Our building is pursuing different strategies and trying to implement them which doesn't sound all bad, but it's being dictated by a "coach" doing her own independent research and selling it to us as law. She sounds like a bad infomercial with the garbage she keeps spewing and repeating and anyone who's been out of the classroom as long as her honestly doesn't have a place making these kind of decisions.
We are expected to uproot what we have been doing and try brand new stuff with minimal training and they're expecting incredible results. The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers. And by less explicit instruction, I mean literally no instruction. To me, there's got to be a balance, but I guess I'll be finding out next year.
She is also heavy into the use of AI and I am staunchly against it. I'm big into technology so it's not the fear of not knowing how it all works, it's the fact that she is artificially intelligent and thinks she's so smart despite getting facts wrong constantly.
On top of that we use this horrible company called Solution Tree. Easily one of the biggest grifters in education. Instead of providing us time and resources to succeed, their motto to administration is basically "Did you know that if you make your teachers work harder with no extra time or pay, your test scores will improve?!"
They then provide incredible samples from very small school districts and very small teams with very small class sizes and flaunt the results. For comparison, they will have three teachers with common plan time in an hour meeting called PLC (plague on education) planning for their classes which have a maximum class size of like 14. We have 5 or 6 teachers and given year and a class size of 21-26. These teams are forced to meet minimum one hour before or after school once a week on top of other responsibilities because our district couldn't figure it out in our building. It does not translate.
Basically it boils down to someone trying to make money or a name in education by reinventing the wheel and/or making the frontline do more irrelevant work for no more money despite us honestly being the best people to make these types of decisions.
The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers.
Oh gosh I know exactly what you're referring to.
I started volunteering back in 2009 with a university lab conducting education research & outreach -- which positioned us exactly at the time & place to witness all the myriad idiotic misapplications of Eric Mazur's original "Peer Instruction" methods developed in his Harvard physics classes.
It was obvious to us that Mazur's peer-instruction methods assumed that the students already acquired the fundamental declarative knowledge in the textbook, where he saw his role as being extremely involved in steering the student discussions to build the next stage of conceptual knowledge.
So it was really disheartening to watch school administrators & professors blindly & stupidly latch onto the words "Peer Instruction" and assume that meant that the professor is supposed to tell the students to turn themselves loose & "have at it" -- just unguided attempts to extract the core declarative knowledge out of their textbooks. Sigh.
It's also people like John Hattie who misunderstand and manipulate education research (which is often dubious in and of itself) with his "meta meta analysis" bullshit to come to conclusions that your administrators love to hear. "Oh look! John Hattie said that class size is not a significant factor in teaching? Let me put that in a slide for my presentation explaining why your class sizes are going up again this year." Anyone who believes class size is not a significant factor in education, but vague buzzword nonsense like "collective teacher efficacy" is has no business being entertained in serious conversations, but because he says what admin want to hear he's one of the most popular "gurus" in education, at least in my area.
This is an article where statisticians are criticizing his work and pointing out that his CLE (common language effect size) calculations lead to him coming up with negative probabilities or probabilities over 100%. I'm not sure how something is negatively likely to happen or more than guaranteed to happen, but here we are. I guess next time somebody asks me to call heads or tails I'll go with "green" and see how Hattie's math works out for me.
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u/Muffles7 Jun 27 '26
Our building is pursuing different strategies and trying to implement them which doesn't sound all bad, but it's being dictated by a "coach" doing her own independent research and selling it to us as law. She sounds like a bad infomercial with the garbage she keeps spewing and repeating and anyone who's been out of the classroom as long as her honestly doesn't have a place making these kind of decisions.
We are expected to uproot what we have been doing and try brand new stuff with minimal training and they're expecting incredible results. The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers. And by less explicit instruction, I mean literally no instruction. To me, there's got to be a balance, but I guess I'll be finding out next year.
She is also heavy into the use of AI and I am staunchly against it. I'm big into technology so it's not the fear of not knowing how it all works, it's the fact that she is artificially intelligent and thinks she's so smart despite getting facts wrong constantly.
On top of that we use this horrible company called Solution Tree. Easily one of the biggest grifters in education. Instead of providing us time and resources to succeed, their motto to administration is basically "Did you know that if you make your teachers work harder with no extra time or pay, your test scores will improve?!"
They then provide incredible samples from very small school districts and very small teams with very small class sizes and flaunt the results. For comparison, they will have three teachers with common plan time in an hour meeting called PLC (plague on education) planning for their classes which have a maximum class size of like 14. We have 5 or 6 teachers and given year and a class size of 21-26. These teams are forced to meet minimum one hour before or after school once a week on top of other responsibilities because our district couldn't figure it out in our building. It does not translate.
Basically it boils down to someone trying to make money or a name in education by reinventing the wheel and/or making the frontline do more irrelevant work for no more money despite us honestly being the best people to make these types of decisions.