by Terry Heick
Are you looking for the best source of education in education?
That with authentic data, practical studies and a wealth of participants and possibilities?
And your own class?
There is, more and more, the pressure to be based on research and data based. Or “Research based” and guided by “data -based decision -making”.
On paper, none of these warnings is incorrect, but as I said in ‘It is not a question of thought“The solidity of an idea depends on the quality of its effect.
“I love the idea of mobile learning, so I attach positive feelings that can lead me to downstream cognitive distortions, where I simplify its function or catastrophy our continuous misunderstanding of its potential in education. I defend it, but the “IT” (mobile learning, in this case) is simply an idea. The IT + context is different. It’s chemistry.
Consider it as a model: Idea -> Integration -> Effect.
The idea alone is only useful for vision or art. As an academic or intellectual exercise. As a fun dialogue or good old -fashioned bench races.
Integration is a question of design and engineering (designer and engineer being two minds of a teacher).
Ideas, integration and effects are completely important, of course, but everything is also recursive: one affects the other, the idea impacting integration, integration affecting the effect, the effect that breaks a new light on the idea.
There is a lesson here for all data champions.
Administrators giving teachers comments on lessons
Several years ago, I remember created a unit and submit it for “approval” by the administrators.
Once again, it is not a terrible idea of experienced administrators and informed district managers analyzing the planned education, providing useful comments, strengthening teaching practices and tightening the workflow; Teachers’ ability is improved while leaders lead and students harvest the advantages. In application, it was less effective – at least from my point of view.
I would submit a unit, I would be asked if I had collaborated with other teachers on the creation of the unit, said where the unit had not responded to the form “ non -negotiable ” (as opposed to content or quality), and, invariably, I asked him where the search should support almost all design choices. It would look like this:
Administration note in the margin of unity: you use critical thinking stems to support a discussion. Where is educational research to support this decision and what data do you use to decide that critical thinking stems are the best choice? What is the recent data? Please contact me by the end of the day with an answer.
While paper – these questions were legitimate and entirely reasonable, the effect of these questions was problematic. I should rush to find research to support the “ decisions ” and the data to support research and research which indicates that the data was legitimate, and so on, or I could read the research in education and then identify strategies “ “ “ “ `it` `, The lesson was already underway from a subject and a standard rather than the strategy to start. Everything must work together – research, subject, standard, strategies to which students were used to and to which they were not, the duration of the lesson, etc.
So now, after a lot of Sunday evening shock, I would have “submitted again” my plans. Not only was it a huge amount of work for the administrator, but it often left me until late at night, or sent me to school early the next day to revise my lessons (then my unit because the lesson had changed).
And none of this did nothing to improve the life of students.
Research -based teaching is not the objective
The idea (to approve all the lessons and units in time achieved) was good; The effect was terrible. So let’s go back to the search for ideas as a whole.
In ‘6 questions that Hautie did not ask but could have,“ I wondered what it meant to say something ‘works’ in education and I pushed this idea further ”What works in education and how do we know? »»
In short, although research helps us to understand what works and what does not work and why, what it means to “work” is vague and how the results of this research apply to your class and to the minds of students who are, at best, uncertain. The use of ideas for which there are data to suggest that they could work is more logical than the opposite, but involving data and research on people and the effect is also a kind of inherent ability to business, industry and recently.
There is an important transfer in the idea of being based on research. It is implicit that as something “worked” in the context of a study or any aggregation of studies, it will “work” for your students. That he will be “transferred”. Being based on research is not the objective, but a strategy to achieve a goal. The objective must be to change the lives of students and health and membership in their communities. How was this study carried out exactly? What about strategies that have not had any studies evaluated by peers on them? What about the relationship between a strategy and content and a child. Shouldn’t elegance and logic win here?
So, everything I suppose is as follows: research simply means, in part, to verify that something works under a kind of control. The data simply means the quantification of something, probably of a kind of quality.
So why cannot we use class schools and rooms as the foundations of research? To test theories? Experience and be fun and push the limits? The transfer of a study in 2004 at a university on the quality of a reading strategy specific to your class is significant. So reduce this transfer. Take the ideas that permeate academic research and neurology and the work of Hattie and Marzano and Stiggins and so many others-take these ideas, then test them yourself.
(No, it’s not – from what I have seen – what most “data teams” do.)
The best data source for teaching is your students
If your school and your class (and the study program and the evaluation and all other bits) are designed to function as research laboratories – and to produce laboratory quality data – then everything changes from thrust to traction.
Research is, at best, predictive for a future application. In other words, research says, “It worked this way, and should probably work in the same way as we have tested it.”
It is simply predictive for quality. If you do the research, there is less gap between here and there; There is no significant “prediction”. There is no pale transport from the well to the table and returning to the well. You bring the well to the table.
(Or the table becomes the well or the well becomes the table. It does not matter.)
So the big idea is as follows: teach like a parent – or at least as a human being, but plan like a researcher and think like one.
The best data source is the students in front of you, because in the end, it is the only data that matters.
