Edited Podcast Transcript:
ResponsAbility
Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies
By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
#8 John Hattie | Visible Learning and Intentional Alignment – purposes and problems
Transcript
Michael N. W.:
Welcome to the ResponsAbility Podcast, as always with Guro Hansen Helskog as the co-host.
Guro H. H.:
and Michael Noah Weiss as the host!
Michael N. W.:
Today we have one of the world's best known and most widely read education experts with us, John Hattie. Welcome, John! It's a pleasure to have you here.
John Hattie:
Thanks for having me, Michael and Guro! Great to be here.
Michael N. W.
Thank you very much. John. You are Emeritus Laureate Professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Within the broad field of education, you became internationally known with your so-called Visible Learning approach, which is a synthesis of more than 2500 meta-studies covering more than 300 million students. That's really a lot. And the foundation of the visible learning approach are 15 years of research on “what works best” for learning in schools. We wonder: What is the visible learning approach actually about? How would you describe visible learning in a nutshell?
00:01:16 John H.:
Well, there are two halves to the issue. The first half is the research side, and all I've done is I have used meta-analysis, which is a fancy way of statistically summarising many thousands of studies to try and address some of the key issues in education. But I also want to change the question a bit. “What works” has been around for a long time, and I discovered that almost everything works. Hense, it is the wrong question. The right question is “what works best”. In education we love to look at failure and we're very good at doing that and fixing it, but we're not very good at looking at success and scarring it up, and no surprise, we have an incredible amount of success in our schools around the globe. You'd never discover it from a lot of the discussions and vocabulary even in discussions by the profession itself. The way of implementing it (the visible learning approach), which is the second half of the question, is very simple: We ask: Do you have the courage to really identify those schools, those teachers, that are having an above average effect on their students, where all the students can gain at least a year's worth for a year's input? To form a coalition of success around those and then invite the others to join them. And I have to say, the biggest problem in education is the lack of courage. It is so much easier to be distracted by the things that don't matter as much, and to ignore what truly is the most remarkable thing that we've invented in our history, namely incredibly excellent teachers.
00:02:59 Guro H. H.:
One of the central maxims in your visible learning approach is “know thy impact”. What do you mean by that?
John H.:
When I started all this with the first book in 2008. I have a listing of all the different influences, and it was misinterpreted, which I take responsibility for. People were saying “I'm going to do the things at the top of the list. I'm not going to do the things at the bottom of the list”. And it became very mechanistic, and I thought, No wait a moment. Some of the things at the bottom should worry the heck out of us and we should fix them”. And just doing the things at the top kind of misses what I've been trying to argue, which is that it's not what we do that matters. It's how we think about what we do that matters. And so about four or five years later, we ditched the rankings, never to be used again. And we introduced this notion of “know thy impact”. I speak in terms of probabilities. If you do these things, you have high probability of impact. Then if you, Guro, introduce them into your class and your school, what matters then is your implementation, your judgments and the moment by moment decisions you make about your impact on your students. It also begs the question, what do we mean by impact? Some of the critics say I over focus on achievement, and I do, and I make no apology for that. But I want to be the first to say thank you for asking me the question, and the first to say there are many other things in schools that are as critical, if not more critical, than achievement. But the Economist have long shown that the best predictor of adult health, wealth and happiness is not achievement. It is the number of years of schooling, so to what degree is your school an inviting place that kids feel like they belong and want to come and learn? If you don't worry about that, you are not going to worry about achievement. I also look at the number of kids who come to school for other than achievement. Some of my own boys went to school because of sport. If that is what gets them to school, I'll take them. And then there is that whole European philosophy of Education, which is not very strong in English, of Bildung and character formation. And as I remind my colleagues in the US about at the moment: Every person who voted in the recent election for the candidate they didn't like was a graduate of their education system. Maybe we've overemphasized achievement and forgotten about Bildung and citizenship. That's why I' have gone to know thy impact, because it begged that question. What we meant by impact, it begged the question that we're not just plucking things out and saying we're going to do A, B and C. Yes, I want people to do that, but I want them to do it with fidelity. I want them to do it so that it actually has an impact on students. I kind of like Socrates argument Know thyself.
00:05:55 Guro H. H.:
Yes, and actually, you yourself had very much impact with your work having literally shaped much of political and pedagogical debates about educational practice in schools across the Western world the last 15 years. Did you expect to have such impact when you first started your work?
John H.:
What happened in the previous line and in my whole career as an academic did not have anything to do with visible learning. As a psychometrician, I do tests and research design statistics. I started doing this back in the 1970s when meta-analysis was first introduced, to get an understanding what that method was. It was like an epiphany moment I had in the 1980s where I thought maybe I can use meta-analysis to ask the relativity question of what works best, and it worked. So, when I went to New Zealand in 1999, I thought, ah, I'm not going to talk about it anymore. I am going back to my measurement world, but I will spend some time just writing up the research and getting it out of my system. Well, it didn't work that way. It took over.
00:07:01 Michael N. W.:
In that respect: While politicians and practitioners embraced visible learning, there were several scholars who criticised it. What was their critique about? I also have to mention that what I like with you and your books is that you are always open for critique, and you take this critique seriously and you respond to it. But how do you understand the main critique of the visible learning approach?
John H.:
One of my gurus is Karl Popper. Do you know Karl Popper, a famous philosopher of science?
Michael N. W.:
Of course.
John H.:
He was also my teacher, and one of his fundamental arguments was that science progresses by looking for evidence where you might be wrong. That has driven me through my whole career and so I think I am in the most luxurious place any academic could ever be. I have the world's best critics, and I mean that incredibly positively. It doesn't mean to say I agree with them all, but I do learn. If you look at Chapter 2 in The New Sequel, I spent a lot of time talking about the criticisms, both the one`s I've accepted and the ones that I am perhaps resistant to. I pay no attention to people who critique me as a person. I'm amazed how much people know about me, who've never met me, but I ignore all that. The best criticism I ever got of visible learning was from one of my very close, dear friends, a sociologist in Auckland, Alison Jones. She came up to me after a session once and said that “I am so impressed that you know what happens in classrooms to the 2nd decimal point”. And it is a very good criticism! It is the one that has driven me to try and do a meta synthesis of classroom observation studies as well, working with my wife to develop an app that automatically codes classroom observation, to try and see what's happening in the classroom as well. I also think it's quite remarkable that across all the thousands and thousands of studies out there, there's virtually nothing about the quality of lesson plans, which is what every teacher worries about every day. There are huge gaps on what is happening in that classroom. I've been driven by many critics, including Steen Nepper Larsen, who was on your show recently, to look at the why. And as you've probably noticed, we've spent a lot of time looking at how teachers think. I'm still doing a lot of work to try and understand how teachers think, to get away from that mechanistic notion which many have accused me of. Maybe I take some blame here - that it looks like you only have to do these things and everything's Hunkydory and Rosie. That is a very good criticism I take to heart. Let me put my challenge out. It took me 50 years, 60 years, to collect all that data. It was really squirrel-behaviour. I put it all out on the internet for free. And my challenge is - please someone take it and come up with a better story. Like for instance, a few weeks ago I put all the data into ChatGPT and said tell me what the discriminations between influences above and below the average, and I came up with pretty much similar answers to the ones I've come up with, but it did give me some new insights and I hope others will look at that. I hope one day soon someone will come up with a better explanation of the data and I will be the first to congratulate them. That's how science progresses.
00:10:23 Michael N. W.:
In that respect, in one of your recent books, The Sequel, you write the message is in the patterns, not in the details. Hence, it is the interpretation of the evidence, not the evidence itself, and the building of a story, that matters. With building a story and interpreting evidence, we are arriving at hermeneutics, the art of interpretation. Because a story always needs interpretation in order to make sense. So my question is, does this mean that it would also be possible to come up with a completely different interpretation, or a completely different story based in the data that you used?
00:11:04 John H.:
Oh, totally. I look forward to people doing that. Like I go back to my measurement background. We collect data, but what matters is how each of us interpret that data. I am quite proud that I had 221 thesis students successfully trough, and in every meeting with them I started with the same question: What is the story today? It is all about the story. And yes, of course. There are competing stories. Does anyone think that the story I came up with was a singular homogeneous story? It is not. It has got massive conditionals to it. It is not the usual ones, where teachers argue their class is different, therefore it is not going to apply here, but there are conditions upon which it makes a difference in terms of what happens. Yes, I think someone else can come up with a different story. And I think that I am looking forward to the disruptor.
00:12:02 Guro H. H.:
Your work is mainly based on statistical measurements of large bodies of data on what works best in education, which cannot necessarily be transferred directly to individual teachers. However, it seems like this is what many people quite uncritically have been doing. And you already kind of touched upon it, but can you comment a little bit further on that?
John H.:
Are kids unique? Of course they are. Every different child is unique, and everybody who crosses the school gate is unique. That does not mean to say that what works best differs depending on the backgrounds of the kids that are in question. That is an empirical question, and quite frankly, I struggle to find those. It doesn't mean we shouldn't look for them, but I also, as we've talked about, emphasize know thy impact. If I do a teaching strategy with you, Guro, and it doesn't work, the last thing I should do is repeat that teaching strategy with you. It may work with Michael, it may not. That's the uniqueness. It is the teacher`s implementation, the decisions we make and the impact we have. But so often we want to focus on the student and label them. And the largest negative impact in the whole work is labelling kids. Like this absurd notion that we talk about kids with autism, as if all kids with autism are the same. They're as unique as all kids without autism. It is a matter of the teacher`s implementation. So, I questioned that notion, and I do know that people say, “oh yeah, but it's not going to apply in my classroom”. Well, I'm sorry, we work with 10,000 schools a year, and our visible learning program does work. But what is it that we do? Understanding how the teachers think, understanding how they make evaluative judgments, understanding where they go to next. A lot of the evidence isn't just in my corpus of research, it's their evidence from the test scores, from the assignments, from the artifacts of kids, in the the kids voice about their learning, about the teacher judgments. It's the interpretation of those that matter. So, I think that we have a lot to learn from this work. Not just my work, it's the work that many, many thousands have done. Why? I do think there is a science of teaching and learning. I do think that science is up for question, like all sciences, and I do think that we should stop asking what is the best technique to use, and ask what is the best technique to stop using. With these kids in this class, Karl Popper always wins.
00:14:37 Guro H. H.:
You have already mentioned the Socratic “know thyself”, and you also emphasize the role of the teacher. So where does self-knowledge and self-reflection come into the picture in the visible learning approach, especially then for the teacher, but maybe also for the students?
John H.:
One of the things Steen Nepper Larsen, and he said it in the podcast conversation with you as well, he wrote some critical articles, and he emailed me and said can he come out to Australia and talk with me and bring his bicycle and go bike riding? And then I reread his stuff. So yeah, he is a man who actually critiques ideas, so I welcomed him, and it turned out to be quite marvellous. To this day, we still disagree, but we disagree agreeably. And we've changed what we disagree and agree on, but one of the things that he really pushed me hard on, and I'm very grateful for it, was getting more to the question just asked, the why, the question of purpose, and the question of judgement. And I've since been looking a lot at what I call the mind frames, the ways of thinking of teachers, of parents, of students, of leaders of Assessment of Special Education, also delving down into this core notion of evaluative thinking, how teachers make value judgments in the moment by moment decisions. And this is getting more to what you're talking about, I think, more where I want to go, and that is not just those transactional things. It is not just the teaching programs. It is not the curriculum. Not the assessment. It is the ways of thinking, and that is what I have been trying to get to in the last five or ten years of my work. My parody is the first book I had data and created a story. The second book I had a story that I wanted to use to make sense of the data. So yes, my critics were right. I did need to spend more time on purpose and on the why.
00:16:38 Michael N. W.:
You already mentioned that one of the results of visible learning was that anything works, so you focused on what works best. And that reminds me of the so-called Dodo Bird Verdict, which was mentioned first in the 1930s by Saul Rosensweig- He investigated the question of what therapy approaches worked best, and he came to the conclusion that all therapy approaches work equally well. What matters, was the therapeut. That was also confirmed by some studies in the 1970s by Luborsky and Singer, and in 2002 by Wampold and his team. The reason why a therapy worked or not was not because of its techniques, but because of the relationship between the therapist and the patient and the attitude of the therapist. So, I was always wondering when I read about the visible learning approach - OK, if teacher-student relationships are bad, or if the attitude of the teacher is not inspired, then would it still work?
00:17:48 John H.:
I think it is kind of fascinating that when Gene Glass invented meta- analysis, the two studies he did it to illustrate this - the effect of class size and the effect of psychotherapy. And that was in 1975-76. And when you look back at the early meta- analysis, I think the biggest advances over the years is people moving from just doing a study to see what the effect is, to doing studies to try and explain what the effect was. Even so, there were still many meta-analyses that just reported almost summaries rather than explanations. And one of the things that I'm passionate about is just exactly what you're saying is the explanation. You put it down to relationships. I don't think it's that when you ask students about what they want from teachers. They want fairness more than relationships. They want predictability from their teacher more than relationships, and I remember my very best teacher. He was very strict. My goodness. But he worked so that every single one of us in his last year of high school mathematics class was going to succeed, and he never gave up on any of us. And we saw that dramatically. Oh my gosh, to say he had relationships would not be the case. Ironically, 50 years later, I'm still the friend of his. But that's another story. Firstly, it's fairness. Secondly. The reason? Think in psychotherapy and the reason in education is to ask. Why is that? What is it that we want from that relationship? Because I think that relationships in classrooms are means to an end. The end is, so Michael, in this class it is OK if you don't know. It's OK if you make an error. It's OK if you say to me “teacher, can you explain it again? And again?, and again?” Because we all need three to five opportunities to learn something. Most of us get one. And so, relationships are means to an end. Because I've been in classes, I've seen classes. I've got data from classes where it's incredibly good relationships, but no learning. And I watch kids, like one of the things we do now, because my current mission is to change the question from what is great teaching to what is great learning. Now, I am greedy, I want both, but I want to also have that notion when you ask students what a great learner is, they say it's a kid who comes to school well prepared, sits up straight and watches the teacher work. Compliance. Now, they are in classrooms where there is incredibly good relationships, but they haven't used those relationships. I looked at Russell Bishop's work where he's done thousands of schools where he's looked at relationships, particularly between minority students and majority classes where he has dramatically changed the relationships in that class, but no effect on learning. And he will be the first to say you need both. So, I go on with you a little bit there, Michael, but I don't think you've got to the end point. I do think relationships are important. Let me give you another example. AI and robots. I was in a class years ago and watched a robot teach a class of 8 year olds and it was incredibly impressive. Kids loved it, and at the end of it I was able to talk to them. What did you like about it? “The robot didn't know I was the naughty kid”. The robot didn't know I had ADHD“ “The robot didn't care that I asked it 10 times to explain things in 15 different ways”. Relationships sometimes get in the way of learning. Yes, we have to have teachers, and teachers need to be fair and predictable. But they do it for a reason. So, I want to stretch you there and say no, I don't think it is relationships. I think that's the same in psychotherapy. It's building relationships to learn in this classroom, it is OK to not know.
00:21:22 Guro H. H.:
Absolutely, and it is very interesting to listen to you. Visible learning is often associated with the so-called constructive alignment or the intentional alignment approach, especially in higher education which came after the Bologna process. In this model you have learning outcomes telling students what to do. You have learning activities, telling students how to do it. And then you see whether students did it properly or not, and in this context of intentional alignment, this means that students always have to follow the intentions given to them by. Hence, there is no real room left for truly critical thinking and authentic wondering about the world. Students are told what to do and how to do it and when. Another colleague of us from Denmark, Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, calls idea “eichmannisation of education”, referring to Hannah Ardent's understanding of Adolf Eichmann. Being present in his trial she claimed he was a normal man. A nice guy who did a very good job in an evil system. The problem was that he was not able to think, and then not to take the perspective of others. So, you yourself in your book with Steen Nepper Larsen, The purposes of education state that one of your worries about visible learning is that if you have wrong content, whatever that means, then the model will allow you to implement this wrong content. So, what is your stance regarding all this?
John H.:
Firstly, you're right that I did develop this model of intentional alignment, and my very good friend and colleague and fellow researcher John Biggs sort of came up with the model of constructive alignment many years ago. Now he's 89, still sharp as a pen, I. And I talked to him. Look, I don't want to call it constructive alignment, because constructivism has been usurped in education, misused, and is one of the most misunderstood words. I want to use the idea but change the term. So I did, and the way you've described it there, you're right. But one of the Issues with the model I'm promoting in The Sequel is that Intentional alignment means we have to be aware about the relationship between effective teaching and learning methods with the nature of the content. They interact. It's not as simple as saying direct instruction works. Content based learning works if the content is content fact and knowledge. Problem based learning works if it is problem-oriented, not content-oriented, and so often we as teachers choose a method and apply it as if it's the answer to everything, and we forget it's the methods for learning and the focus of the learning.
The other thing that I spent a lot of time on is that we need to teach our students the skills of to work alone and to work in groups. And that requires different kinds of skills. And one thing we know that kids dislike about classrooms, they hate group work. Most of them aren't taught the skills to do group work. Most of them go into a group work without having the content before they do the group work, and so that's where the intentional alignment comes in, trying to align all the bits. Not as you're portrayed success criteria “you have a method-we do a test”. I'm trying to get away from that old grammar of schooling, and I'm disappointed that that's the way it's seen. But then you come to the Eichmann question. A few years ago, I came across a really stunning article on what the author (Gert Biesta) called the Eichmann versus Rosa Parks Paradox. And it is a very convincing argument about which one made the biggest contribution to society - the one that was highly educated, or the one that was less educated, the one that had the moral purpose, or the one that did not, et cetera. And all education involves a moral purpose. It's a moral purpose why we teach this rather than that. It is a moral purpose which kids we accelerate and which kids we leave behind. They are all moral purpose questions, and so I would be horrified if somebody thought there was a banality of evil here of just scripting the whole thing, following the set of research line instructions, and certainly if you've seen my work over the last five or ten years getting closer and closer to understanding how teachers make those decisions. And I like the word evaluative thinking, because it puts the emphasis on value. What values are you making? And like one of the arguments we make in the sequel is that the primary responsibility of a principal and the first place you start, is the culture and climate of the classroom. Now that surprised a lot of people, because their thought was no. It's critical, and it comes back to the previous question, is the classroom and climate a place where kids feel invited to come to learn? Is it a place where they feel safe to make mistakes and learn? Is it a place where they develop the skills to work alone and to work with others? And all these are precursors? After climate and culture, there is: Do we teach kids to learn? And I now go back to Gert Biesta and others, they criticize me because I go on and on about learning. But I'm greedy. I see learning as a means to an end, not the end.
And like when we looked at, we had 20,000 hours of classroom observation work, and we asked how many times in that did a teacher think aloud or did the teacher ask a student to think aloud? In classes and places, we are learning. Most of us struggle with the language of learning. Kids are obsessed: Guro, how did you solve that? Michael, tell me what you did when you solved that. Unfortunately, as you tell me, you often miss out. It's not just a simple task of click. It's not learning. Learning is hard work. Leaning is a struggle. So, I look at that criticism and say it's a parody. Not what I'm talking about.
00:27:13 Michael N. W.:
Well, one of your critics is Gert Biesta. He has a couple of articles, for example “Why what works won't work” and also this article called “How does a competent teacher become a Good teacher?” What he is saying there in this in this article is basically, OK, you can go through teacher education, you learn and acquire certain competences, but that doesn't make you a good teacher. And I was wondering a bit about that thought or that idea. And what I've figured out working in teacher education myself, are there certain aspects, fundamental or essential aspects that certain students have to learn in order to become or develop towards being a good teacher? For example, for some students it is important to learn to set boundaries and limits, while for others it's important to become more flexible. And taking up this aspect, you can only do it in when the situation is right. You can't just stand in front of the class and tell them, okay, this is how you do when you set boundaries or limits. It won't work because even though they hear it, they know about it, but they don't know how to act upon it. They can only learn that when the situation is right, because then they can learn it in a more authentical, practical way, if you understand what I mean. And here for me the intentional alignment model doesn't work. It definitely works in several contexts, but here when it comes to these aspects, which is Important for being or becoming a good teacher, it won't work because you can't tell in a general way that this is the learning outcome. We are approaching it through these and those learning activities until we see whether you can do it by yourself. You see what I mean? So how can you integrate it? The question is actually: Can you integrate such fundamental aspects of becoming a good teacher into a curriculum?
John H.:
Well, firstly you keep talking about my intentional alignment model and you forget that it's not just that little part. It also starts with purpose. The moral purpose. And it has a context - a climate. So yes, if you just take the one part about the teaching methods, it is possible to ignore all those things, and you're right, it could lead to misleading things. And like you talk about teacher education, my gosh, that's a fascinating topic. Yeah, I've been a head of school 20 plus years, so I failed 20 years in teacher education except here in Melbourne we had a stunning teacher education program because the aim of it was to change how students think, not to give them a whole set of tools. Now they all come in and they want the toolbox. They want classroom management. They want the curriculum. I understand that. And we have them for three, four, five or six years and quite frankly, sometimes I had them for one hour. And I said to them in this one hour, I want to change how you think about what you do and it's exactly what you said. Boundaries. What are the boundaries? The boundaries are what you can and can't do, except I know also from my policy job here in Australia over the last nine years. And more than 50% of the teachers that get in trouble are teachers in the first eight years because of boundaries. And I don't know how many teacher education programs that teach the teachers about the boundaries. What you can do and what you can't do, how far to go. I don't think we have enough of them that teach them about how to think and make judgments.
In the program that we ran, none of the assignments was the same. They had 15 minutes of our time either to mark, to read, to video, to play or whatever in front of us, and we asked 5 questions. It was the problem? Because one of the things that often doesn't happen in teacher education, is problem diagnosis. New teachers rush straight to interventions. I'm going to use this method. I'm going to use this resource. Well, that's step 2. What is the resource and does it relate to the problem? What was the implementation? And if you're going to tell me it'll work perfectly, you ain't a teacher. It does not work that way. First is what are you gonna do in light of that for the next class and that whole way of thinking of value to thinking dominated every single assignment on every subject? Because we wanted to get away from trying to letting our teachers believe that a good teacher was one that had systems, rules, management. They are precursors. They aren't the answer. I think it can be done. I know it can be done. So yes, I'm with you that we need to think. And teacher education that it's more than a bag of tricks we can't like one of the rules we have in our team that works with me. No one is ever allowed to talk about an anecdote from their own class. Because that legitimizes the wall story method of teacher. You can't use tips and tricks because all you're doing is adding to a current way of thinking. And it's probably no surprise that the majority of teachers leave teacher education and teach like the best teacher they ever had. It's no surprise that the effect size of initial teacher education is It's no surprise that teachers learn half as much. Which? First year and half as much in their second year and after that. And I put it to you, a teacher educator, Michael, if you're a teacher in the 1st two years. There's no professional journal, there's no conferences for you. You are on your own. That's the problem. You may do a great job, but we throw them in the swimming pool, and we hope like hang.
00:32:48 Guro H. H.:
Well, you're talking about teaching the students to think differently, and that's really connected to the name of our podcast, which is a ResponsAbility. And this term refers back to practical knowledge and wisdom in terms of Phronesis from Aristotle, which is often translated as prudence. And in short, Aristotle sees Phronesis as the ability to do the right thing in the right way, at the right time, towards the right people, with just the right amount of power. And this is also connected to the European concept of Bildung, which is the term Steen Nepper Larsen, your co-author in The Purposes of Education is very fond of. He calls himself Mr. Bildung. So, the question is really: Bildung and Phronesis, are they always visible? And how can you connect visible learning to these concepts? Or these ways of being in the world?
John H.:
Oh, absolutely, they are ways of being in the world. Yes. I will never forget sitting outside Steen's house in Denmark with his wife and his son. We had a very long discussion about Bildung and we both thought that it only doesn't translate into English. We don't have it, and in the last 20 years we've been obsessed with maths and reading and we've forgotten with character. Forgotten about helping students deal effectively with their emotions. And we know that's really a critical thing that happens every day in the classroom. Listen to and enhancing their energy. Have you ever met a 5 year old who is absolutely full of energy? And these other parts of character. There is other parts of how we go about or work with building the child. I take the very strong lie that we're not building the child's future. The children are going to build their future. We have a chance to build their life when they're in front of us right now, and it's that encompassing of character education is critical. You got to seriously wonder about our current democracy, where we don't attend to the aspects of Bildung, and it's really fascinating that parallel to the changes in our democracy over the last 20 year`s time, our Western love of high math and reading scores has been obsessive.
I hate to tell you this, but a lot of kids don't go to school for math. They go for their friends. They go for sports. They go because they have to. And schools aren't inviting. We know from the Jenkins Curve that only 4 out of 10 of the kids who by the end of elementary school start a high school want to come to school to learn the stuff teachers teach them. That is awful. And so, this is where Bildung comes in, and this place of the human -in our case the student in the society in which they live in. And how we develop their character.
I have been absolutely convinced over the last 10 years that employers want graduates who can work in teams. Who can translate and communicate. I go into schools, and I don't see any of that being taught. I look at AI coming on and saying that the most critical thing we have to teach is quality control. In schools, kids think that's the teacher's job. What they have to learn from a very early age is quality control. We've spent the last 10 years learning why social media has been a bit of a disaster for a lot of kids because we never taught quality control. We just assumed it was going to happen.
So those other aspects of love and search for wisdom like wisdom, like wisdom transcends knowledge in my books and beauty transcends wisdom in my books. They are critical parts of being a child today. I've got 7 grandkids under the age of eight. I see it every day. I want that same joy that they have in learning - that same passion, that same emotion, as 8 year old in 18 year olds, in 28 year olds. In 78 year olds. Sometimes we take the passion out.
Like one of my pet hates is the concept autonomy, and I get it all the time. “I have the autonomy to teach as I want”. " have the autonomy to pick and choose from the visible learning stuff that I like”. “I have the autonomy to run my school as I want”, and notice “it's my school” and “my classroom” and “my children”, and “I have this autonomy”. Well, I'm sorry, you don't. I don't think airline pilots have the autonomy to fly the plane the way they want. Plumbers don't have autonomy to do drains the way they want. Doctors don't have autonomy. They'd be sued if they did things the way they wanted. Why is it that in education we go on about autonomy all the time?
I want to replace that term with the title of your podcast: ResponsAbility. Doctors, plumbers, medicals. Teachers have a responsibility to make a difference to the learning lives of kids. To form character. To add value to acquire them. Having a love of learning and that's the responsibility. And with that comes a lot of pressure and a lot of joy. And I don't think it's a matter of autonomy. So, if I had my way, I would ban the word autonomy, and I would replace it with the title of your podcast.
00:37:40 Michael N. W.:
Thank you very much for that. And in that respect, I just thought of Viktor Frankl, because this is how we came to the the notion ResponsAbility, and he has these thoughts on what responsability is, and he puts it into very simple terms. He says it's not about what we expect from life. It is about what life expects from us. So, in any situation that you stand, you can ask: What does life expect from me now? And in that respect, John, another question. When we're talking about ResponsAbility, how do you think can you integrate exactly this thought, this move from autonomy towards responsibility? Can you integrate that in classrooms, both for the teachers, but also for students?
John H.:
Well, I'm gonna put pressure back on your list this year, Michael and Guro, when I said this has been worrying me for a long time. I'm no expert in this. This is where Steen Nepper Larson and many of those who work in this area, I think they could make a dramatic contribution by having this discussion, and critiquing that concept of autonomy, which is such a dismissive term that I'm not going to do these things. You may say “this is what the evidence says, but I'm going to ignore the evidence”. You'd never get away with that in another profession. Why would we allow people to get away with it? We've got kids, lives at stakes, and we're going to do it on the basis of our opinions. That's scary, but it's not either or. I think the problem is that autonomy is the royal concept. And I would love someone to take this up. And please let me know, because. I'll be the first listener to your podcast if someone would talk about moving from autonomy to responsibility, and what that actually means. I'd welcome that.
00:39:20 Michael N. W.:
John, I think this is a good final statement. We are coming towards the end of the podcast. Thank you very much for your contribution, John. We would also like to thank our listeners and with that we can only say thank you and goodbye.
Literature:
Hattie, J. (2023): Visible Learning: The Sequel A Synthesis of Over 2,100 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hattie, J. & Larsen, S. N. (2020): The Purposes of Education. A Conversation Between John Hattie and Steen Nepper Larsen. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hattie, J. & Clarke, S. (2019): Visible Learning: Feedback. New York, NY: Routledge.