A visitorship report by Brendan Brady, Headmaster, St Andrew’s Prep
The goal of the visitorship was to investigate learning in schools based on John Hattie’s research on what makes effective teaching and Dr Deb Masters’ work on translating Hattie’s research into action in the classroom.
John Hattie’s work Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement builds a story of the power of teachers, feedback and a model of learning and understanding.
Visible Learning means that students know what they need to learn, how to learn it, and how to evaluate their own progress. Using the Visible Learning approach, teachers become evaluators of their own impact on student learning.
Deb Masters and the team at Corwin (Visible Learning Plus) have developed a model of school diagnostics to help schools understand what to focus on in making learning visible and in so doing improving learning outcomes for students.
On the advice of John Hattie I visited four schools, Stonefields School in Auckland, New Zealand; St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School (Brisbane); St Aidan’s Anglican Girls School (Brisbane) and St Peter’s School (Melbourne). Although I will refer to all four schools in this paper, my focus will be on Stonefields.
