Hattie’s (2009) comprehensive study of what most impacts student learning finds that education’s powerful leverage points hinge on features within the school, rather than outside factors like home, environmental, and economic conditions.
Teaching is also our job—the business of our career, the goal of our professional training, the criteria of our credentialing and evaluation process, the fundamental work of any school, and the very reason why most campus professionals are hired. While an unprecedented number of societal responsibilities are being thrust on educators today, one fact is undeniable: it is their responsibility to teach students the academic knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to succeed as adults.
Fortunately, teaching also represents the area over which educators have the greatest level of direct control. While schools must work within federal, state, and local regulations and contractual agreements, many teachers have significant autonomy every school day to determine the scope and sequence of their daily lesson plans, instructional practices, assessment decisions, and classroom procedures. The law considers teachers in loco parentis—in place of a parent—in the classroom. In most educational decisions, teachers have much greater authority than parents. Considering that the average student will spend seven years in elementary school, educators have both an incredible opportunity and an awesome responsibility to directly impact a student’s success in school and beyond.
Without question, more students will succeed in school if educators successfully fulfill their fundamental purpose. But how can we ensure that every student receives effective teaching every day? In this chapter, we examine how many of the state and national reform efforts have proven to be counterproductive to this goal.
Reviewing Past Efforts to Improve Core Instruction
The idea that better teaching improves student achievement is not new to education. Since the adoption of No Child Left Behind in 2001, myriad school-reform mandates have launched to improve teaching. Unfortunately, most efforts were doomed to fail because they advocated low-leverage practices—practices that have a limited impact on actual student learning.
To determine if a teaching practice has a high- or low-leverage effect on student learning, we look at the effect size, or a standardized measure of the strength of an intervention. Effect sizes above 0.40 are good, and the higher the better (Hattie, 2009). We recommend using a baseline of 0.40 standard deviation growth in student learning within a school year (Hattie, 2009). In his research, Hattie (2009) finds that the average student’s academic achievement will increase yearly by 0.10 standard deviations with no instruction at all, merely as a result of the student’s life experiences throughout the year. Hattie also finds that if that average student is randomly assigned a teacher for a particular grade or course, and if the teacher possesses an average level of teaching competence, the student’s academic achievement will increase by 0.30 standard deviations. Combine the two factors, and the average student will improve in learning by 0.40 deviations per year, simply by living a year and regularly attending the average school.
Hattie’s (2009) point is that if a school can achieve an average rate of 0.40 standard deviations in learning growth for students by doing nothing exceptional, it must specifically seek out practices proven to have a higher impact rate in order to intentionally improve student learning. Using this typical effect rate as our scale to judge good teaching, let’s assess the most prevalent efforts to improve teaching practices and educational outcomes.
Teacher training programs: Since the 1980s, there has been a significant increase in the collegiate coursework requirements necessary to earn a preliminary teaching credential. Beyond a subject-area degree, methods coursework, and practicum hours, most states require potential teachers to take additional classes in English language development, technology, cultural awareness, and techniques for teaching reading. Unfortunately, while teacher-preparation requirements have increased, student achievement has not. Hattie (2009) finds, in fact, that teacher-training programs have a low-leverage impact rate of 0.11 standard deviations in the annual growth of student learning—significantly lower than the 0.40 baseline of highly effective teaching strategies.
Step-and-column pay scales: Most school districts structure their teacher-compensation scale to encourage continuing education and advanced experience. Often referred to as step and column, this compensation scale offers teachers higher salaries for earning continuing-education credits and postgraduate degrees, as well as for completing more years of service under the premise that greater content knowledge and teaching experience will improve teacher effectiveness. In reality, these practices produce only minimal gains in student achievement—Hattie (2009) finds that postgraduate degrees, for example, have an impact rate of 0.09. Likewise, studies that have correlated years of experience and teacher effectiveness find that teachers show the greatest productivity gains during their first few years on the job, after which their performance tends to level off (Rice, 2010). While we are not suggesting that promoting continuing education and rewarding teacher experience are nonbeneficial, it is unlikely that these practices will significantly and sustainably improve core instruction.
Ability grouping: In the name of differentiation—in other words, in the attempt to adapt the core instructional program to meet the varying demands of individual student needs—some schools have stratified core instruction by grouping students according to their perceived ability. This practice, known as ability grouping, is justified with phrases such as, “We are differentiating by teaching students at their level.” In reality, ability grouping doesn’t represent instructional differentiation; instead, it is nothing more than student tracking, a practice that has been proven controversial among educators. Hattie (2009) finds that ability grouping, or tracking, has minimal effects on student learning (producing just a 0.12 standard deviation) and, at the same time, can have profoundly negative effects on equity, as the students perceived to have the lowest ability are most often minorities, English learners, and students from poverty.
Flexible grouping: Another common differentiation strategy involves the use of in-classroom flexible groupings to meet individual student needs. In this strategy, instead of grouping students by perceived ability, teachers flexibly group students within the classroom by skill. Commonly, these groups rotate through both self-guided stations and direct instruction with the teacher. Many teachers, claiming they know their students best and are in the best position to meet each student’s learning needs, advocate this strategy. Hattie’s (2009) meta-analysis of this practice determines an effectiveness impact of 0.18, which is hardly better than the deviation in learning improvements achieved through ability grouping (0.12)—or simply through living. (We describe using flexible grouping effectively in chapter 2, page 46.)
Class-size reduction: During the first decade of the 21st century, many states funded class-size reduction programs to improve classroom teaching. Proponents argued that reducing class size leads to more individualized instruction, more student-centered learning, increased teacher morale, fewer student misbehaviors, and higher student engagement—all factors that should improve classroom instruction (Hattie, 2009). However, Hattie’s meta-analysis of fourteen major studies on the impact of lowering class size identifies an overall impact rate of 0.21; therefore, lowering class size did not significantly impact student learning. Thus, the size of the class size itself is not as important as the quality of the instruction that takes place in it.
![Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary] - Gayle Gregory](/cover_679455.jpg "Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary] - Gayle Gregory")
Hattie’s (2009) comprehensive study of what most impacts student learning finds that education’s powerful leverage points hinge on features within the school, rather than outside factors like home, environmental, and economic conditions.
