The Artful Science of Education
Education is important. Let's do it well.
It’s hard to have a school-wide faculty meeting, or open an education magazine, without encountering the word “data.” Once highly idiosyncratic, teaching has rightly become more and more a skill to be learned with outcomes to be measured. I could not be happier about this move from teaching-as-witchcraft (or worse, merely bad theatre) to teaching-as-skill. …
Educational research is at once deserving and undeserving of its bad reputation. Deserving because much of it has been weak. But undeserving because the most unfortunate practices in schooling – teaching to various “learning styles,” for example – became entrenched because of a near-complete absence of research or critical scrutiny. The problem of weak educational …
If Hospitals Were Like Schools… Imagine a visit to the emergency room that went something like this. Worried you might be having a heart attack, you complain of chest pains. Instead of using the usual protocols, the attending physician says, “Yes, thousands of other doctors have had good results using what’s tried and true, but …
Continue reading “Why You Might Not Want An Innovative School for Your Kids”
We all want (even) better schools. But anyone close to the challenge of improving schools knows that often part of the problem is not too little inspiration but too much. Attempts to improve bring a flood of well-intentioned ideas. “We should have a later start to the school day” “We have to teach 21st century …
Continue reading “Why Changing the Carpets Will Not Improve Schools”
Just this week, NPR launched its newest program, Invisibilia. Billed as a show that “explores the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions,” it is another in the Radiolab and This American Life mold. It might not get the listeners that Serial did, but it is a thoughtful …
Continue reading “What Invisibilia Teaches Us About Schooling”
“We really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science… The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman As long as I’ve been exposed to educational research, I’ve been turning over in my mind the advice of Richard …
Readers of this space know of my obsession with philosophical (really, epistemological) issues. Mostly, I am concerned with separating the wheat from the chaff in ideas – isolating the truly silly, from the potentially true, from the probably true, from the certain. In education, these categories tend to get tossed around together, without much reference …