Strategies that were a surprise from John Hattie's research on "Teaching and Learning Strategies"

Within the School Effect rankings I noticed an interesting ranking of classroom controlled effects vs. out of classroom effects.  An element that has been a struggle in my building recently is how the principal is expected to manage, control and direct classroom behavior throughout the whole building and in every classroom.  I found the rankings interesting that the school leader and/or principal ranks lower than overall effect of classroom behavior and classroom management, which is a control of the teacher in the classroom.  The numerous guests throughout the last few months, to the Teacher Leadership Academy, have indicated that everyone in the building needs to take ownership for all the students in the building and be part of the development of all the skills.  The behavior cannot just be one person’s initiative, everyone has to agree and enforce the expectations in all areas, at all times.

Another area I found to be interesting within the Teaching and Learning ranking was how low inquiry based teaching was on the list, but questioning (which is a large element of inquiry) was so much higher on the list.  It would be interested to explore the definition and explanation of Hattie’s idea of inquiry based teaching in comparison to the work recently published by Harvey and Daniels in Comprehension and Collaboration.  Our school completed a book study on this book and the research throughout the book indicated how beneficial inquiry is to engage students and to expand their prior knowledge. 

The research findings would be interesting to give to our staff and have them rank the building on what they believe is the effective means toward student achievement.  Then compare the rankings to Hattie’s list and see where we have discrepancies in our understanding, then plan our yearly PD in reference to what has proven to be effective teaching and learning strategies that improve student achievement.