Some of the things I stand for in education, these days

When we critique an idea, we should critique the best version of it.

When we critique a pedagogical idea, we should critique the idea itself, not its misinterpretations. (Unless we’re saying the idea is easy to misinterpret.)

Most of the time when a pedagogical idea is critiqued, it’s critiqued for bad choices the teacher might make that have nothing to do with the idea itself. When we imagine an idea we don’t like, we imagine a classroom that we don’t like. That’s not fair, though.

Every pedagogical idea gets misinterpreted.

Nobody knows how to make ideas about good teaching scale, so we might as well talk about what good teaching actually looks like, without worrying about how the truth will or will not be misinterpreted at large.

You and I might teach in very similar ways but have wildly different ways to describe how we teach. The fiercest debates in education are also the vaguest. When you get down to classroom details, or even the tiniest bit of additional specificity, a lot of disagreement vanishes. It’s not that these debates don’t matter, it’s that they are highly theoretical.

OK maybe these debate don’t really matter.

Teachers have access to classroom details and specificity. One way that teachers can contribute to the knowledge base of education is to resist the urge to move to generalization, to spend some more time in the greater specificity that classroom life encourages. This is what teachers can uniquely contribute.

Non-teachers will often tend to think about scale. Teachers usually don’t, and this is something else that we can contribute.

Some people will tell you that being a jerk is important, as long as you’re being a jerk to the right people. Those people are jerks. Stupid jerks.

I think the core of what I do is trying to have a detailed understanding of how my students think about the stuff I’m teaching, and also of how they could think about the stuff I’m teaching. And then I’m trying to create as many opportunities for them to think about that stuff in the new way.

I care about my students’ feelings, a lot.

The way I see it, teaching is best understood through its dilemmas and tensions. This is not a new idea, but it’s one that hasn’t been sufficiently explored. And I’m very suspicious of people who claim to have resolved one of these tensions or dilemmas.

We shouldn’t ad hoc create rules for political discourse that only apply to people who we disagree with.

Debate is essentially performative. I mean, it doesn’t need to be, but it usually is.

Trying to understand someone and how they think is an almost complete improvement over debate in every way.

Lots of research is interesting. It’s especially fun to try to figure out how two different perspectives on teaching can fit together.

Teaching is a job, but it can be a great job if you like ideas and little humans.

Writing and reading should be fun and interesting. When writing instead aims to be useful, it’s usually not useful either. And 99% of writing about teaching is supposed to be useful.

At a certain point you have to decide if you’re trying, primarily, to change the world or to understand and describe it. It’s great that some people are trying to change the world, but I think inevitably those people end up having to be less-than-honest at times, for the sake of their projects or reputation. Personally, I prefer to understand and describe it when I write or think. (I’m not opposed to helping people, though!)

Blogging is dead, but it’s all we got for now, so let’s keep at it.

I like to think of my teaching life as a bubble, and I like to think of all other aspects of my life as little bubbles too. And a question I ask myself frequently is, can I grow these bubbles? Wouldn’t it be something if all the other bubbles could float and sort of merge into each other, turn into just one big bubble that encompasses everything? I feel like that would be nice, someday.