The Path to Truly Impactful Practice in Education Starts with Visible Learning

It may seem obvious, but learning should never be implied or assumed. Learning must be explicit, evaluated and monitored; the impact of teaching on student learning should be visible. But how can we be sure?

Armed with years of research that includes more than 2,100 meta-analyses, and 130,000 studies that include more than 300 million students—plus decades of experience as educators —bestselling authors John Hattie, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Almarode have collaborated to create this accessible guide to what works best to accelerate students' learning. Packed with everything you need to evaluate your impact, the Illustrated Guide to Visible Learning includes:

Clear instructions for collecting, interpreting, and using evidence to make decisions with and for your students

A primer on the 11 signature practices of Visible Learning

Research-backed mindframes that have the potential to significantly influence the quality of education

To have the greatest impact on student learning, we must know what practices work best. With this illustrated go-to guide to Visible Learning in hand, your path is set for truly impactful practice in education.

The honest truths, tools, and teaching that lead to student engagement

High levels of engagement—it’s not an impossible dream. But to attain it we need to focus on what galvanizes learning, and ensure we are offering the tools and mindsets with which students can lean in. In this playbook, an ace team of educators give us the goods to guide self-starting learners.

Nine modules show us how to:

Coherent standards, success criteria, tasks, and goals so students can travel clear pathways

Offer tools that allow learners to recognize the gap between their current performance and the expected performance, and select strategies to close that gap

Talk with students about engagement as a continuum, and that there are actions they can take to heighten their buy-in to any endeavor

Stress-test our lesson plans to ensure students can discuss, debate, create and problem-solve around highly relevant content

Use lots of low-stakes assessment and feedback routines to develop effective collaboration that doesn’t depend on us.

Our job as teachers is to guide learning experiences that build knowledge and self-efficacy. But from there, we need to stay on the sidelines and let students play. Only then will they develop the muscle to persevere, the strategic actions to excel, and the confidence to make our curriculum the springboard of their own dreams and goals.