John Hattie

Spurningar og svör frá Sli.Do

How can teachers respond when parents have little or no expectation that their children will do well at school, or seem to hold no ambition on their behalf?

Governments made school compulsory partly because teachers are more effective at raising achievement and love of learning than some parents. So we have an obligation to hold appropriately high expectations for ALL students, and in particular those whose parents have lower expectations.   This is all the more important given the recent release of PISA 2025, which showed a decline in ‘signals’ from parents about the value of education, which means we educators have to raise these stakes even more.

Teachers cannot require parents to become ambitious, but they can prevent low family expectations from becoming the student’s educational ceiling.

• Begin with curiosity, not judgment. Apparent low expectations may reflect previous disappointment, unfamiliarity with the school system, cultural differences, financial pressures, or an attempt to protect the child from failure. 

• Share specific evidence of possibility. Replace general reassurance with concrete examples: “Aisha explained this idea clearly today. Her next step is to justify it with evidence, and I believe she can do that.” 

• Make progress visible. Show students and parents where the learner began, what has improved, and what the next attainable challenge will be. Evidence of growth can help adjust expectations. 

• Communicate high standards with assurance. The message is: “The standard is demanding, your child is capable of reaching it, and we will provide the teaching and support needed.” 

• Give parents practical ways to help. Ask them to show interest, discuss what their child is learning, encourage persistence, and support regular attendance. They do not need to teach the content or complete the work. 

• Strengthen the student’s own expectations. Help students identify valued goals, recognize progress, seek feedback, and develop credible pathways to future study, work, and participation. 

• Provide additional believing adults. Mentors, teachers, leaders and community members can help create a network of high expectations when this support is limited at home. 

The central question is not whether parents possess ambition in the abstract. It is whether the student repeatedly receives credible messages, supported by evidence and effective teaching, that worthwhile success is possible. This is the ‘virus’ we want students to spread in their family discussions.

How do I change negative leaders among my pupils, who control the others and the classroom in a negative way, to a more positive way?

Yes, leaders can dampen excellence, model unhelpful ways of affecting others, and diminish the learning culture. The aim is not to remove their influence, but to help them understand its impact and redirect their leadership towards enabling others to participate, take risks, and learn. When leadership relies on control, fear or compliance, teachers become less willing to discuss problems, acknowledge errors, challenge established practices or evaluate their impact openly. The aim is to shift leadership from controlling people to creating the conditions in which teachers and students can learn: never easy, but critical to students’ success in the school.  

• Make the impact visible. Move the discussion from leaders’ intentions to the consequences of their actions. Use evidence from staff voice, student experience, classroom observations, staff retention, and learning outcomes. 

• Establish collective expectations for leadership. Define effective leadership through its impact on trust, professional dialogue, collective efficacy, teaching quality, and student learning. 

• Create structures that reduce dependence on one leader. Look for opportunities where there is distributed leadership, transparent decision-making, multiple sources of evidence, and genuine opportunities for staff and students to contribute. 

• Protect productive disagreement. When working with your colleagues, mirror the desirable attributes of productive disagreement: invite challenge, seek second opinions, and treat criticism as information about impact rather than as disloyalty. 

• Provide coaching with measurable goals. In your team, agree on specific changes, such as listening before deciding, seeking contrary evidence, increasing staff participation, and following up on feedback. 

From a Visible Learning perspective, leadership should be judged by its impact on learning. The central question is: Does this leader create the trust, challenge, and collective expertise that enable teachers and students to improve? When this does not occur, it is a major reason why teachers move schools – so check turnover as part of deciding to work in a school.

How can we spark interest in students who seem indifferent to how they do at school, even after we have tried a range of different approaches?

Yes, many students are disruptive, avoiders, or withdrawers – the latter two are harder to detect (as that is part of their skill), and they are unmotivated to take on challenges, and value what you value. 

But a lack of motivation can come from feeling there is no chance of improvement, so why bother. Then lack of motivation can protect students from anticipated failure, embarrassment, or work that seems irrelevant, unachievable, or insufficiently challenging. Trying more activities will not necessarily help until teachers identify what is making engagement costly or pointless for the student.

• Diagnose before intervening again. Ask whether the student lacks prior knowledge, expects to fail, feels unseen, finds the work too easy, does not understand its purpose, or fears public comparison. Know thy student. Listen (not just talk) to them. Explore whether the student lacks essential prior knowledge, expects to fail, feels unseen, finds the work too easy, cannot see its purpose, or fears embarrassment and comparison. Ask what makes learning worthwhile, difficult or safe from the student’s perspective. The student’s explanation provides the starting point for deciding what to do next.

• Listen to the student’s explanation. Ask: “When did school begin to feel less worthwhile?” “What makes it difficult to start?” and “What would make this work worth attempting?” Listen without immediately correcting the response. 

• Create an early experience of credible success. Set a demanding but attainable task, provide the necessary instruction, and make the student’s improvement visible. Success becomes motivating when students can connect it to what they did. 

• Clarify the learning and its value. Students need to know what they are learning, why it matters, what success looks like, and how the present task connects to knowledge or problems they value. Would you play a video game and not have answers to these questions?

• Strengthen relationships and credibility. Students are more likely to invest effort when they believe the teacher understands them, treats them fairly, and will help them succeed. 

• Teach learning strategies explicitly. Some students appear unmotivated because they do not know how to begin, persist, seek help, use feedback, or recover after difficulty. 

• Reduce threats to dignity. Avoid public rankings, ability labels, excessive praise, and comparisons with other students. Give feedback privately when embarrassment may be a barrier. 

• Track small changes in engagement. Look beyond compliance. Notice whether the student begins more quickly, asks a question, persists longer, seeks feedback, or improves the quality of their work. 

Engagement is most likely when students can answer: What am I learning? Why is it worth learning? How am I progressing? What can I do next, and who will help me succeed?

What is the best way to approach a student with little or no ambition when it comes to school?

So, what is their ambition? Do not assume that a student lacks ambition simply because their aspirations differ from those valued by the school. Their ambition may concern relationships, belonging, mateship, independence, creativity, sport, work, family or life outside formal education. Begin by listening and discovering what matters to them. The task is then to connect those ambitions to learning and help the student see a credible pathway forward.

• Know thy student. Listen more than you talk. Ask what matters to them, what they enjoy, what they believe they do well, and what they hope their future might include. 

• Explore what is blocking ambition at school. The student may expect to fail, have experienced repeated difficulty, feel that they do not belong, or see little connection between school learning and the life they value. 

• Connect learning to their ambitions. Show how particular knowledge, skills and qualifications can expand rather than restrict their future choices. 

• Begin with a valued and attainable goal. Agree on a meaningful short-term goal that requires effort but remains within reach. 

• Create credible experiences of success. Provide appropriate challenge, explicit teaching and useful feedback. Help the student recognize how their actions and strategies contributed to improvement. 

• Make possibilities visible. Introduce the student to people, pathways and opportunities they may not know exist. Students cannot aspire to futures they cannot yet imagine. 

• Communicate high expectations with support. Say: “This will be challenging, but I believe you can learn it, and I will help you identify the next steps.” 

The aim is not to give students our ambitions for them. It is to understand their ambitions, expand what they believe is possible, and help them develop the knowledge, confidence, and strategies needed to pursue those possibilities.

If you could change one thing about a teacher’s mindset that you think would have the biggest impact on student success, what would you change and why?

I would want every teacher to walk into the classroom asking: “What is my impact today? Impact on what, for whom, and by how much?”  (And every leader to walk into a staffroom and ask the same three impact questions).

The purpose is not simply to teach a lesson, cover the curriculum, prepare students for a test, keep them busy, or make the lesson enjoyable. These may be parts of teaching, but none demonstrates that learning has occurred. The purpose is impact.

This means being clear about:

• Impact on what? What important knowledge, understanding, or skill should students gain? 

• Impact for whom? Which students are progressing, which are not, and who needs a different explanation, greater challenge, or additional support? 

• Impact by how much? What evidence will show the degree of learning, rather than merely whether students completed the activity? 

Teachers with this mind frame continually seek evidence of their influence. They listen to students, examine their own work, notice errors and misunderstandings, compare progress with the success criteria, and adapt their teaching accordingly. They do not ask only, “Did I teach it?” They ask, “Who learned it, how well did they learn it, and what do I need to do next?”

This mindset has the greatest potential because it changes teaching from delivering lessons to evaluating impact. The teacher becomes an evaluator of their own influence and sees learning through students' eyes.