I see Jan de Lange was on your list of designers you experienced in Singapore. You might consider attending (caution, shameless plug ahead) the Realistic Math Education conference this fall at CU-Boulder. Jan and many others from the Freudenthal Institute presented at the last conference, and I believe Doug Clements will be at this year’s conference, which will focus on the design and use of learning progressions in math ed. See http://fius.org/ for details.

I also wonder what happens if you unhitch Risk from Grades…

BTW, thanks for the Shell Centre link. The “Red Book” is one of my favorites and a reason that I can’t wait to see what becomes of the Graphing Stories project.

What was most valuable about this reflection for me was your implicit reminder of how grounding it is to reflect while one is “in process.” The times when I am too busy to reflect are *exactly* the moments when I most need to stop, sit down, and reflect on what is going on and what I am missing.

That kind of reflection is way different than academic writing, but is very useful in its own anchoring way.

Thank you for reminding me that, when I am *least* inclined to sit down and reflect, *that* is exactly the signal that I am overdue for doing so.

– Elizabeth (aka @cheesemonkeysf on Twitter)

There were a number of educators debating the relative merits of Sal Khan’s pedagogy on Twitter, say a few weeks or a month ago. Dan was cast in the middle of it as elder statesman.

He did what he does, and well. But while the dialogue was impassioned, it wasn’t terribly interesting. We get it at this point. Khan Academy’s polarizing, there’s some good but it’s not the future of ed, who cares. Oh and he uses Wikipedia who cares.

Then the tone started to shift. Weirdly, the conversation became less about Khan and more about how to ‘market’ good pedagogy. One teacher insisted that research showed his method of teaching as the most effective.

Dan mentioned that ‘research doesn’t go viral,’ and that we needed to start playing offense. I take it that ‘we’ meant his cadre of innovative educators, bloggers, and consultants.

I wonder what the definition of ‘offense’ is, though.

The vast majority of questions we have about teaching- smaller things like how to teach linear equations, bigger things like how to integrate procedural and conceptual knowledge- have almost all been researched. Some down to their essence.

An understandable knock on research is that it’s divisive more than conclusive. As a teacher, I often felt this way. It also seemed a little heavy on “double blind triple blind a priori z quotient correlation control group table quotient z score type” vocabulary. It seemed too wrapped up in the science and not enough in the art of the thing.

So I cowboyed on and built my own stuff.

But in doing so, I ignored a lot of practical suggestions and sound advice. Look at the dozen or so studies posted above. All make profound insights about teaching. It’s not always unresolved fracas and intellectual vanity.

Research won’t ever go viral. But if it did, or could, how would that change the way classrooms look?