Is the thesis that the majority of teachers and education employees are engaged in an active conspiracy to prevent the introduction of new teaching methods?
I can’t speak in sweeping generality here, but I can speak from my own experience. (I’m finishing a dissertation in educational research and bump into this pretty frequently.)
Teachers who have been “in the trenches” for any appreciable length of time (say, 5+ years) have developed some sense of what is necessary from a pragmatic point of view. They’re usually extremely well-intentioned toward the children, and often for that reason they resist a lot of the suggestions brought to them from educational research. There’s this sense that education researchers are too ivory-tower to know how things really happen in a classroom. There are exceptions, but they’re actually quite rare.
However, not all education researchers are naive about this issue. I know of many who were teachers in public schools for a decade or so before they moved on to research to do something about the mess they personally encountered. They’re able to build face-to-face rapport more readily with teachers. But that’s simply not good enough to convince teachers as a collective to try something new, even if the pragmatics of how to do it are spelled out in excruciating detail. They seem to resist change purely because it’s change, especially if it interferes with their personal emotional impressions of what it means to teach (which, unfortunately, were instilled more by accidental impressions than by training or rational scrutiny).
In addition to this challenge, a painfully large portion of education researchers don’t apply reasonable scientific methods. The majority of articles I’ve encountered in this field amount to philosophical commentary, which is often based on spotty evidence that to me would constitute preliminary research. So surprise surprise, a lot of the reform suggestions being proposed are saturated in cognitive biases that no one seems to be at all aware of let alone make any effort to account for. And, thus, most “well-researched” reform suggestions really don’t work in classrooms! So on the rare occasions that teachers are willing to try something radically new based on a new theory (or are required to by fiat), in most cases it doesn’t make much of a difference at best.
And this is ignoring the fact that researchers frequently forget about (or never consider!) the inferential distance teachers have to traverse to even understand what they’re supposed to do let alone do it well enough to teach. The “New Math” of the 1960s was a spectacular failure both because the theory behind it was psychologically and neurologically bankrupt and also because the teachers weren’t able to implement the original idea anyway.
So no, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s more that teachers are tired of having people try to mechanize their profession as though it didn’t require any skill to interact with children, especially since the vast majority of attempts to do so that they’ve encountered failed dramatically—often because the reform wouldn’t have worked anyway, but often because it was implemented very poorly due to undertraining the teachers in the first place.
I can’t speak in sweeping generality here, but I can speak from my own experience. (I’m finishing a dissertation in educational research and bump into this pretty frequently.)
Teachers who have been “in the trenches” for any appreciable length of time (say, 5+ years) have developed some sense of what is necessary from a pragmatic point of view. They’re usually extremely well-intentioned toward the children, and often for that reason they resist a lot of the suggestions brought to them from educational research. There’s this sense that education researchers are too ivory-tower to know how things really happen in a classroom. There are exceptions, but they’re actually quite rare.
However, not all education researchers are naive about this issue. I know of many who were teachers in public schools for a decade or so before they moved on to research to do something about the mess they personally encountered. They’re able to build face-to-face rapport more readily with teachers. But that’s simply not good enough to convince teachers as a collective to try something new, even if the pragmatics of how to do it are spelled out in excruciating detail. They seem to resist change purely because it’s change, especially if it interferes with their personal emotional impressions of what it means to teach (which, unfortunately, were instilled more by accidental impressions than by training or rational scrutiny).
In addition to this challenge, a painfully large portion of education researchers don’t apply reasonable scientific methods. The majority of articles I’ve encountered in this field amount to philosophical commentary, which is often based on spotty evidence that to me would constitute preliminary research. So surprise surprise, a lot of the reform suggestions being proposed are saturated in cognitive biases that no one seems to be at all aware of let alone make any effort to account for. And, thus, most “well-researched” reform suggestions really don’t work in classrooms! So on the rare occasions that teachers are willing to try something radically new based on a new theory (or are required to by fiat), in most cases it doesn’t make much of a difference at best.
And this is ignoring the fact that researchers frequently forget about (or never consider!) the inferential distance teachers have to traverse to even understand what they’re supposed to do let alone do it well enough to teach. The “New Math” of the 1960s was a spectacular failure both because the theory behind it was psychologically and neurologically bankrupt and also because the teachers weren’t able to implement the original idea anyway.
So no, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s more that teachers are tired of having people try to mechanize their profession as though it didn’t require any skill to interact with children, especially since the vast majority of attempts to do so that they’ve encountered failed dramatically—often because the reform wouldn’t have worked anyway, but often because it was implemented very poorly due to undertraining the teachers in the first place.