We can’t improve our schools until we face down the powerful yet mostly unexamined assumptions we hold about teaching and learning.
Now approaching the second decade of the 21st century, we still base our evaluations of teachers and schools on a century old model of teaching that’s completely inconsistent with widely accepted findings of research in both education and neuroscience.
Our education policy is science denial all over again. This is not how children learn.
Our schools will mass produce obedient (if angry) clerks until we call B.S. on the many ways we let this old paradigm drive policy interventions in the work of educators and students.
The design of education for a just and sustainable future must begin from the ground up, with an intelligently and humanely built foundation in what we know about how children learn.