In the U.S. at least, there is a significant structural issue in schools that keeps bad teaching around: there is little communication and instructional accountability across grade levels.
Take, for example, the ideal of intellectual autonomy--an ideal that just about everyone believes in as a goal for schooling. What happens when you throw this ideal at a connected instructional system, where grade-level teaching sees itself as a link in the chain--where the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade teachers all collaborate to produce desired student outcomes by, for example, the end of middle school, and stakeholders, from admins to parents, have bought into this arrangement? At the very least, I would think it more likely, given this connected structure, for the ideal of "intellectual autonomy" to be systematically developed across students' learning journeys over time within a school.
But school instructional systems (again, at least in the U.S.) don't work this way, in general. They are not continuous. They are discrete points. So what happens when you throw this ideal of intellectual independence at the discrete system? Well, everyone has to develop it and demonstrate it fully and separately in their own classrooms, with little consultation or advice about how to make that happen from anyone but education consultants, think tanks, government institutions, and "thought leaders." This is why, no matter the cause célèbre, whether it's grit or growth mindset or problem-based learning, you see it promoted everywhere, from Kindergarten to high school. There is nearly zero incentive for anyone to say, "I believe in that ideal, but that's not my primary function as a 4th grade math teacher. I'm going to focus my instructional time heavily on giving students the knowledge they will need to move to the next level, which I won't really be around to see."
The ridiculous discreteness of the structure also goes some way to explaining why there are such pitched battles around pedagogies. The teaching style you fear the most is never intelligently processed and meted out over time, consistent with any common sense understanding of how students learn. Nope. It's "everything, everywhere, all at once."
There was an excellent paper by a UK government department on the problem of evidence based conclusions. The problem they found was the propensity of reports that were more evidence sprinkled than evidence based.
The pointed out the key item to look for is how well a report compares evidence for one conclusion to the next best support conclusion.
The question for any change proponent is have you established this is the best change we can make for our situation?
In the U.S. at least, there is a significant structural issue in schools that keeps bad teaching around: there is little communication and instructional accountability across grade levels.
Take, for example, the ideal of intellectual autonomy--an ideal that just about everyone believes in as a goal for schooling. What happens when you throw this ideal at a connected instructional system, where grade-level teaching sees itself as a link in the chain--where the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade teachers all collaborate to produce desired student outcomes by, for example, the end of middle school, and stakeholders, from admins to parents, have bought into this arrangement? At the very least, I would think it more likely, given this connected structure, for the ideal of "intellectual autonomy" to be systematically developed across students' learning journeys over time within a school.
But school instructional systems (again, at least in the U.S.) don't work this way, in general. They are not continuous. They are discrete points. So what happens when you throw this ideal of intellectual independence at the discrete system? Well, everyone has to develop it and demonstrate it fully and separately in their own classrooms, with little consultation or advice about how to make that happen from anyone but education consultants, think tanks, government institutions, and "thought leaders." This is why, no matter the cause célèbre, whether it's grit or growth mindset or problem-based learning, you see it promoted everywhere, from Kindergarten to high school. There is nearly zero incentive for anyone to say, "I believe in that ideal, but that's not my primary function as a 4th grade math teacher. I'm going to focus my instructional time heavily on giving students the knowledge they will need to move to the next level, which I won't really be around to see."
The ridiculous discreteness of the structure also goes some way to explaining why there are such pitched battles around pedagogies. The teaching style you fear the most is never intelligently processed and meted out over time, consistent with any common sense understanding of how students learn. Nope. It's "everything, everywhere, all at once."
There was an excellent paper by a UK government department on the problem of evidence based conclusions. The problem they found was the propensity of reports that were more evidence sprinkled than evidence based.
The pointed out the key item to look for is how well a report compares evidence for one conclusion to the next best support conclusion.
The question for any change proponent is have you established this is the best change we can make for our situation?