Effective Teaching Techniques

A guide for schools to embed great teaching in their classrooms
Professor John Hattie performed a meta-analysis of nearly 1,200 research studies on education. 

From this, Professor Hattie developed the Barometer of Influences to measure the effect size of learning influences on student achievement. He combines the suggested impacts of various interventions to arrive at an effect size.  

The average effect size is 0.4, which is considered the standard rate of progress from one year of schooling. The maximum effect size is around 1.6. This rate accelerates students who are behind and advances all students at a faster rate than standard progress.  
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For teaching to be effective, students must progress at or above the standard rate of progress. Effective teaching, by this measure, is teaching that accelerates students above the standard rate of progress.
Effective teaching is informed by the science of how students learn and the emerging discipline of cognitive science.  
Its efficacy has a strong evidence base and is informed by decades of research on schools using forms of effective teaching.  
Effective teaching lessons are designed to produce optimum instructional growth in the shortest time so that learning is maximised.  
Lessons support new or experienced teachers and enable them to bring their own individuality and style to the delivery of lessons.
Lessons also support the teaching professional, who still make judgements on their students’ needs throughout the lesson and continually apply their expertise to the learning experience. 
Each lesson has:
  • information presented explicitly and unambiguously to mitigate students' misunderstanding of the content.
  • content presented through interlinked schemas that form a comprehensive learning framework across primary school years 
  • an objective learning goal that lets students know what they are about to learn and what the outcome of the learning will be
  • limited new information that builds on skills from the past lesson and reoccurs throughout subsequent lessons
  • skills that are initially acquired easily so students experience initial success, but later get increasingly complex, so students are continually challenged
  • skill development set out in sequenced learning progressions that build on students’ previously acquired learning – students master each set of skills before progressing to new tasks, and past information is regularly recalled to inform new learning
  • regular checkpoints to check that students have mastered the content before they learn new information, which is determined by students demonstrating around 90 per cent accuracy
  • adjustments and strategies for teachers to address gaps in learning before retesting students and moving on
  • built-in pedagogical scaffolding for student engagement strategies to keep engagement high. 
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