Hattie & His High Impact Strategies for Teachers

Note, this article refers to John Hattie’s 2009 book, Visible Learning. You can find an updated summary of his findings here.

John Hattie synthesized over 500,000+ studies related to student achievement in his book Visible Learning. In this book he showed that teachers can make a difference despite other circumstances that may impede learning.

In fact, Hattie found that most teachers have some degree of impact on their students’ learning. However, some teachers have far more impact than others.

According to Hattie: What Should Teachers Do?

John Hattie discovered that teachers are far more likely to have a large and positive impact if they:

• Are passionate about helping their students learn
• Forge strong relationships with their students
• Are clear about what they want their students to learn
• Adopt evidence-based teaching strategies
• Monitor their impact on students’ learning, and adjust their approaches accordingly
• Actively seek to improve their own teaching
• Are viewed by the students as being credible (Hattie 2016 Update)

Hattie & His Top 10 Teaching Strategies

According to John Hattie, high-impact, evidence-based teaching strategies include:

• Direct Instruction
• Note Taking & Other Study Skills
• Spaced Practice
• Feedback
• Teaching Metacognitive Skills
• Teaching Problem Solving Skills
• Reciprocal Teaching
• Mastery Learning
• Concept Mapping
• Worked Examples

Hattie Found Curriculum Matters Too

John Hattie found that what you teach matters too.

Specifically, students achieve better results when they are taught:

• Core and subject-specific vocabulary
• Phonics and phonemic awareness
• Comprehension skills

Other programs that have a significant, positive impact on student performance include:

• Creativity Programs
• Repeated Reading Programs
• Visual Perception Programs

Be Aware of Subtle Details In the Evidence

The above findings are clear cut. However, much of John Hattie’s work needs careful reading to appreciate the subtle nuances of his findings. For example, Hattie found that homework has a marginal impact. This true when you average out different studies. Yet, a careful reading of the underlying research shows that homework has virtually no impact on young students, and quite a lot of impact in senior secondary school. Furthermore, other research (found in a different section of Hattie’s book), shows that study tasks help students do better at school, which suggests the nature of homework may play a role. Also, Hattie found that:

• Ability grouping was not particularly helpful and that mixed ability groups were better. However, he also found that within-class ability groups in reading outperform mixed ability groups.
• Piagetian programs had a large impact on student results, where the underlying research actually showed that it was students’ Piagetian levels that correlated with achievement. Students operating at higher Piagetian levels were much more likely to achieve better marks than peers operating at lower Piagetian levels.
• That problem-based learning was less effective than alternative approaches, but that teaching students problem-solving strategies had a large impact on their subsequent results.

John Hattie’s Work

John Hattie’s work is one of the most (if not the most) significant educational projects undertaken to date. Yet, it is important not to over-simplify his findings. Many of the articles on this site unpack the subtle nuances behind the research he reviewed, and it is worth reading his book Visible Learning in its entirety.