55: John Hattie On The Education Politics Of Distraction And Collaborative Expertise.

John Hattie is the Director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne. He's also the Chair of the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leaders, and co director of the Science of Learning Research Centre. His work is known widely throughout the world.

In June 2015 he wrote two papers that were intended to be read together,

What doesn't work in education: The politics of distraction.

What works best in education: The politics of collaborative expertise.

The titles alone sound provocative and controversial. But the message is in essence quite simple. He argues that one year of input should equal one year of progress, for all students, no matter where they start. It sounds obvious, but he argues that we are too easily distracted from the real issues, and that we don't harness enough, the power of collaborating with our best educators to create what he calls a coalition of the successful.

I caught up with John at the Improving Initial Teacher Education conference in Melbourne, in April 2016, to dig a little bit deeper into these two papers.

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