High Impact Teaching Strategies

What are the High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS)?

The HITS are 10 instructional practices that reliably increase student learning wherever they are applied. They emerge from the findings of tens of thousands of studies of what has worked in classrooms across Australia and the world. International experts such as John Hattie and Robert Marzano have synthesised these studies and ranked hundreds of teaching strategies by the contribution they make to student learning [see the ‘What is effect size?’ box]. The HITS sit at the top of these rankings.

What is effect size?

Effect size is a measure of the contribution an education intervention makes to student learning. It allows us to move beyond questions about whether an intervention worked or not, to questions about how well an intervention worked in varying contexts. This evidence supports a more scientific and rigorous approach to building professional knowledge.
Highly regarded educational researchers and resources, including Hattie, Lemov, Marzano, and the Teaching and Learning Toolkit – Australia (Evidence for Learning, 2017), have used slightly different methodologies to measure effect size and identify HITS. Despite their varied approaches and terminology, all agree on a number of powerful strategies. These strategies are reflected in this HITS resource and the AITSL Standards and the Classroom Practice Continuum.
Some teachers will ask, “But will they work in my classroom, with my students?” Only the professional judgement of teachers, both individual and collective, can answer that question. For any concept or skill that students need to learn, using a HITS to teach it increases the chances that students will learn it, compared to using other strategies. But they are reliable, not infallible. Knowing their students and how they learn, teachers are well-placed to judge whether a HITS or another strategy is the best choice to teach that concept or skill.
The HITS will not be new to most teachers. The purpose of this resource is to bring them together in one place, along with practical examples of how other Victorian teachers are using them successfully.
The HITS alone do not constitute a complete framework for professional practice. They are part of the full set of instructional practices that contribute to a comprehensive pedagogical model [see diagram below].
This resource offers:

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  accessible, succinct guidance on using high impact, evidence-based strategies
  

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  bite sized insights that enable you to focus on one or more HITS, and to progressively build expertise, and
  

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  scalable possibilities, allowing individual teachers, Professional Learning Communities, and whole schools, to set goals and actions centred on the HITS.