Thread by @biblioracle

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.