Academics should resist being “seduced” by whatever teaching method is in fashion and instead focus on truly evaluating their impact on students, according to one of the world’s most widely read education experts.
John Hattie, emeritus laureate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, releases his new book, Visible Learning: The Sequel on 20 March, a follow-up to 2008’s Visible Learning, a highly influential text that spawned a series of books that have been translated into 29 languages and sold more than 2 million copies.
While his original work was based on 800 meta-analyses to judge how teaching styles influence learning, the new book is based on 2,100 – and Professor Hattie has put all the data online to “challenge his critics to come up with a better story”.
But he said the new work is less focused on the data and more on the bigger story, which he summarises as: “It is not what you do, it is how you think about what you do.”
