Creating visible learners

Went to the most amazing PD session on Monday Session Notes. Out of the three I attended during the day it was the most useful and gave me a lot of reassurance that what I am trying to do with my class is supported by evidence and research. As a scientist that is really important to me and I respect the work of John Hattie so much. The man is a genius and a wonderful statistician and his looking into effect size is brilliant and so very useful.

Anyway the PD session was primary focussed on the creation of visible learners. What it looks like in a classroom, how we as teachers can achieve it and what it means for the students. I took a lot of encouragement about the small things I am doing in my classroom and it also was a good reminder of things that I should be doing like constantly referring the students back to the LO of the lesson and also how it fits in to the topic and referring to the I can do sheets a lot more so the students can keep track of and monitor their own progress.  One of the biggest ideas I got was for the students to become visual learners they need to be shown how to be visual learner and that initially I really need to plan it into my lessons so it become habit for both of and by doing this hopefully the students will become very comfortable with there own learning and be able to take real responsibility for it.  This I believe will be beneficial to all the years I teach.

Another really important take home message was reflecting on the learning not only in the one lesson but over a series of lesson and over whole topics. This idea is not new to me, I just don't know the types of questions that I should be asking and the type of survey I should set up. Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated.  Reflection is a very powerful tool that I personally use, I am my own worst critique so for me self reflection needs to be undertaken very carefully as I have a tendency to see the worst in my own teaching. This often leaves me digging very large pits of despair that can take other people a while to remove me from, I am getting better, baby steps like everything in my teaching, the more I do the more I learn better ways of doing and appropriating situations.

One the methods suggest was to have students self reporting the grades they expect/want to get in a topic test. I have been doing this for most of this year with my year 10's and the students are very in tune with there own learning and what they know and don't know. I am hoping to use this as a platform to start slowly introducing some of the other ideas and methods that I learnt from this session as the effect sizes are very good and I am very interested in to measuring my own effect size on topic and on students. To do this mean extra work for me, but I think it will be worth it especially if what what I am doing is successful but also it will show me approached that aren't' working with a specific class which is important knowledge about how I am teaching a class.

The biggest take home message I got from the session is that the students need to be taught how to take responsibility for their own learning and their own success and to do this they will need help, encouragement and guidance from their teachers and most importantly it needs to be very positive and safe for everyone involved.  The skills that the students will learn from this type of classroom learning will bee invaluable and will stay with them forever.