The fraught issue of teacher representation

Ranting, raving and complaining Hattie and the tenor of debate within Education

I agree with the contention that Australia is within the grip of a movement described as “the Cult of the Guru” with John Hattie as the visible figurehead and Visible Learning as the corporate and commercial arm.

It is worth noting that the emergence of Hattie within Australia closely mirrors the rise of Dylan Wiliam’s in the United Kingdom and more recently the USA. Wiliams’ Classroom Experiment and Hattie’s Revolution School TV programs, Wiliam’s Learning Sciences International and Hattie’s Visible Learning bear much in common, though their agendas differ.

So, it is clear that this is not merely an Australian trend, but one aspect of the broader ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ (Sahlberg 2006; 2016), a trend whose examples I am sure others more qualified than I could add to.

The critiques of Hattie’s methods are numerous and robust (Bergeron & Rivard, 2017; Higgins & Simpson, 2011; McKnight & Morgan, 2019; Simpson, 2017; 2018; Terhart, 2011), and those that stick to strict critiques without personal attacks or confusing the company of VL and Hattie’s academic production have won much favour and support within the broader education space, including some teachers and leaders. These works have generated considerable traction within the academic spheres of education.

The work of Ollie Lovell’s Education Research Reading Room and Cameron Malcher’s Teachers Educational Review podcasts and the incredibly accessible and robust passion project of George Lilley’s blog: http://visablelearning.blogspot.com/ are doing exemplary work of bridging the gap between academia’s ivory, pay-wall encircled, towers. Also, by making it clear the pitfalls and complexities within Academia and those who would try to sell simple solutions to complex contextual problems. But awareness and consumption of these accessible bridging works among both teachers and leaders are low.  

It is important to always emphasise the distinction between the two realms of: the education system (the doers); and the educational academia (the thought leaders) and to note they are largely disconnected. Typically the education system lags roughly 10 years behind best practice discussion within academia, something that is not true for medical research, hence the push and temptation towards ‘Evidence-based Education’ (Bergeron & Rivard, 2017).  

Hattie may believe that the critics of his approach in Academic journals are visible to leaders in Australian schools but by-and-large they are not, due to a range of barriers but also simple lack of interest. This is why Eacott’s positioning of the ‘Cult of Hattie’ rings so true to educators ‘at the chalkface’, an effect he notes in the impressive response he has had to the 2018 article, whilst even those most accessible, such as those sampled above hold comparatively less sway. McNight and Morgan (2019) state that Random Control Trials (RCTs) “…serve to buttress eminence-based claims to prestige made by gurus”, this phrasing fits neatly with Eacott’s expression of this movement and shows the way that teachers are silenced by this cult, even though among it’s core tenets are the empowerment and centrality of the teacher.    

For his part, Simpson (2018) conflates Hattie’s work with a much broader and more complex discussion of Evidence-based Education (McKnight & Morgan, 2019), the “What Works” movement (Hammersley, 1997; Olson, 2004: Slavin, 2002; 2004) and his own vague and sweeping statement of the “identical, fundamentally flawed arguments underpin much of the ‘evidence-based education’ movement.” (2018, p.2). Yet despite this oversight, his criticism of Hattie’s method ring true and remain robust and compelling. They are however not as broadly accessible to teachers and leaders without qualifications in education research or knowledge of statistics.

Scott Eacott (2017) provides the most compelling account of the conditions that allow for the “Cult of the Guru” within Australian Educational Leadership. Not surprisingly, he focuses on the work of John Hattie, perhaps the most current and ‘hot’ figure in this line of gurus (though he notes others such as: Pasi Sahlberg, Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves and Yong Zhou). Crucially this movement is occurring just as our focus on Finland and Pasi Sahlberg’s representation of it and more broadly the idea of comparative education policy development is in something of a recession, between the release of PISA data cycles, as we currently are. His work broadens out the idea of a mere criticism of Hattie’s work and considers the fertile ground that allowed for this culture to emerge. Personally, I believe a direct line can be tracked from the presentations of Sir Ken Robinson, Sal Kahn and Sugata Mitra (among others) who laid the groundwork for a cult of edu-celebrity, whilst also denying the system any concrete answers or approaches to the issues they identified and espoused. As Eacott (2017) notes, it was the practicality and the Taylorist presentation (if not necessarily content) that made these ideas, and Hattie as the Guru, so compelling.

John Hattie’s (2017) response proves not only his disconnection with the actual teachers that form the majority of the education sphere, but also reveals an unwillingness to engage with the quite interesting ideas being presented. The core disagreement stems from Hattie’s approach to make ‘bold conjectures’, citing Popper, something that seems directly in opposition to the scientism basis of his approach to meta-meta analyses. But further his Thesis-antithesis-synthesis conception of academia clashes directly with Eacott’s version of argument-refutation. Personally, I lean towards the argument refutation approach as it involves actively engaging with another person’s ideas and responding to them. This has consistently been seen as something that Hattie avoids, instead rolling out similarly phrased platitudes without directly addressing those arguments, or more commonly refutations, in opposition to his work.

As with all arguments, the core thing that impacts on teachers and school leader’s ability to actively respond to, and be critical of, convenient and robust-sounding research is time poverty. As a teacher and budding educational leader, I would love to agree with Hattie’s title that “Educators are not uncritical believers of a cult figure”. Sadly, this is not true, for a range of multiple and complex reasons including time poverty, lack of statistical awareness and the relatively new shift towards instructional leadership rather than transformational leadership. For those still unclear about the challenges made to Hattie’s research and his responses to criticism I strongly recommend delving into the reference list below.

Lastly, you, the reader, do you believe we as Educators are uncritical believers of a cult figure?  

References

Bergeron, P. J., & Rivard, L. (2017). How to Engage in Pseudoscience with Real Data: A Criticism of John Hattie’s Arguments in Visible Learning From the Perspective of a Statistician. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l'éducation de McGill, 52(1), 237-246.

Eacott, S. (2017) School leadership and the cult of the guru: the neo-Taylorism of Hattie, School Leadership & Management, 37:4, 413-426.

Eacott, S. (2018). Ranting, raving and complaining: reflections on working against orthodoxy. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1-9.

Gilliland, A. & Stevenson, H. (2015) Teacher Unions at the Heart of a New Democratic Professionalism. Howard Stevenson, Alison Gilliland. From: Evers, J., & Kneyber, R. (Eds.). (2015). Flip the system: Changing education from the ground up. Routledge.

Hammersley, M. (1997). Educational research and teaching: a response to David Hargreaves’ TTA lecture. British Educational Research Journal, 23(2), 141-161.

Hattie, J. (2017) Educators are not uncritical believers of a cult figure. School Leadership & Management 37:4, pages 427-430. 

Higgins, S., & Simpson, A. (2011). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. By John AC Hattie: Pp 392. London: Routledge. 2008.£ 90 (hbk),£ 27.99 (pbk),£ 35.37 (e-book). ISBN-13 978-0415476171 (hbk), ISBN-13 978-0415476188 (pbk), ASIN: B001OLRMHS (e-book).

McKnight, L., & Morgan, A. (2019). A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine. Journal of Education Policy, 1-17.

Reid, A. (2018) Beyond Certainty: A process for thinking about Futures in Australian Education. University of South Australia for the Australian Secondary Principals Association.

Sahlberg, P. (2006). Education reform for raising economic competitiveness. Journal of Educational Change, 7(4), 259-287.

Sahlberg, P. (2016). The global educational reform movement and its impact on schooling. The handbook of global education policy, 128-144.

Simpson, A. (2017). The misdirection of public policy: Comparing and combining standardised effect sizes. Journal of Education Policy, 32(4), 450-466.

Simpson, A. (2018). Princesses are bigger than elephants: Effect size as a category error in evidence‐based education. British Educational Research Journal, 44(5), 897-913.

Slavin, R. E. (2002). Evidence-based education policies: Transforming educational practice and research. Educational researcher, 31(7), 15-21.

Slavin, R. E. (2004). Education research can and must address “what works” questions. Educational researcher, 33(1), 27-28.

Stevenson, H. (2018) Flip. the. system? Get. organised! From: Rycroft-Smith, L., & Dutaut, J. L. (2018). Flip the System UK: A teachers’ manifesto. Abingdon: Routledge.

Terhart, E. (2011). Has John Hattie really found the holy grail of research on teaching? An extended review of Visible Learning.Journal of curriculum studies, 43(3), 425-438.

Olson, D. R. (2004). The triumph of hope over experience in the search for “what works”: A response to Slavin. Educational researcher, 33(1), 24-26.

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