Comments on: Teachers not superhuman

By: Bronwyn

Bronwyn — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:54:20 +0000

Of course Hattie doesn’t advocate Taylorism – he is probably unaware that his research sits directly in that unlovely philosophy. I was once at a seminar where to the amazement of everyone present Hattie presented “data” purporting to measure passion in the classroom. Niue may believe otherwise but no one in that audience was convinced that there could be a reliable way of measuring passion. I doubt you could even get common agreement on a definition of passion far less measure it credibly. And anyway passion isn’t automatically a positive characteristic – at one extreme, it can be obsession.
As to Niue’s proposal about how performance could be measured, I see s/he knows nothing about research but it doesn’t stop him/her making daft suggestions! The problem with such a delightfully simple (simplistic?) idea is that you couldn’t guarantee that both classes were identical to start with so any results would be completely dodgy. It’s not like medicine where you screen the samples to avoid confounding the measurements PLUS have a control group. Also you can’t control external influences – these are real people after all, not there to provide fodder for experimentation by mad scientists! We know that kids’ achievement is affected by an enormous range of factors outside the classroom (and so does Hattie but there’s no fame and money in talking about that) IQ, homework, level of family support, drug use, divorce, death in the family and so on. There is no mathematical formula that could equalise the classes in your experiment to give a credible result. GIGO

By: Niue

Niue — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:13:17 +0000

I disagree vehemently, Bronwyn. Teachers should be subject to performance management measures and performance-related pay just like a range of other professions. Your characterisation of Hattie’s research is more akin to caricature. Measuring the impact of the teacher is relatively straightforward. You measure the change in learning outcomes with the same cohort of students over an academic year. Reward outstanding and creative teachers and have mechanisms to ensure those not performing get support to make improvements to their praxis. Hattie’s meta-research needs informed debate not stupendously simplistic knee-jerk reactions. Where for example, does Hattie advocate Taylorism, except in your imagination?

By: Bronwyn

Bronwyn — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:05:08 +0000

To say as Hattie does that the quality of interaction is critical to student learning is obvious to the point of banality. Where he crosses the line into rank stupidity is when he starts saying that it’s THE critical factor and that everything else should be treated as subservient to that – even going so far as to say teachers’ pay should somehow be connected to that factor. At least in respect of the latter, and in a rare moment of self-awareness, he concedes that it would be extremely difficult to do. (Read: “impossible”.) In other words, millions of dollars of taxpayer money gifted to John Hattie Inc. for the foreseeable future so he can develop a bureaucratic behemoth that pretends to measure classroom interactions with a an appearance of objectivity to facilitate the link to pay. It seems as if Hattie is bent on becoming the Frederic Taylor of education – and I don’t mean that in a nice way. Taylor was an engineer with a cold and clinical personality that today would surely be diagnosed as autistic. Consistent with that, he had an obsession with measurement. He developed a set of principles known as “scientific management” famously put into practice by Henry Ford in his car factories. The process involves splitting tasks into their smallest possible elements, determining the most “efficient” way of doing them and then standardising that approach throughout the workplace. Those highly inconvenient human traits such as individuality, originality and agency must be eliminated in order to guarantee the purity of the finished product. This approach may be all well and good when it comes to manufacturing industrial products (if we can set aside, for the moment, the fact that it is soul-destroying for workers and actually discourages commitment and engagement)but it is surely ironic in the extreme to be to be advocating it in education – moreover in respect of the most idiosyncratic of educational activities – communication. I doubt that even Frederick Taylor himself would have gone so far.