PLEASE READ THIS: WHAT WORKS BEST IN EDUCATION: THE POLITICS OF COLLABORATIVE EXPERTISE

In the previous paper, 'What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction', John Hattie argued that the aim of schooling is for every student to gain at least a year’s worth of learning for a year’s input. He further argued that many policy-makers and systems are persistently drawn to the wrong kind of education interventions – distractions that do not help us realise this ambitious aim. Hattie argues here that we need instead is a defensible and compelling narrative that leads to long-term, coherent and focused system-wide attention on student learning. He calls this territory ‘the politics of collaborative expertise’. Its premise is that there is differential expertise across our schooling system and that there can be wide variation within schools. At the same time, there is a remarkable spread of expertise that can be identified, nurtured, esteemed and brought together to reduce this variance. The aim of this paper is to begin describing what a model of collaborative expertise would look like and what we need to get done to make it a reality. 

John Hattie is Professor and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Deputy Director of the Science of Learning Research Centre. He is the author of Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers, the co-author (with Gregory C. R. Yates) of Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn and co-editor (with Eric Anderman) of the International Guide to Student Achievement. If you want to read the full report it is available free at pearson.com.