At Beeliar Primary, John Hattie’s Visible Learning principles underpin our teaching and learning. Educational researcher, John Hattie, carried out extensive analysis to understand the most effective teaching strategies to progress student achievement. Hattie’s research is based on over 68,000 studies and 25 million students. He defines ‘visible learners’ as students who:
- Reflect and self-evaluate their own performance;
- Regularly seek and readily apply feedback;
- Can articulate what they are learning;
- Can identify and explain how to achieve the next steps in their learning;
- Set clear learning goals and know what needs to be done to achieve them.
To achieve these outcomes, our teachers:
- Display clear learning intentions for each lesson (WALT);
- Provide explicit criteria for success (success criteria);
- Provide levelled work samples demonstrating various stages of success for students to work towards;
- Guide students to set appropriate learning goals;
- Provide timely and relevant feedback.
We believe that feedback is one of the most powerful influences on student achievement. Our teachers use clear success criteria and modelled examples to give explicit and timely feedback to students. Furthermore, students utilise success criteria to self-evaluate their own work and identify where to next.
Visible Learning Principles have driven the development of our Beeliar Instructional Model, which forms the basis of our teaching and learning programs. The goal is to move students from ‘surface’ learning to ‘deep’ learning, where students ultimately have the ability to apply and transfer their skills to a variety of contexts. Our teaching and learning programs contain a balance of opportunities to acquire and consolidate new skills, then apply them to rich, critical thinking tasks.