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“Research-based” ( or “evidence-based”) teaching–What actually is it?
A lot of teachers ask this question, because the body of educational research is impenetrable unless you have an advanced degree in one of the social sciences. And because people in our profession tend to throw around terms like “research-based” and “evidence-based,” and it can be difficult to know whether they are using the terms…
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BOOK REVIEW: The Cult of Creativity, by Samuel W. Franklin (2023, Oxford University Press)
Educators cherish the goal of helping students to be creative, but what that means can be hard to pin down. So many activities can be classed as creative, and, sometimes, acts that look creative are in fact exercises in rote repetition. In The Cult of Creativity, Samuel W. Franklin, a cultural historian, shows that the…
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Wasting Education Dollars on the Culture War
Of all the ways in which taxpayers money could be used to improve schools, a school district defending lawsuits because they insist on banning books is about the worst. Yet that is what Florida school districts are doing, as a Trump-appointed federal judge has just pointed out to one of them: https://www.theledger.com/story/news/local/state/2024/12/17/florida-school-district-urged-to-settle-costly-book-ban-lawsuit/77029016007/
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The Logistics of Teaching
The phrase “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” has been attributed to various military leaders. I suspect it’s apocryphal, and that, if a serious soldier did ever say it, they meant that serious soldiers don’t discuss strategy without discussing logistics at the same time, because the strategy won’t succeed unless the logistics are made to…
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Group Work: A Check on the Research
In a previous post, I commented on the tendency of educators to say that an approach is “research based.” I wrote, “I’ve come to suspect that [the research] may sometimes be of low quality or exist only in rumor.” I committed to not believing such claims until I had conducted my own systematic check on…
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