On the orthodoxy of Hattie
and other neat magic tricks
When I was an undergraduate, I remember happening across a copy of Hattie’s Visible Learning. I remember wondering why our university lecturers hadn’t shared this book with us. It held all the answers to teaching and learning and it did something very seductive in that it gave a number and a rank to almost every conceivable teaching strategy. I remember thinking I had the edge. I am prone to hyperbole, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I felt like the cleverest person on campus for having discovered the existence of meta-analysis. I do reflect now about how naive I was and note that I was almost 40 years old. Evidence-based practice was new to me and though I’m an English teacher, I have a rational mind and I do love a measurement. All I would need to do was figure out what collective teacher efficacy and self-reported grades were, and learn how to estimate student achievement. I would be fine.
Fast forward to 2022 and I am still an advocate of evidence-based practice. I don’t have an ideological objection to PISA, TIMMS, even NAPLAN. But I’ve started a Master of Educational Leadership and the veil is lifting. Not to sound like a zealot, but I’m slowly (maybe glacially) moving away from dichotomous thinking. What if it’s not about whether we are evidence based or constructivist but a third, and more important question: why, and who wins? Ok that was two questions. I’ll start with the macro view and work my way to Hattie, so if Visible Learning was clickbait and this is all a bit tl;dr you’ll have to scroll down!
Mike Bottery1 wrote something in 2001 that recently grabbed me. He talks about the purpose of education and the expectation in schools that teachers share a kind of top-down vision. A shared purpose is key to convincing teachers to do ‘more,’ but what if that ‘more’ feels hollow and remote? He quotes the then Secretary of State for Education in England, David Blunkett, who said:
Learning is the key to prosperity—for each of us as individuals, as well as for the nation as a whole. Investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge-based global economy of the twenty first century. This is why the Government has put learning at the heart of its ambition.
If that feels a little pentecostal and neo-liberal then you’re probably right. Stir this up with the fetishisation of intelligence and a lack of effective social safety nets and you can start to see some of the problems with this vision.
Scott Eacott and Richard Niesche2 at UNSW talk about the neat trick that instructional packages like Hattie’s are able to pull. Programs like Visible Learning or Quality Teaching Rounds repackage and value-add best teaching practice and sell them back to teachers as solutions to bigger issues like educational inequality. In some ways, Hattie is right to decouple home influences and inequality - elements we as teachers can’t control - from teaching and learning, which we ostensibly can. As the authors ask, who could possibly disagree that effective instruction is a bad idea? But they point out that the models offered become circular - the means become the end and our success is measured in our performance of the script, with little reference to context. More insidious than this, however, is the idea that once socio-economic status is magically separated from schooling, teachers hold the key to redressing educational inequality. If we don’t close the achievement gap, even as teachers have been handed the formula made ‘visible’ by academics like Hattie, then policy-makers know exactly where to lay the blame.
I’ve written before about Sally Larsen’s research showing that schools make little difference to NAPLAN results. I don’t object to the existence of NAPLAN but I do question whether it’s become so politicised that it’s become what is now known in education as a lethal mutation. Her research showing that once we ‘control’ for SES (another neat semantic trick), schools don’t make much difference is a finding that can be sliced so many different ways, depending on one’s agenda. The immediate response from many was to argue for less funding for non-government schools, but the antithetical argument that public schools aren’t making much difference either was largely ignored. And ‘controlling’ for SES doesn’t change raw data: certain schools are still producing less literate and numerate students than others. The idea of controlling for SES is a useful one and Sally’s own comments were politically neutral, but NAPLAN is another demonstration of how orthodoxy and manipulation of data can be presented as solutions to issues that policy-makers have hand-balled to schools.
Who is really in a position to disagree with a list of effective teaching practices tested on success with (literally?) millions of students? It seems that if only we perform the behaviours, everything will be ok. And if we don’t then, well, it won’t. And if it all goes really badly, remember we are “controlling” for everything else. Magic.
Mike Bottery (2001) Globalisation and the UK Competition State: No room for transformational leadership in education?, School Leadership & Management, 21:2, 199-218, DOI: 10.1080/13632430120054772
Eacott S; Niesche R, 2021, 'Educational and instructional leadership', in Understanding Educational Leadership: Critical Perspectives and Approaches, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 221 - 236, https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/understanding-educational-leadership-9781350081833/