Fifteen years or so ago, after a classroom visit, I would ask the teacher some form of the following question, “How do you think your lesson went?” The hope was to create some sort of self-reflection and dialogue.
Oh, how I was wrong.
If, on average, teachers talk about 70 to 80 percent of the total class time (Hattie, 2012), how can teachers self-reflect on the lesson they have taught?
I have completed close to 4,000 classroom visits over the last 16 years, and the following scenario plays out over and over. The teacher is addressing the class and then says, “Let’s discuss the following…” The teacher then delivers a monologue to the class. Stopping only occasionally to ask some surface level questions.
“This dominance of teacher talk leads to particular relationships being developed in classrooms – mainly aimed at facilitating teacher talk and controlling the transmission of knowledge” (Hattie, 2012, Locations 1727-1729). This control leads to quiet, well behaved classes that respond to closed questions where thinking is at low levels (and in most cases no level of thinking at all).
This is certainly not class discussion. With an effect size of 0.82 (Hattie, 2009), class discussion has the potential to considerably accelerate student achievement, increasing a student’s chances of success by 122% and placing them in the top 79% of their peers.
As Hattie (2011) remarks, “I think it’s fascinating that we have a profession where kids come to school to watch us work” (para 10).
In an interesting study, Yair (2000) had 865 students (grades 6 – 12) wear digital wristwatches that beeped throughout the day. When the wristwatch beeped students were asked to answer a short questionnaire, which included the student’s engagement with the learning task in the classroom. Engagement being defined as students who were attentive to the task at hand.
With an effect size of 0.46 (Hattie, 2009), time on-task has the potential to accelerate student achievement, increasing a student’s chances of success by 58% and placing them in the top 68% of their peers.
Yair (2000) notes, “on average, the students were engaged with their lessons only 54% of the time. That is, they attended for only about half the time to the resources that the schools provided for academic instruction and to the opportunities to learn that the teachers presented” (p. 254). In other words, students were on-task for only a little more than half the time and this decreased as the grade level increased. Specifically, students that were on-task decreased from 62.1% in 6th grade to only 49% in the 12th grade.
Couple Yair’s research with Antonetti and Garver’s (2015) research of 17,124 classroom visits and the picture gets even bleaker. That is, as the grade level increases students being involved in the activities of listening and watching increases too. Specifically, high school students are on-task about half of the time while spending 63% of their class time listening and watching (Antonetti & Garver, 2015; Yair, 2000). Really think about this…63% of the time, high school students are only asked to listen or watch, but their attention to this task is less than half the time!
Figure 1 Primary Student Activity by Grade
| Grade Levels | Activities Involving Listening/Watching | Identical Seat Work |
| PreK – Grade 2 | 37% | 44% |
| Grades 3 – 5 | 43% | 28% |
| Grades 6 – 8 | 52% | 18% |
| Grades 9 – 12 | 63% | 15% |
| All Grades (PreK – Grade 12) | 49% | 26% |
Ironically, Yair (2000) found that lecturing was the most common instructional method (40%), yet it had the lowest rate of attentiveness to the instructional task.
Is listening to a lecture an instruction task?
A learning task needs a cognitive load and a lecture does not produce that load. “Until there is an articulated task completed by each individual student, there is no guarantee of thinking or learning” (Antonetti & Stice, 2018, p. 11). Since students can only be entertained by a lecture and not engaged by it, adverse effects on student achievement will be profound. Especially for at risk students (Antonetti & Stice, 2018; Yair, 2000).
“The more students perceive relevant instruction, the more they feel challenged, and the greater academic demand on students—the more students are engaged with instruction—the less prone they are to external preoccupations” (Yair, 2000, p. 256).
In my own research from the 2018 to 2024 school years, 1,178 classes were observed for levels of thinking and being on-task. Of the classes categorized as having Mid/High Level Thinking, approximately 95% (316 out of 334 classes) were also on-task. In contrast, among the classes with No/Low Level Thinking, only about 71% (601 out of 844 classes) were on-task. This demonstrates a substantial difference in on-task proportions between classes with Mid/High Level Thinking and those with No/Low Level Thinking, with a difference of 23% (e.g., 95% versus 71%). This suggests that classes with Mid/High Level Thinking had a significantly higher likelihood of being on-task compared to those with No/Low Level Thinking. In other words, the odds of students being on-task are 7 times higher in classes with Mid/High Level Thinking compared to classes with No/Low Level Thinking.
Teachers can challenge students by checking for understanding and not moving to the next standard until students understand the current standard. In essence, mastery learning. In a three year study, from 2010 to 2013, involving two different schools and 986 classroom visits, I categorized the percentage of students that a teacher checked for understanding during a class period and who were on-task and the percentage of students that were correct in these formative assessments and on-task. Threshold levels of mastery were both set to 80%.
The results were as expected.
The odds are 6.4 times higher for a class to be on-task when teachers check 80% of the students for understanding than a class when teachers check less than 80% of the students for understanding.
AND
The odds are 6.7 times higher for classes to be on-task where teachers did not move to the next standard until at least 80% of their classes understood the current standard.
For learning to occur, students need to be attentive to the instructional task. However, students are on-task a little more than 50% of any given class time. And, at the high school level, 63% of the instructional tasks are to listen and watch. This scenario is troublesome.
A teacher cannot check for understanding and increase the challenge if students are listening or watching. In general, schools provide instruction that encourages average on-task rates which alienate students from instruction. “The diffuse walls of instruction in classrooms allow external factors to consume students’ attention, culminating in significant losses of human capital, especially among minority and at-risk students” (Yair, 2000, p. 263).
Let’s stop looking at the teaching and start focusing on the impact on learning.
1 The BESD standardized risk ratio
References
Antonetti, J. & Garver, J. (2015). 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong: Strategies That Engage Students, Promote Active Learning, and Boost Achievement. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.
Antonetti, J. & Stice, T. (2018). Powerful Task Design: Rigorous and Engaging Tasks to Level Up Instruction. SAGE Publishing. Kindle Edition
Hattie, J. A. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.
Hattie, J. (2011, June 10). Just shut up and listen, expert tells teachers. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au
Hattie, J. A. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on teachers. New York: Routledge. Kindle Edition.
Yair, G. (2000). Educational Battlefields in America: The Tug-of-War over Students’ Engagement with Instruction. Sociology of Education, 73(4), 247-269.
Categories: Education Research, Teaching and Learning