Thinking the unthinkable, John Hattie is halfway there?


Thinking the unthinkable, John Hattie is halfway there?

Early this week whilst preparing some materials for the educational discussion group that I run online, I stumbled upon a paper written by John Hattie that had been floating around my piles of paper for a number of months. Having a spare moment to fill, I began reading the article. To my genuine surprise, I found myself nodding along in agreement. The paper in question is entitled ‘What doesn’t work in education: The politics of distraction’ (Hattie, 2015) and did exactly as advertised, despite Hattie’s overreliance on his own work to support his contentions many of the points rung true.
 
For background, my engagement with Hattie’s work has come largely through official channels (including the HITS model) and was delivered without question. This allegiance to his thinking and methodology was strongly tempered however, by the growing distrust and challenges made against his work. These challenges come from the profession itself (Perkins, 2019), typified by a recent event held in Melbourne entitled ‘Debunking Hattie and HITS’. These complaints are most accessibly summarised by Adrian Sampson’s appearance on Ollie Lovell’s Educational Research Reading Room (ERRR) and Hattie himself later appearance in response (Here and here). These two podcasts showed a staunch and convincing rebuttal to Hattie’s message and a pandering and political response from Hattie himself. As a result of this reading, I have since read a number of Simpson’s papers and other scholars to gain a grounding in the complexities and challenges of his approach (Bergeron & Rivard, 2017; Higgins, & Simpson, 2011 ; Simpson, 2017; Simpson, 2018; Terhart, 2011). 

With this background, I had all but discounted many of his points and ideas. For example, the hypocrisy of educators who accept those items at the top of Hattie’s ‘leaderboard’, without considering the fact that this also means that the bottom of the ‘leaderboard’ should be things to be avoided.  Elements from this list would include things such as: Humour, welfare policies, diversity of students, distance education, teacher education and mentoring. Surely, few members of our democratic Australia would support abandoning or halting many on the list here? So, suffice, to say, I had discounted the work of this educational guru (Eacott, 2017, 2018).

Reading the aforementioned paper, I was pleasantly surprised, indeed, his writing was consistent with the rest of the work I had read from other leading scholars dealing with global and national policy suggestion such as Professor Alan Reid (2018). Hattie commented on the ineffectiveness of teacher aides, something that I had been reading about recently (Sharma & Salend, 2016), he tied together many complex ideas around the public-private debate neatly and without fuss. He noted that the increase of adults within classrooms, typically through the hiring of teacher assistants, had made no significant impact on the outcomes of students. As I read along, nodding my head, I realised that this paper was written in 2015, a full 7 years after the often-criticised ‘Visible Learning’ from 2008. Indeed, as I read, I recalled his statement to Ollie Lovell that people ought to heed ‘the story’ rather than focus too closely on the data and graphs. I begun to feel that perhaps he was correct and had been improperly treated.

After the quick and pleasant read of this paper, I noted it referenced the next paper in the series, entitled ‘The politics of Collaborative Expertise’ (Hattie, 2015b). I excitedly downloaded and printed it off, this paper was the mirror to the first piece, it proposed solutions to the problems and distractors that he had neatly laid out in the first. Alas, as I read on, I noted no presence of myself (a teacher) in any of these solutions. Each solution involved an outside expert and constant references to data and accountability. There were no human dynamics, no realities of students or teachers, merely an over-ascription to a medical analogy that should have been left dead a long time ago. So now I am back where I started, overlooking his work and seeking alternatives.  

Articles & Podcasts
Lovell, O. (2018a) ERRR #018. John Hattie defending the meta-analysis. Accessed on 27/5/2019, from:www.ollielovell.com/errr/johnhattie/
Lovell, O. (2018b) ERRR #017. Adrian Simpson critiquing the meta-analysis. Accessed on 27/5/2019, from: www.ollielovell.com/errr/adriansimpson
 Perkins, T. (2019) An unhealthy data obsession is strangling our schools. Accessed on 27/5/2019, from: https://au.educationhq.com/news/56923/an-unhealthy-data-obsession-is-strangling-our-schools/
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. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. routledge.
Hattie, J. (2015a). The politics of distraction: What doesn't work in education.
Hattie, J. (2015b). What works best in education: The politics of collaborative expertise. British Columbia Teachers' Federation.
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.
Sharma, U., & Salend, S. J. (2016). Teaching assistants in inclusive classrooms: A systematic analysis of the international research. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 41(8), 7.
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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