The Impact of Visible Learning - Why It Matters

Everybody wants good results, i.e. quality, in the classroom. But what is the best way to achieve this? My 20 years as a foreign language teacher have given me a perspective that I try to implement in school. Things that I regarded as extremely important at the beginning of my teaching career are not necessarily as important today as they once were. New aspects of teaching and learning have appeared.


What is important?

The focus has for a long time been on tests, essays and other written assignments, but how do we document everything that happens individually to each student? And in what way does each student learn the things that we teachers have seen? We need to take into consideration many things that the students accomplish. Everything that happens during the lesson is significant.

Small group sizes, the amount of homework and the teacher training are all aspects that have been considered important in the learning process, but I think we need to choose new paths as far as learning and teaching are concerned.


What does visible learning mean?

Something that is visible can be seen. To me, learning is visible when my students see success. We need both visible learning and visible teaching in the classroom. Teachers need to see learning through the eyes of the students and students need to see themselves as their own teachers.


Things to focus on

As teachers we must help our students to try out new strategies to move on in the learning process. We must motivate our students and adapt our teaching to what's best for them. We have to support them and give feedback so that they can reflect upon both their results and their way of working towards them.


What do we need to do?

There is a big challenge in making learning visible to teachers and in making teaching visible to the students. We need to create an atmosphere in the classroom where students are allowed to make mistakes and where questions asked by students mean that they are curious to learn more. Response from classmates and words like collaboration and innovation are extremely important here.

Great tools to use in school

After having spent a fabulous week in Calgary, Canada, together with 76 amazing colleagues from 22 countries and fantastic people from SMART Technologies, I am more than ever convinced that SMART offers classrooms great tools for visible learning. Yesterday I installed SMART Notebook 15.1 on my classroom computer and I can't wait to start using it with my students! Another fascinating software is SMART amp, which I am also looking forward to starting using soon! I am so impressed by all the great features in SMART's software, features that are developed to maximize student achievement through collaboration, engagement, exploring and visible learning.