Jul 13, 2023·edited Jul 13, 2023Liked by Michael Pershan
This resonates with me. I think the education PD world became so unserious because of a toxic combination of the mission-driven aspect of the profession and the tendency to drastically overpromise ("No child left behind"). How about a fitness analogy? It's like if I spent a month telling my family that I was going to get *super* serious about working out and was going to work towards having an amazing body, without
A) having any realistic plan to schedule the required number of hours into the day for exercise, &
B) also without even knowing which exercises are the good ones that produce results.
I can keep up the positive talk for about a month, but after that I'm gonna have to either tell my family that I'm adjusting my goals and trying to figure out what's realistic, or (and this is what the education world did) I could just declare something ridiculous like a "contagion theory" of fitness in which I work out only one muscle group in the belief that those muscles' fitness will naturally spread to the rest of my body without my effort. So I just keep walking around saying, "Do you SEE these toe muscles! I can feel it starting to spread to my calves, too. I predict that by December it'll be up to my abs!"
In education, the overpromising was the first mistake. The mission-driven rhetoric and tradition then made it impossible to backtrack or rethink that overpromising. It's tough to say, "Yes, some kids are inevitably going to get left behind" or "In order to address problem X, we'd have to withdraw resources from our efforts to address problem Y." So instead people started saying, "Actually, kids who don't know their multiplication facts are learning something equally important...how to deal with real-life stress when you lack key knowledge." They just started gaslighting themselves and others. And once you've set yourself on the the path of being ridiculous, it's **really** hard to admit it and get back to reality.
However, I like "thin slicing" and think I don't do it enough.
Here's a related question: do you like Abbot Elementary?
I think This Slicing is a funny name for a useful concept. So, I guess it gets the pass.
I watched half an episode of Abbot Elementary with my wife (also a teacher) and I totally get the appeal but it's just not for me. I dunno, the lessons are just so simple (or so complicated in simple ways) with shows like that -- I'd rather just have the humor without the school stuff, if we're going to keep everything so cut and dry.
So a quick story: I once intersected with a friend at an NCTM conference. She was not part of the MTBoS and we rarely talked about teaching things, but when we compared notes about what workshops/talks we were going to, I was really surprised that she was going to all the ones I actively avoid because they seemed incredibly fluffy and other than mentioning inspiration, passion for teaching, and reimagining education, had nothing specific or tangible going on. Meanwhile, she rolled her eyes at my nerdy-ass sessions on the minutiae of Desmos Activity Builder, or whatever. But when we talked more, she revealed how burned out she felt from teaching and that she was deciding whether to leave education or if she stayed, how to get through the next 10 years until she could get her pension. And I realized that she needed sessions that made her feel like teaching was worth it, something that gave her motivation and energy to keep going, whereas that wasn't why I was at the conference and not what I needed to get out of it. My point with this story is that maybe the rise of explicitly "energizing" and "inspiring" conferences is due to how burned out teachers are post-pandemic and the decline of teaching as a lifelong craft in our society. I'm just coming back to blogs and talking to Math teacher friends on the internet again this year - that's how long it took me to love teaching again after the year and a half I spent teaching over Zoom and then another year with everyone spaced out in rows and no group work. I was very close to leaving teaching altogether and probably not in a great headspace to nerd out over congruence proofs or even check Math Twitter. If people don't love teaching and aren't excited to improve their craft, if younger intellectuals aren't drawn to the profession, then we're not going to have a critical mass to write blogs and discuss and have interesting conferences.
And by the way, I hear your criticism of Building Thinking Classrooms, but their conference was the first time in a long time that I saw lots of other Math teachers excited about teaching and sharing with each other. Sessions were more focused, helpful, and nuanced than many I have seen at NCTM. Yes, there's some unfortunate edu-celebritizing that happens, but that happens in every community so I don't take it too seriously, as long as there's also useful content and pushback. And for the record, I don't think the MTBoS was ever very research-based - it always felt to me more like a teacher lounge with people sharing what worked for them and asking good questions. There were just enough people doing interesting things and pushing back on each other's thinking in a helpful way to make it a place that improved everyone's practice. I hope that can happen again.
Yeah, I tried to make the connection between burnout and the market for inspiration in this post, but I totally agree that this is part of what's going on.
Oh and I also agree that "research-based" isn't necessary! I don't want to make this all about BTC but my point is that the book goes to great pains to tell you how everything is a finding of research, and my only point is that evidence provided is extraordinarily weak.
One thing that struck me while reading is that what you're describing has always been true in real world teaching. I've been to lots of PDs with people who have lots of qualifications and basically just run on vibes and vague nods to research and try to make people feel good. Most teachers don't care about research but I've always known some classroom falls who do that same thing.
Maybe a different framing is that there is some sort of gravity towards education being a joke. For a brief period a confluence of good fortune and technology allowed a small community to rise above before falling back to earth.
The primary ideological orientations within education as a whole--inclusive of teaching--will remain tied to folk wisdom so long as research is not taken seriously (and not just cogsci research). We live this folk wisdom as busy (privileged) middle-class parents: send my kids off to school and then stand back and assume that all the things that school is supposed to do for them are happening. The only thing we have to do is make a lot of self-empowerment noises and advocate for our *individual* students' individualities. The common wisdom captured by this arrangement is that learning, social development, etc., just sort of happen without any kind of technical intervention required.
Teaching gets to ignore these ideological orientations (practically, not aspirationally) because it happens in this magical black box that folk wisdom doesn't want to (and can't) touch. The doors in classrooms don't just close to keep out the noise from the hallways.
I think it may be possible that social media simply found a very small number of teachers who were interested in policy, instruction or curriculum. That conversation was fun, but a lot of the teachers, as someone mentioned, were not actually interested in teaching so much as in moving on professional development to do the part that really interested them, in the belief they could change education. The other half--the people who liked talking policy, instruction, and curriculum, but had no interest in leaving teaching, probably feel a bit bereft.
I don't, but then I was only tangentially interested in the discussion that many of you found so rewarding.
1. Hey, have you heard of this one really popular conference that is (maybe) pure fluff where they just focus on fun and positivity? It's a joke.
2. Education is not serious. Our entire field is being judged (maybe) by others and by ourselves as a joke because we don't have any serious conferences.
3. Actually putting on conferences is really hard. What do people want from a conference anyway?
4. Actually, most of education scholarship is pretty bad.
5. No one hangs out on twitter anymore.
[1] I'd be interested in going to one of these just to experience it. How bad could it be? Most PD is already so incredibly bad, how could this be worse? And an NCTM conference could be just as bad, but boring also. So I choose the sugary energy drink.
[2] You should go to some academic math ed conferences. They are very serious.
[3] I have no idea what to do about this. I just keep going to NCTM and showing people my shapes and hoping for the best.
[4] It's very hard to conclude anything in this field. Not our fault. It's the nature of the subject.
[5] All fun things eventually die and go away. You were always shouting into the void. Now you're getting only 5 echoes off the cave walls instead of 50.
Regarding the conferences and research... I have a hunch about what might be causing part of the phenomenon.
Too many educators don’t take themselves seriously. We don’t view ourselves or our task as particularly serious. We will pay lip service to it. But for the most part there is too much “they won’t remember what you taught them but they will remember how you made them feel” sentiment. If you really embrace that, then do you really need to figure out if “research based” really means based on rigorous research?
If we took ourselves more seriously more of us might seek out the conference with the oak table and the serious conversations.
(Of course there are caveats to all of this. Teachers are strapped for time and can only expend so much deep thought when they’re mentally drained. As you pointed out, the internet makes us not want to travel. Etc.)
Maybe it doesn’t explain much of the phenomenon, but I think it’s part of it. If you don’t take your approach to pedagogy seriously then you probably don’t mind a conference that doesn’t either.
I wonder... do people/communities/cohorts have those long conversations just once? And it just happened that the teachers of 2007-2017 (ish) had them on Twitter? Dan Meyer and Robert Kaplinsky have noted that much of that community perhaps has turned over and are not classroom teachers anymore even if they are still working in education (like yours truly).
On the other hand, the new teachers still have the potential for (at least one?) deep conversation on pedagogy. And animations of sine and cosine still go viral (hey that’s what got me going in the early days).
I wonder if the main audience for what-was-mtbos are early career educators, and as the population ages up they lose connection to the early days.
There's some truth to what you're saying, Scott, but in my view the current crop of early career educators doesn't have a rich menu of veterans (like Dan Meyer, etc) who are focusing on aspects of teaching that are really salient to classroom teachers, especially early career ones.
The big names are talking about justice, curriculum design, etc. Some of them are out there misrepresenting their data or misleading people about it. Those few (BTC, TLAC, etc) who are talking about the nitty gritty of "how do you get kids to *do* the things?" are, unfortunately, presenting their insights as a package deal, gift-wrapped and tied tight with a ribbon called "research" that stifles new teachers' questioning and doubt instead of eliciting that inquiry from teachers.
If I were a new teacher, I think it'd be pretty easy for me to get the sense that PD is a complete hoax because nobody even knows how to teach well. We just do PD to reassure ourselves that "it's all for the kids", etc.
I put togehter a table that doesn't replicate, but it's pretty clear that at most PD is mandatory bullshit and the valuable PD that builds teacher capital requires them to get paid a lot of money to do the work.
So a similar question perhaps-- was that time a confluence of Common Core making many people rethink + big unique voices like Dan who had the boots on the ground still + the growth stage town square of Twitter?
I think there's something to what you say. What gave the time period its vitality was its immense sense of mission, possibility, and hope. The CCSS roll-out was a big part of that sense of possibility and mission. But when the hope soured, you had all these mission-driven Type A people who'd centered their lives on education and couldn't just turn off that part of their personality. So some of them channeled that energy into ways that turned out to be kind of ridiculous (I don't think Dan Meyer's work is ridiculous -- the Desmos curriculum is incredible, although sometimes I find in confusing that Dan seems to denigrate the content side of math education even while he leads the team that's producing the best lesson content out there).
Maybe it would have been better for the world if we'd all have been more cynical in those days -- talking about how we're gonna make small, sustainable, incremental changes. But that's not how I felt back in the day, and I think the general energy of the MTBoS was that we were riding a wave that was gonna change the profession.
This resonates with me. I think the education PD world became so unserious because of a toxic combination of the mission-driven aspect of the profession and the tendency to drastically overpromise ("No child left behind"). How about a fitness analogy? It's like if I spent a month telling my family that I was going to get *super* serious about working out and was going to work towards having an amazing body, without
A) having any realistic plan to schedule the required number of hours into the day for exercise, &
B) also without even knowing which exercises are the good ones that produce results.
I can keep up the positive talk for about a month, but after that I'm gonna have to either tell my family that I'm adjusting my goals and trying to figure out what's realistic, or (and this is what the education world did) I could just declare something ridiculous like a "contagion theory" of fitness in which I work out only one muscle group in the belief that those muscles' fitness will naturally spread to the rest of my body without my effort. So I just keep walking around saying, "Do you SEE these toe muscles! I can feel it starting to spread to my calves, too. I predict that by December it'll be up to my abs!"
In education, the overpromising was the first mistake. The mission-driven rhetoric and tradition then made it impossible to backtrack or rethink that overpromising. It's tough to say, "Yes, some kids are inevitably going to get left behind" or "In order to address problem X, we'd have to withdraw resources from our efforts to address problem Y." So instead people started saying, "Actually, kids who don't know their multiplication facts are learning something equally important...how to deal with real-life stress when you lack key knowledge." They just started gaslighting themselves and others. And once you've set yourself on the the path of being ridiculous, it's **really** hard to admit it and get back to reality.
However, I like "thin slicing" and think I don't do it enough.
Here's a related question: do you like Abbot Elementary?
I think This Slicing is a funny name for a useful concept. So, I guess it gets the pass.
I watched half an episode of Abbot Elementary with my wife (also a teacher) and I totally get the appeal but it's just not for me. I dunno, the lessons are just so simple (or so complicated in simple ways) with shows like that -- I'd rather just have the humor without the school stuff, if we're going to keep everything so cut and dry.
So a quick story: I once intersected with a friend at an NCTM conference. She was not part of the MTBoS and we rarely talked about teaching things, but when we compared notes about what workshops/talks we were going to, I was really surprised that she was going to all the ones I actively avoid because they seemed incredibly fluffy and other than mentioning inspiration, passion for teaching, and reimagining education, had nothing specific or tangible going on. Meanwhile, she rolled her eyes at my nerdy-ass sessions on the minutiae of Desmos Activity Builder, or whatever. But when we talked more, she revealed how burned out she felt from teaching and that she was deciding whether to leave education or if she stayed, how to get through the next 10 years until she could get her pension. And I realized that she needed sessions that made her feel like teaching was worth it, something that gave her motivation and energy to keep going, whereas that wasn't why I was at the conference and not what I needed to get out of it. My point with this story is that maybe the rise of explicitly "energizing" and "inspiring" conferences is due to how burned out teachers are post-pandemic and the decline of teaching as a lifelong craft in our society. I'm just coming back to blogs and talking to Math teacher friends on the internet again this year - that's how long it took me to love teaching again after the year and a half I spent teaching over Zoom and then another year with everyone spaced out in rows and no group work. I was very close to leaving teaching altogether and probably not in a great headspace to nerd out over congruence proofs or even check Math Twitter. If people don't love teaching and aren't excited to improve their craft, if younger intellectuals aren't drawn to the profession, then we're not going to have a critical mass to write blogs and discuss and have interesting conferences.
And by the way, I hear your criticism of Building Thinking Classrooms, but their conference was the first time in a long time that I saw lots of other Math teachers excited about teaching and sharing with each other. Sessions were more focused, helpful, and nuanced than many I have seen at NCTM. Yes, there's some unfortunate edu-celebritizing that happens, but that happens in every community so I don't take it too seriously, as long as there's also useful content and pushback. And for the record, I don't think the MTBoS was ever very research-based - it always felt to me more like a teacher lounge with people sharing what worked for them and asking good questions. There were just enough people doing interesting things and pushing back on each other's thinking in a helpful way to make it a place that improved everyone's practice. I hope that can happen again.
Yeah, I tried to make the connection between burnout and the market for inspiration in this post, but I totally agree that this is part of what's going on.
Oh and I also agree that "research-based" isn't necessary! I don't want to make this all about BTC but my point is that the book goes to great pains to tell you how everything is a finding of research, and my only point is that evidence provided is extraordinarily weak.
One thing that struck me while reading is that what you're describing has always been true in real world teaching. I've been to lots of PDs with people who have lots of qualifications and basically just run on vibes and vague nods to research and try to make people feel good. Most teachers don't care about research but I've always known some classroom falls who do that same thing.
Maybe a different framing is that there is some sort of gravity towards education being a joke. For a brief period a confluence of good fortune and technology allowed a small community to rise above before falling back to earth.
What is that gravity?
The primary ideological orientations within education as a whole--inclusive of teaching--will remain tied to folk wisdom so long as research is not taken seriously (and not just cogsci research). We live this folk wisdom as busy (privileged) middle-class parents: send my kids off to school and then stand back and assume that all the things that school is supposed to do for them are happening. The only thing we have to do is make a lot of self-empowerment noises and advocate for our *individual* students' individualities. The common wisdom captured by this arrangement is that learning, social development, etc., just sort of happen without any kind of technical intervention required.
Teaching gets to ignore these ideological orientations (practically, not aspirationally) because it happens in this magical black box that folk wisdom doesn't want to (and can't) touch. The doors in classrooms don't just close to keep out the noise from the hallways.
Option A
Healthcare is a Joke
Not medicine, healthcare.
Option B
Politics is a Joke.
Not public service, politics.
Which Option is more similar to this thesis? How?
Which state of affairs is worse? Why?
What other examples can this community identify?
What prompts the disconnect between research and practice?
Should our goal be to eliminate all "Jokes?" Why or why not?
I think it may be possible that social media simply found a very small number of teachers who were interested in policy, instruction or curriculum. That conversation was fun, but a lot of the teachers, as someone mentioned, were not actually interested in teaching so much as in moving on professional development to do the part that really interested them, in the belief they could change education. The other half--the people who liked talking policy, instruction, and curriculum, but had no interest in leaving teaching, probably feel a bit bereft.
I don't, but then I was only tangentially interested in the discussion that many of you found so rewarding.
Oh man, a lot going on here...
1. Hey, have you heard of this one really popular conference that is (maybe) pure fluff where they just focus on fun and positivity? It's a joke.
2. Education is not serious. Our entire field is being judged (maybe) by others and by ourselves as a joke because we don't have any serious conferences.
3. Actually putting on conferences is really hard. What do people want from a conference anyway?
4. Actually, most of education scholarship is pretty bad.
5. No one hangs out on twitter anymore.
[1] I'd be interested in going to one of these just to experience it. How bad could it be? Most PD is already so incredibly bad, how could this be worse? And an NCTM conference could be just as bad, but boring also. So I choose the sugary energy drink.
[2] You should go to some academic math ed conferences. They are very serious.
[3] I have no idea what to do about this. I just keep going to NCTM and showing people my shapes and hoping for the best.
[4] It's very hard to conclude anything in this field. Not our fault. It's the nature of the subject.
[5] All fun things eventually die and go away. You were always shouting into the void. Now you're getting only 5 echoes off the cave walls instead of 50.
Regarding the conferences and research... I have a hunch about what might be causing part of the phenomenon.
Too many educators don’t take themselves seriously. We don’t view ourselves or our task as particularly serious. We will pay lip service to it. But for the most part there is too much “they won’t remember what you taught them but they will remember how you made them feel” sentiment. If you really embrace that, then do you really need to figure out if “research based” really means based on rigorous research?
If we took ourselves more seriously more of us might seek out the conference with the oak table and the serious conversations.
(Of course there are caveats to all of this. Teachers are strapped for time and can only expend so much deep thought when they’re mentally drained. As you pointed out, the internet makes us not want to travel. Etc.)
Maybe it doesn’t explain much of the phenomenon, but I think it’s part of it. If you don’t take your approach to pedagogy seriously then you probably don’t mind a conference that doesn’t either.
I wonder... do people/communities/cohorts have those long conversations just once? And it just happened that the teachers of 2007-2017 (ish) had them on Twitter? Dan Meyer and Robert Kaplinsky have noted that much of that community perhaps has turned over and are not classroom teachers anymore even if they are still working in education (like yours truly).
On the other hand, the new teachers still have the potential for (at least one?) deep conversation on pedagogy. And animations of sine and cosine still go viral (hey that’s what got me going in the early days).
I wonder if the main audience for what-was-mtbos are early career educators, and as the population ages up they lose connection to the early days.
There's some truth to what you're saying, Scott, but in my view the current crop of early career educators doesn't have a rich menu of veterans (like Dan Meyer, etc) who are focusing on aspects of teaching that are really salient to classroom teachers, especially early career ones.
The big names are talking about justice, curriculum design, etc. Some of them are out there misrepresenting their data or misleading people about it. Those few (BTC, TLAC, etc) who are talking about the nitty gritty of "how do you get kids to *do* the things?" are, unfortunately, presenting their insights as a package deal, gift-wrapped and tied tight with a ribbon called "research" that stifles new teachers' questioning and doubt instead of eliciting that inquiry from teachers.
If I were a new teacher, I think it'd be pretty easy for me to get the sense that PD is a complete hoax because nobody even knows how to teach well. We just do PD to reassure ourselves that "it's all for the kids", etc.
PD *is* a complete hoax. We just do PD because a federal or state drone makes schools check a box.
If you want teachers to do meaningful professional development, you have to pay them a shit ton of money. Wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/07/18/continuing-teacher-education/
I put togehter a table that doesn't replicate, but it's pretty clear that at most PD is mandatory bullshit and the valuable PD that builds teacher capital requires them to get paid a lot of money to do the work.
So a similar question perhaps-- was that time a confluence of Common Core making many people rethink + big unique voices like Dan who had the boots on the ground still + the growth stage town square of Twitter?
I think there's something to what you say. What gave the time period its vitality was its immense sense of mission, possibility, and hope. The CCSS roll-out was a big part of that sense of possibility and mission. But when the hope soured, you had all these mission-driven Type A people who'd centered their lives on education and couldn't just turn off that part of their personality. So some of them channeled that energy into ways that turned out to be kind of ridiculous (I don't think Dan Meyer's work is ridiculous -- the Desmos curriculum is incredible, although sometimes I find in confusing that Dan seems to denigrate the content side of math education even while he leads the team that's producing the best lesson content out there).
Maybe it would have been better for the world if we'd all have been more cynical in those days -- talking about how we're gonna make small, sustainable, incremental changes. But that's not how I felt back in the day, and I think the general energy of the MTBoS was that we were riding a wave that was gonna change the profession.