Learning company Pearson has published two new reports by education expert professor John Hattie which call into question some of the key reform policies pursued by governments in the last twenty years.

The research has promised to be useful for education policy makers thought the Arab world as governments in the region to seek to overhaul education systems with a view to improving student performance, said a statement.

Karim Daoud, managing director of Pearson in the region, said: “We are seeing governments in the GCC, and throughout the Middle East, funnelling billions into modernising their education systems with the aim of better preparing learners for the demands of a 21st Century world.

“This new research published by Pearson’s Open Ideas Programme gives decision-makers advice about what John Hattie believes works in education and what doesn’t, helping make good on what is a very substantial investment from many countries throughout the region.”

Hattie has questioned widespread government focus on policies all of which he has said are less important than the variability in education outcomes and teacher effectiveness within any one school.

In the first report, titled ‘What Doesn’t Work in Education: the Politics of Distraction.’ Hattie has called out a number of popular, but low impact, policy ‘distractors.’

It includes longer school days, performance pay, smaller class sizes, technology as a magic bullet, choice of school and initial teacher education.

Professor Hattie, an education expert at the University of Melbourne who has dedicated his career to opening up the ‘black box’ of learning, challenges policymakers around the world to reevaluate their strategies for improving learning using the available evidence on what does and does not work in education.

He has asserted that it is our obligation to provide every student with at least one year of learning progress for one year of input, regardless of their academic achievement level when they begin. And he has identified within-school variability - most critically, the variability in the effectiveness of teachers within any given school - as a fundamental problem to be addressed.

Building on his world-renowned Visible Learning work, which examined the relative impact of various education interventions on student learning, Hattie shows that many of our most politically popular structural fixes, such as school choice or reduced class size, are simply ‘distractors’: they have had little impact on student learning despite costing billions of dollars.

The evidence indicated that a much higher impact strategy is to develop a culture of ‘collaborative expertise’ in our schools and systems, he said.

In the second report, ‘What Works Best in Education: the Politics of Collaborative Expertise,’ Hattie laid out a series of tasks designed to reduce the problem of within-school variability by seeking out and scaling up teacher expertise.

The tasks included teachers working together to develop a common language around student success criteria for a year’s schooling; teachers making learning more personal for students at varying levels by using appropriate diagnosis, intervention, and evaluation tools; and leaders working with their staff to continuously evaluate the impact on student learning.

The papers were published by Pearson as part of their ‘Open Ideas’ series, in which independent experts from around the world provide their views on the big, unanswered questions in education.

“Despite the best of intentions, education has become fraught with the politics of distraction, most drawing us away from the critical work at hand. That is, ensuring that each student makes at least one year of progress for one year of effort,” said professor Hattie.

“If we truly want to improve student learning, it is vital that we shift our narrative about teaching and learning away from these distractions, and begin the critical work of building up collaborative expertise in our schools and education systems,” he said.

Sir Michael Barber, Pearson’s chief education advisor, said: “Pearson is working with some of the best minds in education to bring their diverse and independent ideas and insights to a wider audience. These pieces can sometimes be provocative; they are certainly always interesting.

“The current papers by John Hattie are a brilliant example of this -  they prompt the right questions and start the right debates.

“Using the evidence that he has amassed over the course of his extensive career, John has produced a provocative synthesis of the most popular policy interventions in education, and their relative impact on learning, most of which he finds lacking in terms of the size of impact we should expect,” said Sir Barber.

“Our aim is that these papers, which include John's proposed model of collaborative expertise, will challenge thinking along all points of the political spectrum and hopefully inspire policy changes that will help deliver the best possible outcomes for students,” he added. - TradeArabia News Service