Interview Notes, Resources, & Links
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About Dr. John Hattie
John Hattie is the researcher and author behind the enormously influential Visible Learning series, including his synthesis of more than 800 meta-analysis studies related to achievement. Dr. Hattie is Professor, Deputy Dean, and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is Chair of the Board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and Associate Director of the ARC-Science of Learning Research Centre.
[expand title="Show Transcript"] Announcer:  [00:01] Welcome to "Principal Center Radio," bringing you the best in professional practice. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and champion of high‑performance instructional leadership, Justin Baeder.

Justin Baeder:  [00:12] Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. John Hattie. Dr. Hattie is the researcher and author behind the enormously influential "Visible Learning" series, including his synthesis of more than 800 meta‑analysis studies related to achievement.

[00:31] Dr. Hattie is also professor, deputy dean, and director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is chair of the board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and associate director of the ARC Science of Learning Research Center.

[00:48] Most of our Principal Center Radio listeners know Dr. Hattie primarily as a researcher and author. We're here today to talk about his new book, "10 Mindframes for Visible Learning ‑‑ Teaching for Success."

Announcer:  [01:00] And now, our feature presentation.

Justin:  [01:03] Dr. Hattie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

John Hattie:  [01:05] It's great to be here talking to you, Justin, and to the listeners.

Justin:  [01:09] Thanks so much. Let's talk first about what you saw happening in the profession, perhaps in reaction to some of your previous work. How did you arrive at the conclusion that teachers' mindframes are so important? What was it that led up to this particular book?

John:  [01:25] Since I started on the whole visible learning notion, which actually I started in your old state, Washington, way back in the early 1990s, was trying to answer the question about how everything in our business seems to work. How come every teacher says they're above average and every school has evidence that they're doing a good job? Yet from the perspective of a student, that doesn't always make sense.

[01:48] What I've tried to do is change the conversation from what works ‑‑ because almost everything works ‑‑ to what works best. As I've done in the book, trying to take the many, many thousands ‑‑ tens of thousands ‑‑ of research articles that are done in everyday classrooms and trying to answer the question about what does work best.

[02:07] In the early books, I was grappling with 150, now 250 different influences. I published the book and I take the responsibility here. Sometimes that lead table, that list of factors, gets in the way of the story. It took me 20 years to write that first book to understand what that story is.

[02:26] What this current book is about is it concentrates entirely on that story. What it turns out is it's not really what teachers do. We could have two teachers, Justin, using exactly the same strategy and one of them implements it well. One of them has got good diagnosis and [inaudible] for their class. One of them modifies it on the fly, and one of them doesn't.

[02:51] It's not the strategy. It's their thinking in the moment‑to‑moment, day‑by‑day process that teachers use. It really was not so much what they did. It wasn't really who they are in terms of whether what kind of training they have, how many years' experience, whether in Arkansas, whether in Washington, whether in Melbourne. What matters is how the