Straight from John Hattie’s Visible Learning
When students were asked about their best teachers, the common attributes were teachers who built relationships with students (Batten & Girling-Butcher, 1981), teachers who helped students to have different and better strategies or processes to learn the subject (Pehkonen, 1992), and teachers who demonstrated a willingness to explain material and help students with their work (Sizemore, 1981).
In my humble opinion those are very LEARNER focused behaviors. When we focus on learners, our teaching becomes a solution, not an activity we perform every day. To help students learn, we must change our solutions.
While working on my laptop last night, my wife was channel hopping (she does that a lot). Stopping on the movie The Blind Side when the character playing Michael Oher was being tutored by character being played by Kathy Bates caused me to stop working and watch for a bit. During the scene I was watching, the actor playing Michael Oher looked at his tutor and said: “I don’t get it.” She replied: “YET, you don’t get it YET.”
So, I continued watching a bit even closing my laptop to save the battery. During another tutoring session, the tutor was working with Michael to find a topic for a paper he had to write. It was a very important paper as his future college scholarship rested on him getting a B or better on the single assignment. Kathy Bates’ character (sorry, I can’t remember her name in the movie) exhausted her ideas to motivate Michael, so she encouraged his father to step in. With a new approach and new ideas, they came up with a great topic to write about. The tutor never gave up and continued to find a new approach that would get through to help Michael learn.
Learning = (Teaching + Creativity) x Different Approach
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