There’s an interesting dichotomy in schools today: on a small scale, we embrace every little trend that comes our way; on a large scale, however, we are extremely slow to adapt even when the circumstances around us make the need for change obvious.
Once you’ve taught for a few years, you begin to see that educational trends and materials change frequently. Are you using Guided Reading? 6 Traits? 7 Keys to Comprehension? Focus Correction Areas? Everyday Math? Investigations? Harcourt Math? Houghton-Mifflin? Phonics or whole language? New math or the basics? And on and on it goes.
The thing is, most of those ideas would work if you really stuck with them. But many schools are so hooked on the newest trend that they try something for a year or two, then move on to something else. Teachers burn out and begin to tire of these constant changes.
But that’s not the worst of it: the most insidious thing that happens when we constantly embrace new, trendy teaching methods is that we satiate our desire to improve our own teaching practice. In effect, we quit thinking about making significant, substantive reforms to the way we “do school” because we deceive ourselves into believing that these surface-level changes will make a difference instead.
As a result, we keep running schools that have thousands of students in them. We keep teaching cursive. We keep forcing students to spend all day in age-based, rather than ability-based, classrooms. We keep thinking of technology as just Internet games kids can play once a week. We keep paying teachers more just for getting older, not better. We keep lecturing.
It’s time for all of us to start making fewer trendy changes so that we can focus our energy on true reform.
Posted by mpullen 
