last Friday, Prof John Hattie conducted a live webinar for Singaporean educators to share about effect size of the six areas of SF(Ed) based on his meta-analysis. i am most interested in the part on DI, and here’s my notes taken during the sharing:
- While we often believe no two students learn the same way, he countered by saying “well, actually not completely true, a lot of students learn in the same way.”
- as such, by taking the teacher perspective, differentiation is about how teachers allow “for (students’) different ways of learning.”
- if differentiation means grouping students and giving different activities to different students, it’s an “abject failure”, for the effect size is only .12.
- instead of emphasising different activities for different students, look at differentiation in terms of mastery learning (effect size 0.61) and success criteria (effect size 0.88) instead.
- “Differentiation means kids can have different ways and different times to get (to a common success criteria).“
- Citing research carried out by Prof. Christine Rubie-Davies, who studied and compared teachers that set low expectations vs. those that set high expectations of students, the effect size of the latter are “very high“ (effect size .5 to 1.44; vs. -0.3 to .2).
- A distinct difference between these two groups of teachers is how they viewed differentiation (low vs. high expectation):
- “sees great differences between students in class” vs. “sees lower differences between students in class”
- “argues that some are expected to improve” vs. “argues that all are expected to improve”
- “has more differentiated activities in class” vs. “has less differentiated activities in class”
- differentiation if taken to be “different for every kid like personalized learning, individualized instruction, has an effect size close to zero.”
- to promote the “centrality of the child“, get students to work together across different ability groups, where teachers structure tasks so that students “can learn from each other.“
- differentiation is “different ways in different times“, akin to GPS. for example, to travel from Sydney to Melbourne, 80% of the drivers will take the Hume Highway; but there are those would take the coast road, some would go inland, including those that would drive all over the place like tourists. this is “what the concept of differentiation looks like”.
- the fact is that “a majority of students go through a similar progression but we need to differentiate for those that go down the coast road”. there’s no wrong routes per se, for a GPS will always route a driver to Melbourne (i.e. success criteria)
#TLDR differentiation is about how a teacher design learning so that students can pursue different ways albeit over different amount of time to achieve common success criteria. in the process, effect size is high when teachers set high expectations of students, design tasks for students in heterogeneous group for them to learn from each other.
#TLDR differentiation is akin to GPS. students can take different ways to arrive at the same destination (i.e. achieve common learning objectives) at different times; there’s no ‘wrong’ route to a GPS.
hope i have gotten the ideas and quotes as close to what Prof. Hattie has intended, and u’ll find this little note useful. oh yes, all the emphasis were added by me (:
to cite:
Tan, Y. H. (2020, September 16). notes on DI from webinar by Prof. Hattie. EduBlog.Net. https://edublog.net/wp/2020/09/16/notes-on-di-from-webinar-by-prof-hattie/
