IMO, people who look at education as a policy problem do not appropriately appreciate what practitioners mean when we say that measuring effective teaching is "complicated." Not "hard," "complicated." insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
For ex. I believe the assessments many schools use to measure student writing proficiency are actively damaging to student writers. Showing me that a pedagogical approach moves the needle on those assessments means nothing to me.
If we don't have a conversation about what success looks like, we cannot even being to measure it. Many of the measures we use for student achievement have proven problematic because of a desire to get past the complexity so we can have an answer. That's bad.
Removing the complexity around learning creates all kinds of bad incentives, and when high stakes accountability attaches, we're looking at an inevitable Campbell's Law problem, when the measurement becomes the goal, The whole process is corrupted.
So when Matt Yglesias or Kevin Carey claim we don't know enough about successful teaching, we have to pause and ask what are the underlying values that inform what we're calling "success?" Without that conversation, there's no progress to be had.
I know my approach in The Writer's Practice works because I've experimented over many years to align my pedagogy with my goals and values, but if those values aren't shared, someone else will not look at it as success. bookshop.org/a/1793/9780143…
I get a little frosty when people who do not teach use their large platforms (Yglesias) and positions of considerable influence (Carey) to lecture instructors about what we do and don't know. I got a whole book on what I know about teaching writing. bookshop.org/a/1793/9781421…
And as I argue in Why They Can't Write, the barriers to better teaching are not primarily pedagogical. The structural problems around writing instruction in 7-12 and college are far bigger issues than what we do or don't know about teaching writing.
While I put my own spin on my pedagogy, the roots of it can be found in what was known about how to teaching writing in the 1950's, knowledge that has been reaffirmed over and over again. For some reason, that knowledge does not have primacy in our current systems.
I could go on and on about why what we know about teaching writing is not valued and widely practiced. Lots of reasons, but one of them is that people of influence and (occasionally unearned) confidence on these subjects, deliver pronouncements lots of people believe.

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More from @biblioracle

1 Jul
He injected (admittedly relatively low grade) poison into the atmosphere. Now that the monster is out of the lab, he realizes that maybe his original allies aren't so honorable. Now, we're expected to trust him as to what is or isn't poisonous? Please explain the logic.
Coddling the American Mind played a major role in establishing the narrative that has allowed the anti-anti-racism crowd busy actually squelching free speech to barge through on this rampage. See chapter 11. bookshop.org/a/1793/9781948…
Safetyism was whole cloth B.S. that was eaten up by folks who want to believe in their own goodness and probity. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
Read 4 tweets
25 Jun
He blocks me on here, so I can't see his tweets, but contextual clues from tweets of others I can see indicate that Conor Friedersdorf is denying any role in stoking the moral panic over cancel culture that has now morphed into authoritarian anti-anti-racism.
In my book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free: The Future of Public Higher Education, I have a chapter discussing how right wing groups like TPUSA/College Fix and centrist types like Jon Haidt (Coddling the American Mind) and Friedersdorf combined to create the current toxic narrative
The right wing critiques of higher ed have been around forever, think WF Buckley and God and Man at Yale, or David Horowitz's book on the most dangerous professors. Nothing new or particularly dangerous.
Read 22 tweets
21 Jun
This take on journalistic organizations applies to academic institutions too. There's no reason to pretend bad faith attacks are done in good faith and respond defensively. Call it out for what it is, propaganda, and stand behind people and principles. ez.substack.com/p/newsrooms-ne…
Just saying Prof. So-and-So has the "right to express themselves" when a mob ginned up by Campus Reform comes for them is fundamentally weak. Call out the attack for what it is, a bad faith attempt to intimidate and silence. It's accurate, so you can say it.
I got a chapter in Sustainable. Resilient. Free. that walks through the current playing field and makes some recommendations on how to deal with what's coming for institutions. beltpublishing.com/products/susta… Image
Read 5 tweets
18 Jun
Two and a half years ago I made a conscious jump to try to step away from putting education and teaching & learning central to my work. That experiment has ended and I'm back to what calls me full-time. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
I alternate between excited and terrified, walking away from a job with guaranteed income and benefits and the security those things bring, but teaching and learning and trying to attack the systemic barriers to improving in those areas is what I want to spend my time on.
I'm still figuring out what that work is going to look like, talking with other likeminded people about possibilities, but one think I know I'll be doing is writing more about education at a newsletter for @EEtutors educationalendeavors.substack.com
Read 5 tweets
17 Jun
Revealing story on what's up at Penn St. with Black professors whose proportions have not budged in over 20 years. These dynamics are at play most everywhere. washingtonpost.com/education/2021…
An administrator straight up tells a Black faculty member that he believes minority candidates are less likely to be qualified for positions. This is not a pipeline problem. It's a failure to to recognize varieties of excellence problem. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
If you have a structure that is fundamentally hostile to certain groups, you must undo that hostility if you expect to attract more people from that group. Black faculty have been sharing stories of the hostility for years yet the entrenched powers do not listen.
Read 4 tweets
17 Jun
For what it's worth, some additional context about a survey that the viewpoint diversity crowd is crapping themselves over this evening. Took me all of 10 minutes to look a little harder at the data and see how, as always, things are more complicated than they 1st appear.
First, this survey is produced by a NDSU university center that's funded largely by Koch money. There's dozens of these around the country. It's not nefarious, but they have a clear agenda behind their work. ndsu.edu/news/view/deta…
Second regarding that question about how students would respond to "offensive" speech, it's designed to be as vague as possible. There's no definition of what "offensive" is. It's purely in the eye of the beholder. An intentionally bad question.
Read 16 tweets

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