The child/student, our first notes on Visual Learning

Hattie's main argument in this section of his book is that students enter school not only with prior achievements, but also personal dispositions, and that these dispositions can then have an impact on the outcomes of schooling.

He identifies the key dispositional ingredients as:

1. the way the child is open to new experiences;
2. the child's emerging beliefs about the value and worth of investing in learning;
3. the manner in which they learn that they can build a sense of self from their engagement in the learning enterprise:

He explains that although children enter the school with these, they can be changed by the school, and that they need to be nurtured in order to raise achievement. He states that many feel that such dispositions to learning should be used as performance indicators of the school. This is something that we will look to incorporate into our school assessment. 

The personality attribute that is identified as critical is that of openness to new experiences.

"Openness to experiences involves the willingness (and it is an active process) to experience new ideas, to think outside the box, and of not being tied to one way of thinking. It involves a motivation to explore ideas, and to invest in the process of learning."

We hope that the approach of our school will actively support and develop this disposition, by encouraging children to pose their own questions and offering the time, space and access to expertise to find their own solutions. They will have the time to fully explore the ideas that interest them, and as they will have chosen their path we believe they will be more invested in the process. As a staff we will be there to support the students in linking their time and effort to the learning they are achieving, making this connection explicit.

Background

In the book they also identify that by the time a child enters school there have been a range of factors that have played a "major role in generating subsequent differences in school-based achievement" including prior achievement and lack of academic success. As a school, we should be looking into what we can offer to support these very young families in creating strong home learning environments. We feel very committed to the idea of the school reaching the community beyond school age, both before and after. This community aspect could be built into the students experience, embedded in our curriculum, so when planning a project they would look at how they could involve or support the community. For example creating and producing plays for pre-schoolers, writing stories and running a story time at the library, devising games and spending time as play workers in the local parks.

Creativity is also identified as another prior influence on achievement. It has been found that "Programs with more hands-on activities had stronger effects than those relying on more passive methods" "Those activities that directly adressed students' initial understandings were much more powerful than those which focused more on presentation of accurate scientific information with less attention to students' current understanding" As a school, our vision is for children to build their learning on practical experiences. To investigate their ideas, test, explore and update their thinking through this process. As the children will be leading their learning, being supported in posing their own questions as well as discovering the answers, it will always start from what they already know/understand and build upon this.

Each of the chapters had a great deal of detail, and would make enormous blog posts, so I have made notes on this sub-section of Background, in my next post from this book I will continue onto Attitudes and dispositions.