{"id":206670,"date":"2024-02-22T07:28:15","date_gmt":"2024-02-22T07:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/22\/on-the-danger-of-popular-ideas-in-education\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T17:21:46","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T17:21:46","slug":"on-the-danger-of-popular-ideas-in-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/22\/on-the-danger-of-popular-ideas-in-education\/","title":{"rendered":"On The Danger Of Popular Ideas In Education &#8211;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> [ad_1]<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div itemprop=\"text\">\n<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\">\n<\/aside>\n<p>by <strong>Terrell Heick<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>More than once, I\u2019ve seen Bloom\u2019s Taxonomy called a \u2018fad.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>This can be lumped in with Charlotte Danielson\u2019s DOK framework and Learning Styles, eLearning, Blended Learning, MOOCs, Common Core academic standards, and a few dozen other practices, ideas, and programs\u2013each as a fad. Something that, for a while, is \u2018popular.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>And sometimes, this is true.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.oxfordreference.com\/display\/10.1093\/oi\/authority.20110810104856271#:~:text=A%20short%2Dterm%20obsession%20with,in%20A%20Dictionary%20of%20Marketing%20%C2%BB\">Oxford defines<\/a> a fad as \u201cA short-term obsession with a style, product, idea, or concept. Fads are characterized by high adoption (expressed in either increased sales or publicity or word of mouth) and equally fast disappearance and obsolescence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This description would fit many practices, ideas, and programs in most industries. In the last decade or so, education has seen iPads and apps rise and fall in their adoption, with BYOD not far behind. Maker education, digital citizenship, eBook\/eBook devices, and \u2018mobile learning\u2019 have each, to their degree, gained and lost traction again in their widespread application in formal education.<\/p>\n<p>Part of this is because education, at its best, changes in parallel with \u2018the real world.\u2019 As technology changes, for example, anyone or \u2018thing\u2019 that uses that technology is forced to change with it. As electric cars become <em>more<\/em> common and internal combustion engines become <em>less<\/em> common, \u2018gas\u2019 stations must change in parallel or risk being displaced.<\/p>\n<p>Put another way, it would be odd if things <em>didn\u2019t<\/em> fall out of favor with its users. That it happens quickly isn\u2019t always a bad thing. <\/p>\n<p>Or even <em>generally<\/em> a bad thing.<\/p>\n<p>There is a difference between iPads and gas stations, though. iPads rose and fell in popularity in the \u2018real world\u2019 and education alike, the latter in many ways caused by the former. In contrast, gas stations are merely being <em>displaced<\/em> rather than <em>losing their appeal<\/em> to the public. <\/p>\n<p>So \u2018losing traction,\u2019 for many things, make sense.<\/p>\n<p>But there is also the issue of what appears to be a \u2018good idea\u2019 quickly falling out of favor when that idea is embedded in the infrastructure that adopted it in the first place. This costs time, money, and the intellectual and psychological investment of educators, students, and parents alike. <\/p>\n<p>Take teachers, for example. Teachers are already overworked, undervalued, undermined, and undersupported. To expect\u2013and force\u2013them to change over and over again is, as with most professions, reasonable. But this is not small task with new programs and priorities that require significant changes in curriculum, assessment, and instruction.<\/p>\n<p>And this seems to be one source of educators\u2019 frustration. <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>When measuring success, effectiveness, and performance in education, what are we measuring exactly?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>What Works In Education?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.teachthought.com\/pedagogy\/what-works-in-education\/\">What Works In Education And How Do We Know?<\/a><\/strong> I wondered about the terms of success in a human-centered industry (an unfortunate oxymoron), asking, \u201cWhen measuring success, effectiveness, and performance in education, what are we measuring exactly?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Regarding letter grades, I said, \u201cGrades are an interesting mix of understanding and compliance\u2014if you more or less \u2018get\u2019 the material, work hard to decipher the procedural mumbo-jumbo of most lessons, read well enough, and actually turn in all of your work, you\u2019re likely to get \u2018good grades.\u2019 Do the work and show the teacher you care, and you\u2019re in a decent place in most classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.teachthought.com\/learning\/learning-styles-multiple-intelligences-effectiveness\/\">Stop Saying Learning Styles Don\u2019t Work<\/a><\/strong>, I tried to get at that idea, offering that \u201cSomehow, the idea that when we decide that this student learns best \u2018by listening\u2019 and this student learns best \u2018while doing jumping jacks\u2019 has come to define learning styles.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And finally, in <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.teachthought.com\/pedagogy\/teachers-against-tech\/\">Why Some Teachers Are Against Technology<\/a><\/strong> (which is obviously years old, now), I took a swipe at the idea of \u2018fads,\u2019 noting, \u201cEvery few years someone in education has a bright idea that, for whatever reason, doesn\u2019t light things up the way it might\u2019ve\u2026Some observant educators have noticed this trend, and\u00a0so preach\u00a0patience and fidelity when integrating critically necessary new thinking\u2014even when, like scripted curriculum or test-based accountability, that thinking is flawed.\u00a0This gives us an interesting ecosystem of both pursuing and resisting new ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>But what if what later turned out to be a fad was \u2018good\u2019\u2013useful in some way\u2013and didn\u2019t stop being good when it disappeared?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\u201cIt makes sense to be skeptical of change, especially in an industry with such a mixed history of evolving itself. Every few years, someone in education has a bright idea that, for whatever reason, doesn\u2019t light things up the way it might\u2019ve. This has a few net negative effects, among them a kind of permanent momentum where change\u00a0<em>comes\u00a0<\/em>and change\u00a0<em>goes.\u00a0<\/em>We get used to failure.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><strong>Thoughts<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here are a few of what I hope are hopefully logical\/true statements:<\/p>\n<p>I. Any new program, priority, or effort in education costs attention, money, and the one thing teachers already have too little of\u2013time.<\/p>\n<p>II. This makes teachers skeptical and seemingly pessimistic about \u2018new things.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>III. Skeptical and pessimistic teachers aren\u2019t \u2018happy\u2019 teachers.<\/p>\n<p>IV. Teachers being \u2018not happy\u2019 is, for obvious reasons, problematic.<\/p>\n<p>V. Among these problems is an increased resistance to new ideas and a pre-tensioned willingness (eagerness?) to move on to the next idea. <\/p>\n<p>VII. That is, there can become a tendency to label \u2018things\u2019 as good or bad, right or wrong, research-based or not research-based, student-centered or not student-centered, and so on. This binary thinking isn\u2019t helpful to teachers or, more importantly, students.<\/p>\n<p>VIII. Further, being \u2018disproven\u2019 and being \u2018not useful\u2019 are not the same. On what terms, for example, has the thing disproven? And so we think of ideas as \u2018fads.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>IX. Sometimes, they are bad ideas and are indeed eventually \u2018debunked.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>X. But this can create a reflex to move on\u2013to abandon useful ideas in some wrong-headed effort to be perceived as new or modern even \u2018innovative.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><strong>Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It just might be that education has more than enough new ideas and not enough affection and patience to refine and rethink and reapply them with creativity and passion.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe.<\/p>\n<p>But how can Bloom\u2019s Taxonomy\u2013or any taxonomy\u2013be thought of as \u2018old news\u2019? iPads, Chromebooks, learning styles, or even more recent trending concepts like project-based learning, are all based on thinking that is worth of a collective and ongoing contemplation or we start over and over and over again.<\/p>\n<p>While ridding what we do and how we do it of dogma and bad thinking is necessary as self-criticism to refine our practice as educators, pessimism is something entirely different. Necessities create possibilities and possibilities become ideas and ideas become potential and potential becomes \u2018policy\u2019 and eventually you look up and the once good idea has become something else entirely.<\/p>\n<p>A fad.<\/p>\n<p>And so, over and over again, every few years we feel like we have to reinvent the wheel or have the wheel reinvented for us.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s an exhausting place to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>[ad_2]<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.teachthought.com\/education\/danger-cons-of-popular-ideas\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ad_1] by Terrell Heick More than once, I\u2019ve seen Bloom\u2019s Taxonomy called a \u2018fad.\u2019 This can be lumped in with Charlotte Danielson\u2019s DOK framework and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206671,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[173],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343420,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206670\/revisions\/343420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}