The Economist: John Hattie’s research and “Teaching the teachers”

[Sebastian Waack]

The Economist, a liberal weekly newspaper, asked “How to make a good teacher” on the cover of its June 11th 2016 edition. An in-depth article about education reform cites John Hattie’s research and argues that good teachers are not born but can be trained.

One can read the report like a short summary of the Visible Learning project. The Economist writes that in education reforms “the job of the teacher has been comparatively neglected, with all the focus on structural changes. But disruptions to school systems are irrelevant if they do not change how and what children learn. For that, what matters is what teachers do and think.” Just have a look at John Hattie’s mind frames for teachers.

And of course, the Visible Learning research has its place in the article, too: “In a study updated last year, John Hattie of the University of Melbourne crunched the results of more than 65,000 research papers on the effects of hundreds of interventions on the learning of 250m pupils. He found that aspects of schools that parents care about a lot, such as class sizes, uniforms and streaming by ability, make little or no difference to whether children learn. What matters is ‘teacher expertise’.”

You can read the full article “Teaching the teachers” on The Economist homepage.


Read the books from the Visible Learning Series. Order your copy on Amazon or find them in a library.

• Visible Learning (2009)
• Visible Learning for Teachers (2011)
• Visible Learning into Action (2016)

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