John Hattie on Effective School Leadership

(Originally titled “High-Impact Leadership”)

           In this Educational Leadership article, John Hattie (University of Melbourne, Australia) reports that more than 80 percent of principals see themselves as transformational leaders – setting a vision, creating common goals, inspiring the troops, buffering external demands, staffing well, and giving teachers autonomy. But recent studies have shown that this approach is much less effective than instructional leadership, which has the following mind-frames:

-   Believing that student learning is about what teachers and leaders do or don’t do;

-   Focusing on the impact of teaching on learning;

-   Setting challenging targets to maximize student outcomes;

-   Seeing assessment as feedback on adults’ actions;

-   Evaluating every staff member’s impact on student learning;

-   Understanding the importance of listening to students’ and teachers’ voices;

-   Creating an environment in which everyone can learn from errors without losing face.

“High-impact instructional leadership is riskier than transformational leadership,” says Hattie, “because leaders have to publicly declare what success means – and they may not get there, at least not quickly.” It’s about measurable goals, teaching practices that produce results, and success for all subgroups.

            Hattie says one thing he’s learned from the Visible Learning meta-analyses is that “almost everything in education works” – but to different degrees. Here some leadership traits that produce very strong results:

-   Believing in evaluating one’s impact as a leader: Effect size .91

-   Getting colleagues focused on evaluating their impact:  .91

-   Focusing on high-impact teaching and learning:  .84

-   Being explicit with teachers and students about what success looks like:  .77

-   Setting appropriate levels of challenge and never retreating to “just do your best”:  .57

“The high-impact leader creates a school climate in which everybody learns, learning is shared, and critique isn’t just tolerated, but welcomed… There’s mutual agreement that any interventions that don’t achieve the intended impact will be changed or dropped.” This means moving from anecdotes and war stories to solid evidence. Also:

-   Teachers collaborating on curriculum and assessments;

-   Teachers evaluating their own learning, knowing what to do when they get stuck, and learning from each other;

-   Leaders conducting low-key classroom visits and giving teachers frequent feedback;

-   Senior teachers visiting classrooms looking at student learning versus teacher actions.

Hattie tells the story of a school turnaround. Initially, when students were asked to describe a good learner, they talked about listening to the teacher, doing their work, being well-behaved, and trying their hardest. In addition, says Hattie, most teachers “weren’t making the connection between student achievement and their own practices, weren’t paying enough attention to what students were saying or doing, and didn’t understand the importance of learning intentions and success criteria as a means of ensuring that they and their students understood the purpose of learning and could monitor its progress.” Teachers also made excuses about students being poor and not reading at home.

Gradually teachers shifted to looking at results and continuously improving practice. Students began to understand what they were learning, knew their goals in the learning progression, and saw themselves as agents of their own success. In the first two years, students gained, on average, two years for each year of work.

“High-Impact Leadership” by John Hattie in Educational Leadership, February 2015 (Vol. 72, #5, p. 36-40), http://bit.ly/17HMIk8; Hattie can be reached at jhattie@unimelb.edu.au

The summary above was written by Kim Marshall and appeared in issue #574 of The Marshall Memo.