“It is gone. What began as Ted Sizer’s ground-breaking effort to reform U.S.’s 25,000 high schools in 1984 reached 1000-plus schools by 1997, the year Sizer retired from CES. By 2017, however, CES had closed operations with less than 100 affiliated schools. Is this another story of a reform birthed in one educational crisis and […]
“These staple instructional practices, while criticized–often severely by generations of pedagogical reformers–are, in 2023, alive and well in charter schools, regular elementary and secondary public schools, and higher education. And they even persist amid a revolution in teachers and students using high-tech devices in and out of the classroom. Are these ways of teaching simply instances of […]
“Similar claims about new technologies have been made before. Recall that, earlier generations of technophiles claimed that students using graphing calculators in class would transform math instruction (and raise test scores). Calculators surely helped students and teachers but did not alter dominant ways of teaching math.”
“Like others, I have concluded that working directly on individual and collective teacher norms, building broader and deeper teacher knowledge and skills in classroom instruction—not big-ticket structural changes—have a far better chance of improving teaching practices… That a scrum of research studies and policymaker pronouncements in the past few years have affirmed teachers’ influence in students’ […]
“Both my experience and research have changed my mind about the role of schools in society. I have become skeptical of anyone spouting words about schools being in the vanguard of social reform—even from a President I admire. Yet, I must confess that in my heart, I still believe that content-smart and classroom-smart teachers who […]
“Adoption of an innovation in schooling has less to do with what the research says and far more about what school leaders and practitioners believe about students, teaching, learning, and knowledge.”
“The same year that armistice ended World War I, Columbia University professor William Heard Kilpatrick produced his own shot heard round the world: “The Project Method.”
“In viewing technological innovations as a sub-set of curricular, instructional, and organizational reforms, then, teachers, principals, and parents can identify patterns and figure out possible consequences for the adoption of the innovation. They can track the journey as it goes from policy to classroom practice, and expect certain outcomes while being open to unanticipated ones […]
“High school is broken in America. Its buildings and classes are old and stodgy. As an institution, it’s unchanging, built to crank out factory workers and thus unsuited for our modern, high-tech era… It’s a popular narrative reflecting the very real fears held by so many young people today when it comes to economic instability, inequality, […]