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Visible Learning for Literacy: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and ]ohn Hattie Corwin Literacy Paperback, 190 pages, 2016.
Seasoned literacy authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey have teamed up with acclaimed educational researcher John Hattie in their first collaboration, Visible Learning for Literacy: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning. Hattie's comprehensive reviews of literature, Visible Learning (2009) and Visible Learning for Teachers (2012) are the basis for this book. Fisher and Frey applied his meta-analyses to literacy instruction in grades K-12. This book is a must read for educators who crave information that goes beyond what works and instead focuses on what works best. It should also be required reading for college professors and principals who are tasked with supervising and evaluating teacher effectiveness. Last but not least, it provides endless topics for teacher leaders and those responsible for providing quality professional development for educators.
The first line of the book reads, "Every student deserves a great teacher, not by chance, but by design." The design to help all teachers be great is outlined in Chapters 2-4 in which the authors explain the difference and importance in surface, deep and transfer literacy learning. They point out that it is important for teachers to understand their students' phases in learning in order to match the instructional strategies to the phases. What works for surface learning doesn't necessarily work for deep...