This is a weird and random way to initiate a blog, but oh well! I'm basically (with a little light editing) sharing here a thread I wrote on Twitter today, discussing this recent article ("Teachers' Skills Took a Hit During the Pandemic Too, Report Says") in EdWeek. My take here doesn't address all of the problems with the article, but just focuses on a couple that stood out the most to me.
First of all, and probably most obvious, this is yet another example of blaming teachers for systemic inadequacies and failures. If you are (still, somehow) wondering what teachers are "so upset" about, well, here you go. Disrespect in article form. Second, the data being reported on here was collected *only* from "district leaders," and notably, not from teachers, staff, or even school principals (or, G-d forbid, students or parents). That's super problematic for a couple of reasons.
For one, it's unclear who qualified as a "district leader," or how they were selected, at least from this article. All we can tell is that it's people who (supposedly) visited classrooms and observed. But it's also unclear if these observations were, themselves, data collection instruments for the RAND survey/study being reported on here, or if it's just asking people what they recall about what they observed, when observing for other purposes. Recollection is already highly unreliable (e.g., eyewitness testimony). Recollection when also asked to interpret after the fact, such as asking a survey question like "Did you observe effective teaching practices?" adds a big spoonful of bias into the data. It's also unclear what the protocol was, if any, *if* (let's assume) the observations were conducted as part of a survey/study. How and when did observers record their observations? This matters a lot if the "findings" are to be trusted and/or generalized.
Another conflicting factor in evaluating practice based on observation is the expertise of the observer. Any teacher will tell you how frustrating (at best) it is to receive "feedback" from an observer who does not teach what you teach, doesn't know your students, etc. I perceive this EdWeek article as reporting exactly that: Unsolicited feedback from observers who don't know what they're seeing, and as a result, don't know what they're talking about when they report their observations to others. In other words, this isn't reporting what I'd call useful, or even valid "research" findings. Like pretty much every other teacher's take I've seen on this article, I call BS.
It may seem like no big deal (it's "just journalism" or "just an article"), but things like this do find their way into discourse on important things. "Sold A Story" is another example (regardless of your take on it). An article that sets out to report on a research finding should also report on how that research finding was, well, found. Leaving that part out is (partly) how we end up with people thinking that teachers are unskilled or unwilling to learn & adapt, which couldn't be further from the truth. And now we're back to blaming teachers for things FAR beyond their control or influence.
I also think that education reporting in general needs to more carefully consider the potential consequences of leaving things out of pieces like this, like how the research was conducted. This goes beyond the use of clickbait headlines. The undermining, if not flat-out destruction, of public education in the US *thrives* off of biased research that makes its way into public discourse (i.e., not just in legal or policy circles). Those who seek to undermine public ed are fully aware that this article doesn't give all the information, and doesn't guide readers to find out the rest. That's what they want - thriving ignorance about the teaching profession and widespread distrust of teachers. We don't have to keep giving it to them in so-called journalism.
First of all, and probably most obvious, this is yet another example of blaming teachers for systemic inadequacies and failures. If you are (still, somehow) wondering what teachers are "so upset" about, well, here you go. Disrespect in article form. Second, the data being reported on here was collected *only* from "district leaders," and notably, not from teachers, staff, or even school principals (or, G-d forbid, students or parents). That's super problematic for a couple of reasons.
For one, it's unclear who qualified as a "district leader," or how they were selected, at least from this article. All we can tell is that it's people who (supposedly) visited classrooms and observed. But it's also unclear if these observations were, themselves, data collection instruments for the RAND survey/study being reported on here, or if it's just asking people what they recall about what they observed, when observing for other purposes. Recollection is already highly unreliable (e.g., eyewitness testimony). Recollection when also asked to interpret after the fact, such as asking a survey question like "Did you observe effective teaching practices?" adds a big spoonful of bias into the data. It's also unclear what the protocol was, if any, *if* (let's assume) the observations were conducted as part of a survey/study. How and when did observers record their observations? This matters a lot if the "findings" are to be trusted and/or generalized.
Another conflicting factor in evaluating practice based on observation is the expertise of the observer. Any teacher will tell you how frustrating (at best) it is to receive "feedback" from an observer who does not teach what you teach, doesn't know your students, etc. I perceive this EdWeek article as reporting exactly that: Unsolicited feedback from observers who don't know what they're seeing, and as a result, don't know what they're talking about when they report their observations to others. In other words, this isn't reporting what I'd call useful, or even valid "research" findings. Like pretty much every other teacher's take I've seen on this article, I call BS.
It may seem like no big deal (it's "just journalism" or "just an article"), but things like this do find their way into discourse on important things. "Sold A Story" is another example (regardless of your take on it). An article that sets out to report on a research finding should also report on how that research finding was, well, found. Leaving that part out is (partly) how we end up with people thinking that teachers are unskilled or unwilling to learn & adapt, which couldn't be further from the truth. And now we're back to blaming teachers for things FAR beyond their control or influence.
I also think that education reporting in general needs to more carefully consider the potential consequences of leaving things out of pieces like this, like how the research was conducted. This goes beyond the use of clickbait headlines. The undermining, if not flat-out destruction, of public education in the US *thrives* off of biased research that makes its way into public discourse (i.e., not just in legal or policy circles). Those who seek to undermine public ed are fully aware that this article doesn't give all the information, and doesn't guide readers to find out the rest. That's what they want - thriving ignorance about the teaching profession and widespread distrust of teachers. We don't have to keep giving it to them in so-called journalism.
