John Hattie: Collective Teacher Efficacy

If you haven’t heard of John Hattie in the educational world, let me blow your mind. John Hattie is a professor who found the data for what every teacher has always wondered, is this strategy actually working?

You’d be lying if you didn’t say that multiple times a week if not daily you have asked yourself, does this strategy actually work? John Hattie actually has data on 252 factors in a students life that can help or set them back in the classroom.

He calls it, Visible learning. And let me tell you, he couldn’t have come up with a better name because in my opinion, learning should be visible! The data should speak for itself and show us what we should do more of and what we could probably get rid of. His research is a roadmap and checklist for teachers to use and see where they should be focusing on. Just like with our curriculum, we can’t do it all so we need guidance of what is most important and what we could maybe sprinkle in because it really isn’t going to have a big effect on students learning outcomes.

What are they though? Well there’s a list of 252 so I am just going to show you the top 5 but feel free to see the rest here.

Found at Visible-learning.org

For the purpose of this post I am going to just talk about the top one: Collective teacher efficacy which is at 1,57. What is teacher efficacy? Well luckily for all of us, there’s another free website that explains just that called: CT3education.com, who defines it as: “a staff’s shared belief that through their collective action, they can positively influence student outcomes, including those who are disengaged or disadvantaged (Hattie, 2016).”

This means staff is working together positively and everyone has a mutual respect for each other as the adults and are willing to work together. If your school isn’t working as one team to help all students and all staff (jump ship now) because most likely Collective Teacher Efficacy isn’t occurring very much.

CT3education goes on to give great examples of what this could look like including:

• Committees led by staff

• Create team goals

• Swap jobs (best idea ever!!)

• Staff commercials (love this too!)

• Learning Walks (I’ve actually done this school wide before with students and it’s amazing for everyone!)

• Establish values

• Join the community

• Exit tickets at staff meetings

• Survey then follow up with 1on1 discussions- I’ve done a lot of surveys and not once did anyone pull me in after to actually talk it out and get a deeper understanding of my needs.

• Define your intervention system and what it looks like so everyone understands it

• Create time to celebrate and share teacher progress!

After typing up this list it’s clear to me what can help create amazing life long learners in our classroom is when the adults are responsible, creative, driven, respectful, and ultimately working together to create an environment that is well rounded for the students. But it starts with the adults.

I hope this gave you an idea of how you could create collective teacher efficacy to help students thrive, until next time,

Happy Educaiting!