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I briefly worked as a teacher for comp sci, math, and physics at a local high school. Luckily, I hardly ever had to interact with people higher up in the educat

• makeitshine 1y ago
  Having taught for about 15 years, your feeling that pedagogy, as taught in most professional development sessions, is quackery, is not wrong. There are so many hucksters writing books and doing seminars.
• Freak_NL 1y ago
  Don't worry. The pushing of tablets will soon be gone! To be replaced by the pushing of tablets with AI. Because it is inevitable, so they better get used to it in every aspect of their educational career. I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a hyperbolic piece of irony.
  • kleiba 1y ago
    It's funny - you would think that this new generation of "digital natives" is already so apt with everything IT-related that they could use their tablets like wizards and give additional value to the classroom that even surprises their teacher! In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).
    • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      > In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Absolutely. Every naïve mom and dad giving their kid a tablet to say oh he’s gonna be great at computers! No. Your kid is gonna be a good user. To click the thing they’re told to click, follow the path laid out for them. It’s bad.
      • Freak_NL 1y ago
        If only they became good users. It seems they are becoming excellent consumers instead.
      • JohnClark1337 1y ago
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• skissane 1y ago
  > The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery I had this high school computing studies teacher, I’ll call her Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn’t need to understand engineering to understand how engineering students learn That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally thought had something worthwhile to say: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own experiences
• smingo 1y ago
  There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational strategies. Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
  • kleiba 1y ago
    Bingo! It's exactly stuff like that that I had in mind. And I also pity the parents whose kids have to endure this nonsense instead of getting a proper education. I mean, you basically have no power. You give your kids to whatever the government's idea is of an education and all you can do is watch helplessly from the side.
  • AlanYx 1y ago
    Liljedahl's "Building Thinking Classrooms" is the current poster child for this. Hugely influential in educational circles, but inconsistent with most of the reproducible research in cognitive science and likely quite deleterious to learning.
• em-bee 1y ago
  pedagogy is borderline quackery maria montessori developed her education methods using scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0] various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results. it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied more. of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery, then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1], which is something that could be applied without basing it on steiners esoteric ideas. it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was not because it failed on its own but because that educational theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita foundation appears to be still active. WAT? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
  • pm215 1y ago
    With that kind of "separate specialist school" setup I think you would also need to be careful when analysing outcomes to avoid confounding effects from "the parents are actively interested and engaged in their childrens' education, and have the resources to support it", which I suspect is pretty well correlated with good outcomes.
    • aidenn0 1y ago
      Don't also forget sampling effects; if you randomly assign children to schools that are of different sizes, the small schools will have higher variance and thus tend to represent both the best and worst items in the set.
• jerf 1y ago
  The sad thing is that this isn't even a one-off. Education has been repeatedly rocked by "someone had a whacky idea and now it's the law of the land". The original "New Math", and several things after it labelled "New Math". "Whole word" reading, and a whole zoo of related "what if we took how we've been successfully teaching reading and just hypothesized that something else might work better maybe" initiatives. The concept of "learning modes", which everyone believes is real but science strongly suggests don't exist very strongly at all. The solution to every educational problem being to push standardized testing even harder. Just over and over.
  • gr8gatsbyghst 1y ago
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    • cindyllm 1y ago
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  • BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    IIRC, New Math (at least the original) had the strongest pilot success of the lot. However, it failed in mass adoption because teachers didn’t want to retrain and parents threw fits that they could no longer drill their kids in math facts using half-remembered methods from their schooling.
    • jerf 1y ago
      I'd be intrigued to see that, at least if we're talking about the same New Math that was basically "Hey, let's teach kindergartners number theory and 'cardinality' and the soon-to-be-vital skill of doing math in octal so they can use computers". The name got tagged on to a lot of things over the years, and some of them have some merit, but I'd have a hard time believing the original New Math ever tested well in a fair analysis. It's a violation of basic developmental theory, expecting young children to handle levels of abstraction they won't be ready for for another 5-15 years to do basic concrete math.
• shayway 1y ago
  Not that I disagree with your overall point, but it's worth noting that in this case it wasn't enforced top-down: > Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp explains: “At that time, there was no national curriculum – a headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency.”
• kbelder 1y ago
  In C. S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength", a character observes that no parent would ever let people experiment on their children, but they will happily send their children to an experimental school.
  • neaden 1y ago
    I mean that isn't true. Parents let people experiment on their children all the time it is how we test new medicines and such on them. My daughter was part of a clinical trial. On the other hand I would probably feel more cautious about sending them to an experimental school as that is a much longer time-frame to try and understand and will have a big impact on their social and academic life.
• loa_in_ 1y ago
  People who are alive forget that there are people who know nothing stopping all born every day. Each thing we add to the "tutorial level" is going to have to be paid by the next generation.
• lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  > pedagogy is borderline quackery A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief. The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist. So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation. (This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.) But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition. The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.) In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit. A quote for thought: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
• 90s_dev 1y ago
  Plain guess work, and excitement, and fads, and people profiting from being "the experts", and in general social noise that overcomplicates the simplicity of life.