ABSTRACT
A major theme of this book and of Visible Learning is that the quality of teaching makes all the difference.Yes, it would be nice to have eager,well-groomed, invested students with financially gifted parents, but our neighbourhood schools must take all who walk through the gates.We could ask that students need to be ‘ready’ and motivated, and come to school well fed, having been supported at home to do their homework, and are attentive and calm.This would be wonderful, but a major role of schooling is to help students to acquire these habits; we should not discriminate against students whose parents may not know how to help them to do so.We could remonstrate about the quality of teacher selection, preparation, promotion and so on – but the chances of making differences in these matters has thwarted so many for so long with little evidence of change.These issues are important, but history has shown that resolving them has not made much difference to student learning to the degree that is required. For example, there is not a lot of evidence that improving teacher education colleges has improved the overall quality of teaching (but, of course, this is not to say that we should stop trying to find better ways in which to educate teachers to have these impacts).We have used tests to measure the surface knowledge and used these data to name, shame, and blame – and teachers have learnt to play this game – but playing the testing game even more smartly will not make the difference. We have spent billions on buildings, restructured curricula to align with tests and vice versa, and engaged in wonderful debates on the peripheries of what really makes the difference.We love to talk about the things that do not really matter. Perhaps the greatest resistance to change of the current system is that we have asked millions of teachers to improve this system – and they have applied their creative thoughts, and thus improved and sustained the current model far beyond its use-by date.
