Visible Learning for Literacy

Educators have been in search of “what works” for decades. Our collective search for better ways to reach students and ensure that they develop knowledge and skills has resulted in thousands and thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of research articles, and countless websites. The truth is, not everything works. Only a few things work at ensuring that students gain a full year’s worth of growth for a year of enrollment in school, and we think it’s time we focused on what works, what doesn’t work, and what can’t hurt. And we’ve turned to Visible Learning (Hattie, 2009) for help.  As he noted, students must develop surface-level learning if they are ever going to go deep. And we know that deep learning can facilitate transfer, which has been a goal shared by educators for as long as there have been teachers.  In this interactive session, we focus on specific approaches that work at the surface level of learning and note that they are different from strategies that work at the deep and transfer levels.  Importantly, we will clarify which approaches work at which phase of learning