Brendan Scribner, Director of Implementation and Success for Exemplars, began his career in education as a middle school math teacher in Vermont in 1998, before spending the last 20 years as a fourth-grade classroom teacher in Hanover, New Hampshire. He earned his master’s in the science of teaching mathematics from the Vermont Math Initiative. As a passionate classroom educator, he strives to be a mathematical identity builder with a keen focus on learning experiences that cultivate wonder and joy and reveal the beauty of mathematics for all. Brendan supports educators at Exemplars, with a strong commitment to building contextually relevant problem solving into established curricula. An area of particular importance in his work is the power of productive discourse and how “talk moves” within a classroom. When he is not immersed in his work as an educator, he enjoys family time, cycling, hiking, skiing, leisure travel, and crafting unique wood products.

Professor John Hattie of the University of Melbourne, Australia, has long researched performance indicators and evaluation in education. His research, Visible Learning, is the culmination of more than 25 years of examining and synthesizing more than 2,100 meta-analyses comprising more than 132,000 studies involving 300 million students around the world. Professor Hattie wanted to understand which variables were the most important. Although “almost everything we do improves learning,” why not prioritize the ones that will have the greatest effect? He set about calculating a score or “effect size” for each, according to its bearing on student learning and taking into account such aspects as its cost to implement. The average effect size was 0.4, a marker that represented a year’s growth per year of schooling for a student. Visible Learning+ professional learning enables schools and districts around the world to effectively implement the core findings of the Visible Learning research.