Giving Compass' Take:

• Robert Pondiscio breaks down five ways for researchers and policymakers to support better education practices.

• How can funders help to spread these practices? How do these practices play out in your local context? 

• Read about education innovation ideas for 2019. 

1. Ask the right questions

Education research lacks the precision to dictate classroom practice. “What works?” is the wrong question. “The right question is ‘Under what conditions does this work?’” observes Dylan Wiliam. He also notes that education research suffers from “physics envy”—a wish common among social scientists (and policymakers) for the mathematical precision and certainty of “hard science.”

2. Understand and accept trade-offs

A good example the values-laden nature of education research and its application is the new RAND study that found “restorative justice” lowered suspension rates and closed racial disparities in suspension rates, while improving teachers’ perception of school their schools’ environments. However it lowered students’ perception of classroom management and their peers respect for one another. It also had significant downside for test scores, particularly for black students. Let’s assume subsequent studies replicate these findings (never a certainty—another confounding problem for policymakers). So does it “work?” A debate about trade-offs and opportunity costs is very different than arguing whether something “works.”

3. Kill education myths

A modest start to improving instructional sophistication is identifying common myths about education and stopping them. A good example of this is “learning styles,” the theory that students have an optimal way of taking in new information, and that instruction is most effective when teachers know each student’s learning style and adapt their instruction to account for it. The evidence base for learning styles isn’t just thin, it’s been as thoroughly debunked as phrenology and astrology. Yet according to some studies, over 90 percent of teachers still believe it.

4. Learn the lessons of cognitive science

Some myths are benign, others have upended schooling entirely. The unquestioned belief in “twenty-first-century skills” holds that it’s more important for kids to learn, practice, and master critical thinking, problem solving, cooperation, and creativity than to study any particular body of knowledge. But cognitive science tells us those cognitive “skills” are not directly teachable or transferable like, say, riding a bike. They are largely “domain specific.”

5. Stop demanding bad practice through policy

If there’s a policy play here, it’s not “identify best practices and make them mandatory.” It’s stop functionally demanding bad practice through poorly conceived testing and accountability measures.

Read the full article about supporting better education practices by Robert Pondiscio at Education Next.