Ten Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center, and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. John Hattie. Dr. Hattie is the researcher and author behind the enormously influential Visible Learning series, including his synthesis of more than 800 meta-analysis studies related to achievement. Dr. Hattie is also Professor, Deputy Dean, and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

[00:39]

He is Chair of the Board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and Associate Director of the ARC Science of Learning Research Center. And most of our Principal Center Radio listeners know Dr. Hattie primarily as a researcher and author, and we're here today to talk about his new book, 10 Mind Frames for Visible Learning, Teaching for Success.

[01:01] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:03] SPEAKER_02:

Dr. Hattie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[01:05] SPEAKER_00:

It's great to be here talking to you, Justin, and to the listeners. Well, thanks so much.

[01:09] SPEAKER_02:

Let's talk first about what you saw happening in the profession, perhaps in reaction to some of your previous work. How did you arrive at the conclusion that teachers' mind frames are so important? And what was it that led up to this particular book?

[01:25] SPEAKER_00:

Well, since I started on the whole visible learning notion, which actually I started in, um, your old state, Washington, way back in the early 1990s, it was trying to answer the question about how come everything in our business seems to work? How come every teacher says they're above average and every school has evidence that they're doing a good job? And, you know, from the perspective of a student, that doesn't always make sense. And so what I've tried to do is change the conversation from what works, because almost everything works, to what works best. And trying to, as I've done in the book, trying to take the many, many thousands, tens of thousands of research articles that are done in everyday classrooms to try and answer the question about what does work best. And in the early books, I was grappling with, you know, the 100, 100, 150, now 250 different influences.

[02:14]

And I published the book, and I take the responsibility here. Sometimes that league table, that list of factors, gets in the way of the story. And it took me 20 years to write that first book to understand what that story is. And so what this current book is about is it concentrates entirely on that story. Because what it turns out is it's not really what teachers do. You can have two teachers, Justin, using exactly the same strategy, and one of them implements it well, one of them has got good diagnosis and it's appropriate for their class, one of them modifies it on the fly, and one of them doesn't.

[02:51]

It's not the strategy. It's their thinking on the moment-to-moment, day-by-day process that teachers use. And so it really was not so much what they did, and it wasn't really who they are, in terms of whether what kind of training they have, how many years' experience, whether they're in Arkansas, whether they're in Washington, whether they're in Melbourne. What matters is how they think. And what I've tried to distill in this book is the ten most important ways about how teachers think. And our argument in the book is that's what we need to worry about in our profession.

[03:20]

That expertise that relates to how teachers think. And it's very profound, it's very dramatic, and it's incredibly powerful when you see it happening. And it's not uncommon at all.

[03:29] SPEAKER_02:

I couldn't agree more that teacher thinking, teacher cognition is so critical and so powerful. And I wonder if you've seen what I'm kind of picking up from a lot of our profession, this focus on teacher behavior. You know, people will take a list like your book, Visible Learning, you know, the big study, and say, I want to see teachers doing this, that, or the other thing. And we go around to classrooms, we bring the clipboard, and we say, well, you're doing this, I think you should be doing that instead. And we focus very heavily on teacher behavior. But I've seen very, very little focus in our profession on teacher thinking and the decision-making that teachers do and the ways that teachers think about their work and think about their students.

[04:14]

Uh, so I'm very excited to see you direct the attention of educators to... thinking to those things that happen behind the scenes. And I think we have kind of a frustration as administrators, and I work primarily with administrators, that thinking is not very visible. You know, of all the things that we can influence, thinking is one of those that kind of happens beneath the surface or behind the scenes.

[04:36]

So, as you have kind of probed this topic to think about how we can get at teacher thinking, what have been some of the main indicators to you of how teachers think and how that matters in the classroom, how that matters for students?

[04:51] SPEAKER_00:

The theme is absolutely correct. This is too strong, but I almost don't care how teachers teach. I think the whole debate we have about best ways to teach, about best practice about resources, apps, all that kind of stuff, is killing us as a profession. So it's not how they teach. It's the impact of that teaching on the kids. In the same way as you said, when you go into class with those clipboards, you know, take the Daniels and the Mazzanos, and sit in the back, and you record them all.

[05:21]

It doesn't really matter. I've struggled to find any evidence that doing that makes a difference, because only a fifth of the items in the Danielson relate to the impact of the teacher on the kid. Now, if you talk to Danielson, she'll say that her instrument wasn't invented to use it in the kind of accountability way your country's obsessed with. But I care about that impact on the kids. So when you go into a classroom, it's a sin to watch another teacher teach, because all you do is tell that teacher how to teach better like you. What you should do is watch the impact on the kids.

[05:50]

And we know from Graham Nuttall's work that 80% of what happens in the classroom, a teacher doesn't see or hear. So, why would we care about the teacher reflection on that 20%? Help the teacher understand that 80%. And a lot of our work at the moment is trying to help teachers see what's happening in that other percent. I take the private lives that kids talk about in the classroom as teachers are talking. And teachers talk an incredible amount of the time.

[06:13]

It's not as if kids are sitting there passive. They have a whole private world that goes on in that classroom. How do we help the teachers understand and use that to the beneficiary? And then it comes to your point, Justin, about, you're right. It's hard to see the thinking. But it's not impossible.

[06:28]

Like, if you can get teachers talking to each other about the decisions they're making, if you can get kids talking to each other about the ways they're thinking, and in great classrooms, you can, this happens. And hearing kids think aloud is really powerful in the same way hearing teachers think aloud in the staff room. But, Close to 80-90% of the time, kids and teachers are sitting there quietly, absorbing the material. The only way, and you can imagine this is hard for me, the only way you can do this is learn to shut up.

[06:58] SPEAKER_02:

I'm very excited to hear you say that conversation is the way we get at that thinking. Because that's an idea that has kind of captured my attention for the last couple of months. That, you know, this idea that so much of teacher practice is hidden beneath the surface. And if we go in and observe and take notes and then just talk at the teacher, we're going to have a very limited ability...

[07:19]

to actually impact their practice, because, again, most of their practice is that thinking that if we're doing all the talking as administrators, we're not even beginning to get at. So, in the book, you give a number of different mind frames, ten different mind frames, for... Kind of looking at how teachers think and for teachers to reflect on their own thinking. And one of the first that you have in chapter one of the book is, I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning.

[07:49]

I wonder if you could talk for just a moment about why that rose to the top as one of the key mind frames for teacher thinking.

[07:56] SPEAKER_00:

Well, actually, Justin, it's easier than that. If you want to save yourself time reading the book, just read that one chapter, because the other nines are variants of that same theme. It all comes back to when you walk into a classroom and you say, my job here today is to evaluate my impact, then all the good things follow. If you walk into a staff room and say, as a school leader, my job here today is to evaluate my impact. Now, of course, That's going to mean you have to have a discussion and an agreement and understanding of what impact that is. And that's probably the most important thing that happens.

[08:29]

Like, why should it be that every time a kid hits a teacher, if that teacher's conception of what a year's growth looks like is very small compared to one down the corridor where that year's growth is very large, that's going to have a profound impact on your learning that year. How do we get that discussion of what does a year's growth look like? What does it mean to be good at? Year 5 English. Year 10 panel meeting. Those are the kind of discussions we have to have.

[08:53]

Not what are you teaching and how do you teach it, but what do you mean by growth? Bring along two pieces of kids' work three months apart and have a discussion. Do you agree this shows three months growth? And it's all this notion about what do you mean by impact? It means that you're going to have to have an understanding of how you go about assessing it. And you do it through listening to student voice.

[09:13]

What does it mean to learn in this class? Ask the kids that. What does it mean to have growth? In fact, we're working on another book now, looking at student assessment capabilities, where we're trying to point out that students are actually very, very smart about whether they're learning or not, or whether they're growing or not. How do we use them in the conversation? And so this whole notion about, as an evaluator, I evaluate my impact.

[09:35]

I go in there to see who I have impact on, what I have impact about, and what my magnitude is. And quite frankly, That's the whole theme of the other nine, but we thought just having one is probably risky, so we'll have nine of them saying the same thing.

[09:50] SPEAKER_02:

You know, I think for so long in our profession, we've been asking the question, am I using best practices? And I know that one of the reactions to your work sometimes has been that we don't really read the whole book, we just look at the list and say, well, I should be using these top practices, and as you said, ignoring all the rest. Um, but you also say in the introduction to this book that it's almost... As if students learn despite us sometimes.

[10:17]

Students kind of learn no matter what. Everything works. So this question of what is my impact that I'm having, you know, I think often we ignore that question and we just look at whether students are learning. You know, we've had a big obsession with data and with measuring student progress, and I think that's an incredibly important question to layer on top of that, is what is the impact that I am having. Um, so let's talk a little bit more about assessment. What are some of the mindframes or some of the strategies that teachers can use to look at, you know, student work, to look at some of the results that they're getting from perhaps more standardized assessments, and really get a sense of that, because I think we all have this sense as educators that we're doing the very best we can day to day.

[11:04]

We're trying to implement the latest and greatest strategies And yet we always have students who are not doing as well as we would like them to be doing. You know, we want every student to be at 100% proficiency on everything we teach, but the reality is we never quite get there. Um, so what are some points where we can gain some traction on that question of how to evaluate our own impact?

[11:25] SPEAKER_00:

Don't get me wrong. There are higher probability interventions, the lower probability interventions. And yes, I would want teachers to use higher probability interventions, but It's all looking backwards. It's all revision mirror stuff. I look at the research of what's happened in classrooms. And so when you look at what happens, these things tend to work better than those things.

[11:44]

So they're high probability ones. But what really matters is when you implement it, the fidelity of your implementation, the ability of you to make those adaptive expertise comments and changes as you go through, the ability you have of great diagnosis. And then coming to the last part of your question, I think, again, the mind frame that we want you to have, particularly around assessment, is assessment as feedback to you about your impact. So often, we think of assessment as feedback to students about their learning. And I challenge every teacher out there to give a kid a piece of work, give them an assignment, give them a task, and ask them before they start, what grade do you think you're going to get? They are stunningly accurate.

[12:28]

And so you've got to seriously ask, what do they learn from assessment? They just confirm what they already know. And surely, our job's to mess that up. Our job is to find attributes and expertise in kids that they don't think they have, not just to confirm that you're a C student, you're a B student, you're an A student. By age eight, most kids know where they fit in that distribution. As I say, our job's to mess it up.

[12:49]

The mind frame we get across in the book is that I interpret and act on feedback given to me. So every time you give an assessment, at the end of it, or an assignment, say, what did I learn about my impact? What did I learn about what the kids think my concept of impact is, my magnitude of impact? Because that's how you learn what your impact is, by looking at the kind of tasks kids do, the assignments they do. So assessment has an incredible, powerful value if you can learn from that to then decide what the next steps are. In the same way, if we could teach kids to be assessment capable so that they learn from their assessments, so they know what to do next, not waiting for us always to tell them and see what the grade is, because sometimes the grade is just an indication the work's over.

[13:33]

Sometimes teachers think and confuse marking and think somehow it's something to do with feedback. Not necessarily. But we have to be, again, active thinkers about the impact that we're having. And so assessment is an incredibly powerful way to do it if, We see it as about us, not so much about the kids.

[13:50] SPEAKER_02:

I wonder what you think about the issue of teacher evaluation when it comes to mind frames, because this has probably happened to you over and over again in your career as an author and researcher, that you will share something, share a new idea, or share a new finding in a book, and then, as practicing educators, we immediately misinterpret and misapply that, and I... I heard Charlotte Danielson, when she worked with us in Seattle Public Schools, express frustration at the way that many teacher evaluation systems that were based on her framework, uh, were developed with a lot of just punitive and unsound kind of measures and processes and procedures built into them. And she said, you know, that's absolutely not the intent, but if you bring that kind of punitive and negative...

[14:35]

kind of approach to my framework, you will end up with a system that's punitive and negative. Um, so I wonder what kind of cautions you have for us in applying this idea of mind frames. If we know teacher thinking is so critical, if we know getting teachers to reflect on their impact and assess their impact is so critical, uh, what do you think are the most likely ways that we're going to mess that up? Because I'm sure, again, this has happened over and over again with your work, where we...

[15:02]

We don't actually read your work closely enough. We play kind of a telephone game with it. And, you know, I know somebody who knew somebody who read your book. Therefore, I think what we'll do is we will start evaluating our teachers based on their mind frame. So give us some kind of words of caution on the teacher evaluation side.

[15:18] SPEAKER_00:

Well, you're absolutely right. I've talked to Charles and Bob Bozzano and many of the people who develop these instruments, and they're horrified at how they're misused, because it's all about the use and interpretation. And certainly, my background as a researcher, I'm a measurement, I'm a psychometrician, so I see this all the time in the measurement community. And I would be horrified if we now develop a measure of mind frames to come up with some kind of punitive measure. And certainly, we have developed measures of mind frames, we have in our own work, trying to find out better ways to understand how teachers talk and think to each other. But I want to go back a step, Justin.

[15:54]

I want to go back to one of the things I've said in each book, but sometimes it's often missed, that if you look at the research, both in the visible learning work, and if you look at the work as I've done when you had No Child Left Behind, when you look at NAEP, I think I can say with some confidence that probably 60-plus percent of schools and teachers in your country are already getting those kids to gain a year's growth for a year's input. That's impressive. Excellence is all around us. And one of the major themes in visible learning is have we got the courage to recognize the excellence that's there now? If it's not a matter of running around with clipboards to drum up change and say that you've got to change, you've got to change, why would you change the excellence that's there? And so one of the things I would argue right up front is, are we prepared to acknowledge excellence?

[16:42]

And it may not be with our 30-year veteran. It may be with our five-year teacher. Are we prepared to build a coalition of success around the excellence that's already in our school? Are we prepared to privilege that way of thinking and to get that kind of thinking out there? Because if we're not prepared to do that, No system evaluation is going to make one idea of a difference. And so that's the first point.

[17:04]

The second is, yes, I think there are ways that you can look at teachers' mind frames. But it's very, very dependent on the particular kids, the particular subject, the particular year group, the particular age group. It's all about that kind of detail. You know, all education is local. So try and see how teachers think about diagnosing where their kids are at. How they go about making decisions about where to go next.

[17:27]

how they understand what their concept of impact is. Now, these are incredibly difficult things to evaluate. But I do have, here in Australia, I have a political job. I work for...

[17:37]

I'm employed by the, um, federal government to oversee a, uh, the Australian Institute for, uh, Teaching and School Leadership. And one of its roles is to provide resources for teachers and schools to do this. And we provide, and it's free, available to all your users, the AITSL website. We provide them with an incredible amount of apps And resources for them to understand how they do it. A lot of it is self-reflection relative to standards. Um, we know it's incredibly used.

[18:02]

We know we have a million hits from Australian teachers and principals to our site a month. And so, creating that conversation in the school, I think, is really critical. The step, and this is the one you're worried about, is when you then start to say, we're going to measure it, some kind of performance review.

[18:19]

That's where I pause and say, you tell me any other sector that does that. This is the job of school leaders to make those decisions. To make those decisions that are much more nuanced. Um, use balance of judgment across the different kinds of measures. No one measure's ever going to do it. So I'm not resigning from the fact that it can be done.

[18:37]

It can be done. I'm being a little resistant to a simplistic way of coming up with a checklist, coming up with a tick box, having someone sit in the back of the room. It's not going to work. So, yes, I think it can be done and we should do it. We have to privilege expertise or else we're going to lose it. And the expertise is how we think.

[18:54]

And if you look at the book and look at the ten of them, you'll see they're quite varied and most of them You can't see them. You have to shut up. You have to listen. You have to create scenarios. You have to look at what expertise means. You have to go back to the work that David Berlin did in your country in the 1990s, looking at expertise.

[19:10]

And so that's the kind of work we need to do.

[19:12] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I love a comment that you made earlier about shifting our focus from the question of what works to the question of what works best. And I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea of a competency trap, Uh, whereas administrators, we often have a preferred strategy, a new strategy, a new curriculum that we have heard or we know through our kind of connections in the field and our professional reading that this approach would be better than what our teachers are currently doing. And I hear from a lot of administrators who want to help teachers change from maybe a more outdated way of doing something, say, teaching reading, to a more up-to-date and more cutting-edge and more... Kind of research-based or, you know, well-established, cutting-edge approach.

[20:01]

And what I hear in terms of resistance from teachers often centers around this idea of the fact that they're good at what they're currently doing... And they're not yet good at what they're being asked to do, what they're being asked to switch to. And I think of that as kind of a competency trap where people feel stuck in their desire to do the absolute best they can and knowing that they will do a better job with the old way than with the new way. So I wonder when we're thinking about change and thinking about stopping one practice or switching from one practice to another that's not as familiar yet, that we don't have that same level of skill and experience and proficiency with yet, what are some of the mind frames that can help teachers navigate those changes and figure out, how am I going to handle this change in a way that I feel good about, that I can pursue with integrity and pursue with confidence that ultimately it is going to get better for my students?

[21:01] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Justin, let me start by saying you've got to beware of educators who have solutions. And we have a tendency in our business to look for the latest mobile on the Christmas tree and say, we're going to introduce this in our school, whether it be a new curriculum, a new teaching method, a new whatever. And that's one of my frustrations in the business. Why don't we start...

[21:21]

with acknowledging and recognizing that we do have excellence all around us. Why would you take a teacher who uses a method that you may not like, who uses a method perhaps out of the 1970s, but they're having an impact on their kids? Why would you change that? I worked, when I was living in the, uh, North Carolina, I worked for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. And one of my jobs was to look at the thousand videos at the time of the best teachers across your country. And one of the things that's remarkable when you look at videos of a thousand plus superb teachers is you find very little uncommon about how they teach.

[21:57]

Because it's the whole theme of the book. It's their thinking that's behind it. And so when I hear school leaders who come up with this latest gee whiz thing they want to do and all their teachers in their schools have to adopt this new whatever, it drives me crazy. Because sometimes you are destroying the very excellence that are there. And no wonder some of our teachers sit there with their arms crossed saying, no, I'm not going to do it. Now, I'm not defending incompetence.

[22:23]

I'm not defending those who have low impact. I'm saying, start by acknowledging whether you have teachers already doing good things and why would you change them? In fact, I think the biggest problem we have in our profession is we have no debate, we have no literature on how we scale up success. In fact, I'm not bad at literature searching, Justin, and I can only find six articles that have ever been written on how you scale up success. All the time, we want to change. And so, the first thing I want to do is to say, let's be careful about this new thing.

[22:50]

Let's have a look and see what's working well first. Then the second part of it is that sometimes you do need to change. Like, if you're not getting that year's growth, absolutely you must change. And then I look at our business again and say, how good are we at implementation? Well, we work on the assumption that the principal comes up with an idea, they're going to implement it. We don't have a lot of implementation science.

[23:12]

Like Tony Brackett, the Carnegie Corporation, uh, Wundersman in South Carolina, they've got some stunning models of how you do change and how you do fidelity of change. And certainly, if I was running a course in your country on principals, I would be worried in talking to them about What does program logic look like? What does getting to outcomes look like? How do we go about the implementation? Because sometimes it's implemented so badly with the principal standing up front saying, we are going to do this. Here's the script.

[23:41]

Here's the resources. Go and do it. No wonder it fails. You wouldn't do that in any other profession. We would be continually worried about the fidelity of our implementation. So I start from the work of, yes, acknowledge the excellence there.

[23:53]

Some of those teachers with their arms crossed to the back of the room don't need to change. Some of them do. Your first job is to work out which are they, which camp are they in. Second thing is, what I want principals to be very, very good at is evaluating their own implementation. How they go about, when they introduce something to the school, to know where it's working, when it's working, how it's working, the magnitude of its working. And I make a very strong argument that it's about principals and teachers as evaluators of what they do.

[24:22]

And that's the major theme that I want to worry about here. So, how do you get that implementation? How do you get that good diagnosis? How do you get principals helping teachers where to go next? And that's what all the visible learning works for.

[24:38] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think a lot about implementation, and I think a lot about fidelity of implementation, and I think you're absolutely right. So often, we focus on kind of a shallow teacher behavior level of fidelity, and I think, honestly, as instructional leaders, we're often afraid to get into the thinking, and we're afraid to say, well, this can look different in different classrooms, and I don't know exactly what it should look like in every classroom, but... You know, this is what the model is about. This is how we can talk about practice.

[25:09]

You know, I keep coming back to the idea of conversation as so critical for leadership, critical for understanding where teachers are in their thinking, critical for making decisions at the school level about how to proceed and about, kind of, where we are and what we need to do next. So I really appreciate your... your take on that, that it is not a simple task to say, you know, I have my clipboard, I have my rubric, and I'm going to see you implement this strategy or this approach. Um, I appreciate your comments about noticing the good that's already there, and I think about the idea of appreciative inquiry.

[25:48]

You know, this approach to research that says, you know, let's find what's working. Let's find the good and build on that. Because I think one of the You know, kind of the Hippocratic Oath for instructional leadership should be something along the lines of, you know, don't break something that's working and replace it with something that's not going to work as well. And, you know, I appreciate that medicine has that philosophy or that value, and it just struck me as you're speaking that we need the same thing. To appreciate, first, the value of what's working and to be careful to protect that. So, thank you so much for those comments.

[26:26] SPEAKER_00:

Just to make a comment on that, Justin, the biggest power of a school leader is they can have a major decision on what the narrative in the school is. And I just want the narrative to be about impact, not about what we do. In the same way, we're doing a lot of work here in Australia of network of principals, getting principals to work across schools. It's very, very hard, but it can be done, as we're doing it, is to relentlessly make sure that that conversation when principals come out of schools and talk to each other is also about the impact their teachers are having on kids. They do want to talk about the resources in the school, about the wonderful things they're doing, about the policy, about the curriculum, but it's sometimes very hard to get them to talk about that impact. It means you have to create a pretty safe, trusting environment.

[27:11]

And in our work, sometimes that takes six months to eight months to even get that environment before you can get principals talking about impact. But it really is... I don't want to make it that simple, but it is that simple. You have the power to have the narrative about impact.

[27:26]

Do it.

[27:26] SPEAKER_02:

All right, well, that kind of gets to my last question here. If you could wave a magic wand and get all of us in the instructional leadership business, if you could get all school leaders everywhere to do one thing, just by a wave of the magic wand, what would it be?

[27:42] SPEAKER_00:

Oh, let's see. Stop talking about what you do. Stop talking about how you do it. Stop talking about the students. Stop talking about what you do. Stop talking about your curriculum.

[27:53]

All I want you to talk about, all I want you to privilege... is the notion of expertise. As a profession, sometimes we deny our expertise when we say, oh, the kids did the work, the parents did the support, I had the right resources, I had the right curriculum. We have to stand up as a profession and say, no, kids learn because we are very, very good at what we do.

[28:14]

We are brilliant change agents. And we are, because I look at your country, my country, and I see the demise of expertise. I see all the amateurism coming in. I see everyone saying, oh, anyone can be a teacher. It requires an incredible set of skills and mindframes to do it. And I challenge any parent that's listening, probably not to your program, to imagine taking a group, 20 to 30 five-year-olds, and teaching them every day, four or five, six hours a day, every day of the year.

[28:41]

That requires skill and expertise. So can we, as a profession, please acknowledge kids improve. Our education system is very good because of our... Thinking of our expertise.

[28:55] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is Ten Mind Frames for Visible Learning, Teaching for Success. Dr. Hattie, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[29:03] SPEAKER_01:

Pleasure. Thank you, Justin.

[29:05] SPEAKER_02:

So, high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with John Hattie? I think there is so much that we are doing as a profession that diminishes teacher thinking, that diminishes the importance... of teachers' own cognition and reflection and judgments about their practice and judgments about what their students need. And, as I said to Dr. Hetty, I think we've done a tremendous disservice to our students by focusing so much on teacher behavior and on the observable aspects.

[29:41]

So I want to encourage you to commit to yourself. that you will get at teacher thinking. And the best way to get at teacher thinking is simply to talk with teachers. And as Dr. Hattie said, to have a conversation. And in those conversations, I really appreciated the fact that Dr. Hattie emphasized

[30:01]

the importance of teacher expertise and highlighted that teacher expertise is not a rare thing. We have enormously talented, experienced, knowledgeable, expert teachers in our profession. And I think it's been a terrible thing in the last couple of decades that through accountability, through data, we have made all these attempts to reduce the importance of teacher expertise and to treat teachers as if they're the bottom of the totem pole in our profession. Teachers are the front lines, and they are the primary decision makers. So I want to encourage you to have conversations with teachers that get the teacher to do the talking. And as Dr. Hattie said, for us as leaders, to zip it, and to just listen and get teachers talking about their thinking, talking about their impact, and reflecting on their practice.

[30:50]

And I want to let you know about our flagship free program for helping you get into classrooms and talk with teachers. That program is called the Instructional Leadership Challenge. And we are giving it a complete overhaul. We've had more than 10,000 people go through the Instructional Leadership Challenge from about 50 different countries around the world over the past three or four years. And we are doing a total reboot to help you get in the classrooms on a consistent basis and have those conversations with teachers. So you can check that out at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com.

[31:26]

And I also want to let you know about our in-depth training program called the High Performance Instructional Leadership Certification Program. This is available both to individuals and to districts to help administrators get into classrooms and have evidence-based, framework-linked conversations with teachers that actually lead to improvements in practice. And one of the reasons I was so excited to talk with Dr. Hattie today is because he kept saying things that have been resonating with me for the past year or so as I've been developing this program, developing the certification program. So much of what we talked about today, you will find in that program, uh, because that approach to conversation and getting at those invisible aspects of teacher thinking and teacher decision-making, uh, really designed into the high-performance instructional leadership model.

[32:16]

So you can check that out at principalcenter.com slash district if you're interested in learning more about bringing the high-performance instructional leadership certification program to your district. And you can also read about the model in my book, Now We're Talking, 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership.