning. Showing them how to develop their thinking, as well as their potential for discovery, has big implications for our future as an innovative society. In his own work, he has often drawn on the ideas of Arthur Koestler, who in The Act of Creation developed a theory of human creativity: “Koestler’s point is that creativity happens when you bring together two seemingly unrelated ideas. That has stuck with me for my whole career. And of course, it’s obvious. Every great breakthrough in the world has happened this way.”

As Koestler outlined, creativity happens when you quit the automatic rational habits of theorising and brainstorming. As critical as it was as an evidence base,

Hattie remembers his breakthrough moment being when he “threw away the database” and came up with the idea of “know thy impact”. Those three words explained exactly what he had been analysing for 20 years. “It may sound trivial or trite but bringing the story to that level is what I am very proud of.”

This is an edited extract from Class Act — Ending the Education Wars by Maxine McKew, to be published by MUP in September ($19.99). Copies may be pre-ordered at www.mup.com.au.