Consultant helps teachers understand how students can become their own teachers

Karen Flories left the golden-arched M of corporate McDonalds for the ABCs of the classroom.
She began as a special education teacher in an alternative high school and later became an English teacher at Romeoville High School near Chicago. After accepting the position as department chair for the English department, Flories began working in the school district office where she was the literacy and social studies director, and left the district as the executive director of Educational Services.

“I brought Visible Learning to my school district when I had that kind of influence to be able to make some great things happen,” she said. “As heartbreaking as it was to leave the public education spectrum – we made such great things happen in the district – I decided to go full-time and work as a consultant.”

Flories, who has been a consultant for seven years, led a workshop last month for diocesan teachers.

“Visible Learning is a body of research that tries to help teachers have an instructional toolbox that gives them the best chance possible to make the needle move in a positive direction for student achievement,” she said. “The premise in the foundation of Visible Learning is that we want teachers to see learning through the eyes of their students so that students can eventually become their own teachers.”

She presents different ideas, strategies, and beliefs to help teachers do so.

“Visible Learning is really intended to try to level the playing field and to try and give kids a new way to define themselves as a learner,” Flories said.

One of the areas she explored with the diocesan teachers was what students believe makes a good learner.

“A lot of kids say a good learner gets all A’s or a good learner doesn’t talk when the teacher is talking. And while we want kids to follow rules and we want kids to strive for high performance, there are a lot of kids who aren’t going to get all A’s,” she said.

“We don’t want those students to automatically feel like they’re not good learners. Instead, we try to say a good learner perseveres. How about a good learner sets goals? How about a good learner asks questions?”
The idea is to help students and their parents view a new way of what it means to be a good learner, Flories said.

Visible Learning also lightens the teacher’s load.

“It tries to remove all of the work from the shoulders of the teacher and tries to put some of that work into the hands of kids,” she said. “The gentleman who pioneered the Visible Learning research, John Hattie, says the teachers shouldn’t be the ones who are exhausted at the end of the day. We want our kids to be tired at the end of the day from all of the learning that they’ve engaged in.”

Decades ago there was a one-size-fits-all approach to education, Flories said.

“And that definitely helped enough kids succeed. We still want to get to that same destination of learning, but we’re inviting teachers to think about the different pathways that kids can take to be able to master whatever it is that they need to learn.”