Change Leaders

Doug's Reading List:

Too much contemporary leadership literature consists of poorly informed speculation, personal war stories unfiltered by critical inquiry, and pabulum unworthy of the tree killed to create the printed page.
   
The following recommendations are, however, wonderful exceptions.  Please consider purchasing their books and, when possible, patronize your local independent bookseller.  

For book study guides, articles, podcasts, and other resources, please go to www.LeadandLearn.com.  All the downloads are free. 

Do you have an article or book to recommend?  Just e-mail me at DReeves@LeadandLearn.com. 

Visible Learning for Teachers:  Maximizing Impact on Learning (2012) by John Hattie published by Routledge.

Cynics about education research repeat the same refrains:  you can always find a researcher to say anything, the students in the study are not like our kids, and the research is biased.  But John Hattie’s latest work will stop the cynics in their tracks because he has accumulated the work of more than 900 meta-analyses representing more than 250 million students.  This is one of those rare pieces of research that meets the “jury standard” – the preponderance of the evidence – that should mute even the most cynical critics. 

The good news is that we really do not need to speculate about what works in education and what doesn’t.  For example, goal setting that is specific and challenging works; retention – repeating failed practices – doesn’t work.  These are just two among the 150 practices that Hattie and his colleagues have examined after synthesizing thousands of studies.  Using the consistent measurement of impact – effect size – the reader is able to evaluate the relative impact of alternative causes of student achievement.  Hattie thus helps us to reconcile the major debate of our time in educational policy – the impact of socioeconomic status on student achievement.  His research demonstrates conclusively what everyone who has worked in high-poverty schools knows – socioeconomic status matters.  At this conclusion, the critics of high standards and high expectations for all students cheer, as research has now demonstrated the irrefutable (and obvious) contention that the economic environment of students influences their achievement.  Not so fast, Hattie’s research suggests.  While it’s true that socioeconomic status influences achievement, it is equally true that teaching and leadership strategies also influence achievement – and in many cases, the influence of teaching and leadership practices are greater than those of socioeconomic status.  For the proponents of economic determinism, this is very bad news indeed.  It squarely places responsibility for student results not on society, social injustice, and other intractable and conveniently remote causes, but on policymakers, leaders, and teachers.  While we cannot remove the impact of socioeconomic status of our students, we can certainly mitigate it by focusing our energy on strategies that have a relatively greater impact on student achievement than the factors that they brought with them into the classroom. 

For most teachers and school administrators, this should be good news.  It proves our efficacy – the impact that we have, with our energy and professionalism and commitment – on student results.  But curiously, my endeavors to convey Hattie’s work to practitioners has sometimes met with the resistance one might expect in telling a 7-year-old that, sad to say, the Tooth Fairy is not real.  Seven-year-olds are quite clever.  They know that the Tooth Fairy is not real, as they have caught their parents prematurely sleeping while the unredeemed and recently pulled tooth lay beneath the pillow.  In the morning, there was not a shiny dime (or, with inflation, a silver dollar) but only a tooth.  These are childhood fantasies destroyed by indolent parents who wish that, by sheer energy, we could prevent the critical faculties of the next generation. 

But while fantasies of the Tooth Fairy fade away, the faith of adults remains undeterred.  Hattie provides two provocative cases in point.  Everyone knows, of course, that there are three learning styles – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.  Teacher preparation programs inculcate this into their students and the doctrine is reinforced for leaders who pursue degrees at the master’s and doctoral level.  There is just one tiny problem.  Learning styles is a theory unsupported by evidence.  If there were such a thing as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles, then we should be able to identify them consistently.  As Hattie demonstrates, we can’t.  If these learning styles mattered, then teachers who provided a visual learning environment for visual learners and auditory learning environment for auditory learners should prosper, but they don’t.  This is completely consistent with the research or University of Virginia neuropsychologist Daniel Willingham, whose YouTube videos on this subject have gone viral.  But true believers in learning styles are undeterred by evidence.  As very bright and well educated people in an audience today asked me, after my presentation of evidence involving dozens of studies and thousands of students, “What is your research that learning styles are not true?”  Galileo attempted to demonstrate that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but popular views of science overwhelmed the evidence.  Educational mystics are the Inquisition.  Hattie is Galileo.  We all know that that had a bad ending.

Wait – it’s about to get much, much worse. Hattie demonstrates that curricula based upon “multiple intelligences” which does not improve student results.  While the true believers in multiple intelligences are shocked and appalled by this conclusion, one person who is not surprised at all is Howard Gardner.  Professor Gardener’s writings and public statements are invariably modest and self-effacing, inviting experimental inquiry.  Gardner and Hattie both have questioned the use of the term “intelligences” to describe the differences among verbal, mathematical, interpersonal, musical, and other proficiencies that students demonstrate.  Therefore, before critics of Hattie feel compelled to spring to Gardner’s defense, they might want to read what Gardner has to say about the matter.  Not to be churlish about it, but it’s fair to say that Howard Gardner is fully capable of speaking for himself, and more people seem to be acquainted with the titles of his books than with their contents. 

In sum, Hattie’s contribution to research is monumental.  He challenges prevailing notions, he empowers teachers and leaders, and he also provides the reasoned middle ground that policymakers should respect – acknowledging the impact of socioeconomic factors while not becoming enslaved by them.  Visible Learning for Teachers will be a controversial, engaging, and profoundly difficult book for many educators and administrators.  It may also be the most important book that they read in their entire career, provide that they apply its lessons carefully.

 Bauerlein, Mark (2009).  The Dumbest Generation:  How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.  New York:  Penguin Group.

I was fully prepared to hate this book and, with my rhetorical guns drawn, ready to give it the public flaying I knew the book and its author deserved.  After all, these were my kids, my students, my colleagues, and my loved ones that this petulant professor was attacking, and I was ready to fight the schoolyard bully who had insulted my friends.   And then I did what I suspect few of Bauerlein’s critics have done – I read the book.

Disturbing and compelling, this book not only challenges the smugness of adolescents who have conflated certainty with understanding, but also eviscerates the sanguine confidence of boomers, including this reviewer, who paved the road to indolence for our children and grandchildren with a toxic brew of money, technology, and affirmation.   Put aside for a moment the irony that I am  recommending this book on Twitter and a web site, both media excoriated in the book, and consider the evidence:  Student skills in reading and writing have declined, their civic and cultural knowledge has dwindled, and their much vaunted “techno-literacy” is a masquerade, as if a PowerPoint presentation were a substitute for critical analysis. 

 This book is not just another polemic about low test scores and low levels of interest in science and math.  Bauerlein deftly considers the causes of the intellectual decline among high school and college students and lays it squarely at the foot of a culture of self-absorption amplified by technology.  It’s not that adolescents of any age since the Lyceum are more or less self-absorbed; it is that pedagogues from Socrates to Laurence Tribe have challenged that self-absorption with rigorous questions.  Today, however, the pseudo-pedagogues of Web 2.0 nourish complacency and arrogance.  Like Narcissus, we star into the mirror of user-generated content and find its appeal addictive because, of course, it offers unending reinforcement of our interests, choices, and inherent cleverness. 

                The impact is not only a loss of academic interest, but a cultural wasteland.  For 18-24 year-olds, “only one in 10 attended a jazz performance in the 12 months before one survey and one in 12 attended a classical music performance.   Only 2.6 percent of them saw a ballet, 11.4 percent a play.  Less than one in four stepped inside a museum or gallery during the previous year, one in 40 played a classical music instrument, and one in 20 sang in a choir.  Compared with findings from 1982 and 1992, the 2002 results showed performing arts attendance by 18 to 24 year olds dropping in every art form included” (p. 24).  In brief, it is not that students have made a choice to disconnect from boring academics to pursue beauty and truth; their persistent choice is the pursuit of themselves.  While parents worry that students are over-stressed, over-tested, and over-challenged in a school environment, the truth is that the vast majority of students are under-challenged and over-affirmed.  Instead of learning, a steady diet of affirmation actively diminishes their perceived need for the hard work essential to learning.  

                Bauerlein perhaps misses an opportunity to consider that other nations have enjoyed similar access to technology without forsaking their culture, history, and civic participation.  Australians are as wired as Americans, yet maintain a world-class commitment to civic participation.  Students in Shanghai and Beijing are as frenetic in their texting as those in Los Angeles and New York, yet a reverence for Chinese culture, ancient and modern, remains strong.  One plausible explanation for the difference might be that when my Chinese students gave speeches on “my most admired person,” 43 of 44 chose a teacher.  When I have heard American students opine on the same topic, music and athletic stars are more likely to emerge as role models and heroes. 

                Perhaps the most compelling paragraphs of the book are not about technology, but about teaching.  Bauerlein does not blame students as much as their sycophantic parents and teachers who have too readily regarded children as customers, fearful of poor reviews and lustful for the adulation of the young.  This challenging book will, I hope, make my 36^th year of teaching better, if not more popular, than the previous 35, and I have already redrawn next week’s lesson plans.  I still love my students; the question is whether I will love them enough to risk challenging, criticizing, offending, and perhaps alienating them.  Customers in the Internet era demand instant gratification.  Students of every age, however, tend to thank their teachers years, even decades, after the most challenging encounters of schools.  If the dire picture painted in this book is to change, it will not be because adolescents stopped being adolescents, but because adults started becoming adults.

Final note:  I have many friends who are technology teachers and who are in the instructional technology professions.  I too have used (and, I fear, misused) technology in the classroom.  If you would like to offer a contrary view, I'll be happy to post it.  My only request is that your argument is a review of Bauerlein's book and his central thesis and evidence, not simply individual examples of hard-working kids who use technology well.  You can send your review to DReeves@LeadandLearn.com.  Thanks. 

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