Matthews Evans is headteacher of a Gloucestershire secondary school in southwest England and author of Leaders with Substance: An Antidote to Leadership. The issue of researchers–engineers who study and design projects to solve schooling problems–having a difficult time in getting practitioners–plumbers who get in and around pipes and drains–to put their findings into daily practice has been a perennial issue in the U.S. Many U.S. policymakers call it an “implementation” problem. According to Evans it is more complicated than just “implementation” as he describes the divide between teachers and researchers in the United Kingdom.
This post comes from his blog, theeducontrarian. It appeared April 25, 2021. I have lightly edited Evans’ post For the full text and references please go to the above link.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that cognitive science has, and will continue to have, a fairly limited impact on educational standards.
It is not that I reject the findings of this branch of psychology (although many of the studies, we are beginning to realise, may fail to replicate), or that I think we should turn our backs on the discipline. On the contrary: we should glean all we can from this, and other disciplines, which offer something to our understanding of education. My concern is that the implementation of cognitive science – or indeed any research in social psychology – is problematic.
There are many reasons why the application of knowledge from research, or theory, to the classroom is difficult. I will explore just one of these reasons here, which is the problem of the particular.
Access to water
The economist Esther Deflo tells the story of the effort to bring clean water to homes in Tangier in 2007. The firm responsible for this effort spent considerable amounts of money building a large network of pipes and installing taps and CONTINUE READING: The Classroom as a “Gritty” Place for Engineers and Plumbers (Matthew Evans) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice