[Header Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash]

I stumbled my way to becoming a high school teacher of English in the same high school from which I had graduated just five years before.

After graduating from junior college, I was set to transfer to the main campus of the University of South Carolina; that plan included a friend I had attended every year of school with since grade 1.

He had a catastrophic accident that summer, leaving him paralyzed and changing both our plans for continuing college.

I then stumbled, mostly fearful of heading off without the comfort of that friend since we were both small-town boys. So I abruptly shifted to attending the local satellite campus of the South Carolina university system, which meant I also committed to living at home for the rest of my undergraduate years.

My entry in teacher certification was yet another stumble since I did not really choose the degree and career until I was sitting at orientation the fall I transferred to the satellite university.

As a rising junior, I needed to declare my major and had been contemplating pre-law and architecture. But on the spur of the moment, and after several clarifying questions, I became a secondary English education major.

The transfer and relatively late decision to be in teacher certification resulted in my graduating in December, and then, being in a sort of limbo that next spring (although I did enroll in an MEd program as well as worked as a substitute teacher).

But the greatest stumbling of all, I must admit, was those first 5 to 7 years as a high school English teacher.

I often think of the beginning-teacher Me—idealistic and nearly fanatically focused on finding the instructional practices that worked (specifically, how to teach my high school students to write well).

Semester after semester, I revised and rebooted my instruction. Yet, often, student assignments were submitted with about the same degree of struggling, the same (and often predictable) performances that needed to be revised.

In this mania for finding out what works, I even created my own writing textbook, developed directly from my students’ work.

Year after year, a pattern developed: I was highly regarded by my students, my colleagues, my administration, and my students’ parents as an excellent teacher, notably an excellent teacher of writing; yet, I felt constantly as if I was failing.

I had an unhealthy tunnel vision focused on finding what works, and I was not willing or able to simply step back and consider what I now know is true, but is also counter-intuitive. And I just made that claim on social media:

What I have learned as I just completed my year 40 as a teacher is that many instructional practices work, but often predicting what works is fraught practice.

And what I am now certain about is my second point above: What works is profoundly impacted by learning (and living) and teaching conditions.

My mother, who completed only one year of junior college, taught me to read at an advanced level well before I entered public schooling. And she used entirely whole word strategies (note cards taped to objects all over our house) and picture books (from Dr. Seuss to Go, Dog, Go and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish).

We were working class/poor and my parents were not highly literate, but what worked for me isn’t necessarily supported by scientific research and isn’t a template for what would work for anyone else.

Here, then, is why the pursuit of what works in education reform fails:

• What works feeds into the silver-bullet fallacy. No instructional practice or program works universally because instructional/program effectiveness is relative to individual differences among students and time.
• What works feeds into the in-school-only reform paradigm. Ironically, hyper-focusing on what works (instruction/programs) ignores the body of scientific research that shows teachers’ impact on measurable student learning (1-14%) is magnitudes less than out-of-school factors (60+%). Reforming instruction and programs, then, can never have the sort of measurable outcomes that addressing out-of-school factors could produce. This in part explains why all reform appears to fail and we remain in a constant cycle of crisis/reform in education.
• What works is trapped in a flawed model of human behavior. Humans develop is somewhat predictable in terms of stages; however, the exact when of that development is not nearly as fixed as systematic instruction and programs require. Most what works claims are bound to predictive grade- (or age-) level achievement that is linked to aspirational expectations that 100% of students can or should be at these levels. Again, this paradigm in part explains why we are in constant crisis since the expectations are unrealistic.
• What works is a subjective designation grounded in the definition of “works.” At the policy level, what works is always political/ideological because some power structure endorses the defining characteristics of “works”; since education policy is at the whim of political structures, what works can and will be manipulated by political shifts creating an instability that is counter-educational. For example, in writing instruction, do rubrics work? Rubrics can be effective for clarifying expectations for students (transparency) and for standardizing grades assigned to writing (fairness); thus, in that context of “works,” the answer is yes. But rubrics do most of the writer’s work for students by detailing the decisions that emerging writers need to develop; therefore, if your goal is teaching students how to make authentic writing decisions, rubrics do not work (similar to how training wheels do not work). Different power structures, then, could define rubrics as what works or as “currently unsupported instructional practices” based on the mandated definition of “works.”

The US needs a reckoning, one similar to my own experiences as an early-career high school English teacher.

What works? Well, not spending any more time trying to identify and then mandate what works.

Many different instructional practices work under different conditions. And even when something doesn’t work, we have time to find out what will work if we would focus more on what really matters—the learning (and living) and teaching conditions of students’ schooling (and lives).

Almost 60 years after my formative years as a beginning reader, I have witnessed my grandson’s journey to reading grounded in his iPad, playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos about how to play his video games.

Both he and I became eager readers because of our passion for reading as a means to the things we love.

Not an instructional practice.

Not a program.

What works is less a thing we can identify and mandate and more an ideological shift in verb tense—what worked.

A move from being predictive to descriptive, which takes a great deal of patience, a comfort for the unknown and unknowable, and the wisdom to look carefully at the right things—the students in front of us and not the mandates grounded in what works.

See Also

Follow an example thread here: