On serendipity and desperation
How teachers come into contact with evidence-based practice
Not that long ago, I was asked by Dr. Nathaniel Swain about how I began on my evidence-based practice journey. I’m paraphrasing of course, but he asked if coming from a background in marketing enabled me to cut through the bull, as it were. The answer was yes, but not really. I met a woman during my ITE, who retrained to be an English teacher after a career as a veterinarian. Being career changers, we were particularly concerned about the vague pseudoscience being offered up as Science of Learning. I still lean on her regularly and I like to think she is able to lean on me too.
But the reason I also say ‘not really’ is that for the first few years of my career, I really stumbled through. If evidence-based practice came my way, it was really due to my own research and observing teachers I admired who took a direct instruction approach, feeding huge amounts of knowledge and feedback to students because it produced results (perhaps inefficiently given the volume of feedback).
I wondered how others fell into contact with evidence-based practice and I was interested to see several threads coming through. My tweet revealed that
Hattie has been hugely influential. I have my own problems with Hattie, but there’s no doubt that his work has empowered teachers to (at the very least) think about what they are doing and the power of their decisions.
Universities are letting students down. Much of this learning is done after teachers graduate, especially concerning in primary years education.
School leadership often forces teachers away from the evidence-based path, either mandating approaches like discovery or inquiry, or dismissing those who try to introduce science of learning in the classroom.
Teachers - including most heartbreakingly parents who are trying to teach their own children where schools have failed them - are desperate and look to evidence-based practice for solutions.
I’m willing to speculate that for many, this kind of frustration leads to moral injury, with many teachers leaving the profession. It can also be a very lonely path and quite a few commenters mentioned that Twitter was their true professional learning community for this reason. For anyone who feels remotely threatened by evidence-based practice, we are still a long way off from the pejorative medical model. Perhaps presenting a lack of evidence-based practice as the real social justice issue is the answer.
this: "dismissing those who try to introduce science of learning in the classroom." Ultimately those of us trying to promote evidence-based practice at my school were labelled as right wing.