This document outlines a presentation given by Professor Chris Husbands on becoming an excellent teacher through using research evidence. It discusses key findings from the work of John Hattie on visible learning and effect sizes, identifying teaching metacognition, peer tutoring, and effective feedback as the most impactful teaching strategies. It emphasizes that excellent teachers continuously evaluate the impact of their teaching on student learning using evidence, and approach teaching as a clinical practice by asking questions about the strength of evidence for different teaching approaches.

1. Institute of Education, ULT Summer School
Becoming a teacher:
research, evidence and excellence
Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe

2. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
What sort of teacher will you be?

3. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Why teachers
matter
1:

4. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
An eleven year-old girl in my class refused
to speak to me for three days. On Friday
after school, I found a note tucked under
the windshield wiper of my car: It read:
"Sorry about this week. I started. Being a
woman.“
Last year the same person contacted me to
say: "I've been living in Australia but I'm
home to see my mum. Can we meet for
coffee? I've got a little boy now and I want
him to meet my teacher."
I was sitting on a tube train being stared at
by a young man in a hoodie. He got up and
stood over me. “Hey, you, you a teacher?“
I looked, and remembered…. "Darren?“
"Yeh…" he said. He sniffed. "It was good ya
kna..!“
Then the train stopped, the doors opened
and he got off
I was teaching maths to a group of
nine year olds struggling with long
multiplication. In the middle of the
session, a little boy with a speech
impediment started tugging at my
shirt.
I turned to him. His eyes and face
were beaming.
"I get it now! I get it now!" he gasped
with delight.
I was in the Lake District with
thirty kids doing adventure
sports.
One girl who had never been
out of Hackney got lost but
found her way back by asking
a farmer for a lift on his
tractor. A boy woke me up in
the middle of the night to tell
me: "Sir! I've just seen the
stars!"
Teachers matter

5. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Key to success?
“The best school systems ...have the best teachers. Countries and regions such as
Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Ontario ..recruit teachers from the top echelon of
graduates each year, pay them well and create and maintain a culture of
inclusion and quality throughout teachers’ careers that imbues the whole
school system.”
McKinsey & Co, 2007

6. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Key to success?
“What is the most important school-
related factor in student learning?
The answer is teaching”
Bob Schwartz, Harvard GSE, 2010

7. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
“Life isn’t fair, but good teaching and good
schools are the best means we have of
overcoming disadvantage and opening the
doors of opportunity for young people”
Stephen Dinham, Melbourne University 2012
Key to success?

8. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
The impact of good teaching
Sanders and Rivers, 2002

9. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
How teachers
matter
2:

10. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Complex problems….easy answers
For every complex problem there is an
answer that is clear, simple, and wrong
H.L. Mencken

11. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Complex problems….easy answers

12. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
No evidence

13. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
 Left brain/right brain
 Visual-auditory-kinaesthetic
learners
 Multiple intelligences
 Limits on learning
Neuroscience….and neuromyths

14. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Neuroscience and education
 Learning is about making
connections
 Learning can be
stimulated and extended
 Biology is not destiny
 “Learning without limits”

15. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
15
Poor proxies for learning (Coe, 2013)
Children are busy and lots of work is done
(especially written work)
Children are engaged, interested, motivated
Children are getting attention
Classroom is ordered, calm, under control
Curriculum has been ‘covered’ (presented to
children in some form)
(At least some) children have supplied
correct answers (whether or not they really
understood them or could reproduce them
independently)

16. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
A simple view of learning (Coe, 2013)
Learning happens when
people have to think hard

17. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Asking the wrong questions


“Will what I am doing in the classroom have an
effect on learning?
(almost ANYTHING has an effect on learning)
“Will what I am doing have a bigger effect on
learning than the other things I might do?”
(what classroom practices provide the biggest
return)

18. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
What do teachers
do that matters?
3:

19. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
John Hattie, Visible Learning (2008)
Synthesis of 50,000 studies relating to influence on
achievement – covering 260 million children
Key idea is effect size
'Effect size' is simply a way of measuring the size of a
difference between two groups

20. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Imagine a simple study to find out whether pupils learn better in the
morning or the afternoon.
In this school, pupils normally read in the morning.
Effect size
A group of 38 children were studied.
Half were randomly allocated to listen to a story and answer questions
about it on tape at 9am, the other half to hear exactly the same story and
answer the same questions at 3pm.
Their comprehension was measured by the number of questions answered
correctly out of 20.

21. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Morning 20 17 17 17 15 15 15 14 14 13 12 12 12 10 9 7 4 3 3
Afternoon 20 20 19 19 18 17 17 17 17 17 16 15 14 13 11 8 2 2 2
Effect size
The average (mean) score for the morning group was 12.1 and for the
afternoon group 13.9.
But how big a difference is this? The effect size measures this, by
comparing the size of the effect on each group

22. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Effect size
To work out the effect size, you need to know 3 things: the mean score in each group, and
the standard deviation of the control group. Then the effect size is
(Mean of experimental group score – Mean of control group score)
Standard deviation of control group
Here, that gives us:
13.9 – 12.1
4.30
This gives an effect size (1.8/4.3) of 0.4
You will never, ever need to do this yourself!

23. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Visible learning: effect sizes
• At least half of all children achieve an effect size of 0.4 in a
year (the hinge point), so effects up to 0.4 a year are simply
developmental. Anything over 0.4 has a visible effect.
• An effect-size of 1.0 means that, on average, the score for a
child receiving that experience exceeds 84% of children not
receiving that experience.
• An effect-size of 1.0 indicates an increase of one standard
deviation. This is typically means children's achievement
advances by 2+years (it’s huge).
• An effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to about one grade at
GCSE. It means advancing children’s achievement by about 1
year.

24. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Visible learning: effect sizes

25. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
1. Direct Instruction
2. Teaching study skills
[‘metacognition’]
3. Homework
4. Feedback
5. Ability grouping [‘setting’]
6. Pupils repeating a year
7. Computer assisted
learning
8. Peer tutoring
9. Team teaching
10. Simulation and games
Ten strategies for learning: which is best?

26. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Teaching metacognitive skills 0.69
Peer tutoring 0.72
Effective feedback 0.73+
The winners

27. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
“It is teachers seeing learning through the eyes of students; and students
seeing teaching as the key to their ongoing learning”
John Hattie
Teaching metacognition
Peer tutoring
Effective feedback
The essence of
research informed
teaching

28. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
So: how do you
do it?
evidence based
teaching
4:

29. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Excellent teachers….
...monitor their impact on
learning, adapting lessons as a
result- rather than expecting
pupils to keep up regardless of
circumstances
...target assessment and
teaching practices to
maximise the information
obtained about teaching and so
optimise the chances of
improving learning
...continuously evaluate the
impact of their teaching, to
inform next steps
...use evidence about what
each pupil knows and
understands to inform teaching
interventions

30. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Teaching as a clinical practice – using
evidence to underpin judgement
A different way of thinking about teaching
Involves using the knowledge base , asking
questions about how strong the evidence is,
and getting better evidence to support what
is done
Meta analysis
Randomised controlled trials
Disciplined and systematic inquiry
Increasing
use of:

31. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
..almost all pupils make some
progress in school (everyone
learns)…how do we help them learn
most effectively?
Evidence based teaching….
...the key question is what teaching
approaches generate the most
successful learning
...and systematically evaluating the
results
..this involves asking questions
about the approaches you are using
1
3 4
2

32. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Is the evidence good?
I trust my experience
 It’s what we do here
 I read a book
 Judgement is
supported by good
evidence
What
approaches
am I using?
What’s the evidence
that they work?
 The pupils seem
occupied
 Parents are happy
 There is evidence
that they promote
good learning
Why am I using
them?
 Because I was
taught that way
 Because
everyone does it
 Because there is
good evidence
Evidence based teaching

33. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
What impact am I having?
What do I need to do to get better at
teaching?
The important questions you ask again and again...

34. Professor Chris Husbands, Director, Institute of Education, University of London
www.ioe.ac.uk  @director_ioe
Focus on learning
Learning to teach
Develop diagnostic
clinical approaches
LOOK
When teaching or
observing
Why do some things
work, and others not?
QUESTION
Identify the knowledge
base for teaching
Build curiosity about
teaching
LISTEN
READ
Evaluate, evaluate and
revise your actions
Think individually and
collaboratively
THINK