The 8th Annual Visible Learning Conference, originally slated for New Orleans, streamed live on Zoom with almost 1,000 colleagues online with us. The conference opened with our MC, Sonja Alexander, welcoming attendees with the New Second Line Song by Mardi Gras Big Shots and Milton Batiste transporting us to the lively streets of New Orleans with vivid imagery of the French quarter, Beignets, and of course, Bourbon Street!
Making Learning Visible: The Power of Implementation
This year’s conference theme centered on the importance of effective implementation with keynotes from John Hattie, Peter DeWitt, Jenni Donohoo, Sugata Mitra, and John Almarode and over 20 breakout sessions for attendees to choose from that explored three critical questions:
- What conditions support deep implementation of the key ideas of Visible Learning?
- What teacher and leader practices are essential for deep implementation?
- What evidence am I using to make the learning from implementation visible to students, teachers and leaders?
If you’re ready to put the research into practice and start your own implementation journey, contact us about Visible Learning+ today.
The Distance Learning Playbook
This summer has been a time for deep reflection of what effective teaching and learning looks like, and what it can look like—not only in our traditional classroom setting, but also in this current space of remote learning. Just in time for AVL, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie released The Distance Learning Playbook and attendees had the opportunity to participate in sessions designed around this content. During the sessions, attendees were able to begin planning for the re-opening of schools and really dive into how they could take their success in the distance learning environment and scale them up to ensure impact in student learning. Stay up to date with Distance Learning Playbook workshops and services here.
Visible Learning School Awards
If you attended AVL last year, then you know we presented our very first Visible Learning School Award to the team at Ka’imiloa Elementary. This year, we were thrilled to award not one, but three esteemed schools with the Visible Learning+ Certified School Award! These schools have dedicated years of hard work, focus, and commitment into earning this award. Each school’s principal and school leaders, teachers, coaches, and staff all understand the Visible Learning principles, use them in their daily work and are systematically embedding these principles at all levels within the school. They have also effectively developed the Visible Learning mindframes whereby everyone, including the students are evaluators of their own impact. Congratulations to Health Science High and Middle College from San Diego, CA; Metzler Elementary School from Spring, TX; and Lemm Elementary School from Spring, TX! Learn more about the Visible Learning+ School Awards and see if you qualify to apply today.
You win a book, you win a book…
What’s AVL without prizes? Throughout the course of the conference, attendees were firing up the chat box and social media and we took notice! We awarded multiple attendees with free books, free institute seats, and two lucky winners got free seats to join us again for the 2021 Annual Visible Learning Conference in Anaheim, CA!
The Second Decade of Visible Learning
In their closing keynote, John Hattie and John Almarode powerfully summarized the learning over the course of the two-day conference and built upon the very important conversation around building our schools back better. The presentation focused on the key question of how educators can move beyond implementation and into ‘masterful chef work in the kitchen’. This analogy approached the idea of impactful implementation as preparing vs. designing—that educators should not simply prepare prepackaged ‘dinners’, but rather utilize the tools and the skills they have to create new ‘meals.’ Educators can design impactful instruction because they have the ingredients to do so. If this current pandemic can teach us anything, it is to emphasize design over preparation—we must move toward designing instruction that has maximum impact for learners in any setting.
Next year, we’ll continue this conversation of impact in Anaheim, CA for the 2021 Annual Visible Learning Conference! Registration is now open at www.corwin.com/avl2021
Enjoy some of the tunes from the conference:
Professor Longhair go to the Mardi Gras
When the Saints Go Marchin’ in – Fats Domino
