Visible Learning at Benton CSD

Visible Learning is an idea brought to us by John Hattie.  Beyond reading different books by Hattie, I have had the opportunity to learn about Visible Learning from Steve Ventura.  Grant Wood AEA has hosted opportunities for area educators to learn from Steve the past two years.  At one of his sessions this year, he shared a visual created by another district that he had worked with that describes characteristics of visible learners.  We put own out Benton CSD spin on the visual and now have it posted in classrooms throughout the building.  

We were able to talk about Visible Learning and student-centered classrooms during professional learning recently.  During the session, teachers reflected their current reality of knowledge and implementation and on what is getting in their way of implementing some of the ideas behind Visible Learning in their classroom.   Every conversation teachers had about what gets in the way went back to knowledge.  We need to learn more about attributes of student-centered classrooms and characteristics of visible learners.  If we want our students to learn in student-centered environments and embody the characteristics of visible learners, we have to build the ideas behind them into everything that we do and make it part of our culture.  This will be a focus for us moving forward.  We have started by using the Innovation Configuration Map, brought to us by the Iowa Department of Education.  We are excited to use this tool to guide our conversations in the future.  ​