Cost Benefit Analysis - Teaching Techniques

If you are a teacher, there is a ton of advice out there about how to do your job better.  While that is a good thing, it is also a daunting thing.  Most of the advice is contradictory because many people write books out of their own philosophy, not out of the results of research.  Some of them try to make you feel guilty for having a different philosophy than that of the author.  Just put those books down.  There is no technique good enough to put yourself through a guilt-inducing book from an arrogant author.  

Even if we filter out all of that and focus only on the good books by authors who care about research, there is still an overwhelming amount of information and advice.  You can't go into your classroom on Tuesday and completely turn your practice upside down to match the book you just read.  Change has to be incremental to be sustainable or even possible.  So, this is a little meta, but I'm going to give you advice about advice to help you sort through all of the advice.

1. Let me shamelessly rip off two quotes from friends of mine.  Andrew Watson opens every session with "Don't do this thing.  Think this way."  He will tell you that knowledge of working memory or growth mindset or any other piece of research will look different in your classroom than it does in the classroom next door.  The researcher had a very specific methodology that you may or may not be able to do, so allow the knowledge to guide your thinking rather than dictate your actions.  Similarly, John Almarode ends his presentations with, "Don't adopt.  Adapt to your context."  In the same way as Andrew, he is telling his audience that they can't just drop a technique and hope for the best.  The way you implement a new technique will be different if you are a high school science teacher than if you were a 3rd-grade Spanish teacher.  So when you read a book, an article, or a blog post, figure out the deeper meaning behind the technique and use your professional judgment to choose the implementation of the idea.
2. Only fix what is broken.  It can be so easy to sit in a professional development session and feel bad about yourself.  If you don't do the thing that is being presented, you may feel like a bad teacher.  Yet, you know that a lot of what you do works.  You have students who learn concepts, develop skills, pass your tests, perform well on AP tests, and succeed in college; so lighten up on yourself.  You also know you have room for growth because everyone does (and you are part of everyone).  Look at your yearly map.  What is the one concept you have trouble explaining clearly or that your kids struggle with most?  Is there a way to approach that differently?  Then, address that one thing this year.  You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you attended a conference.
3. Some techniques are complex, and they don't work if you don't implement them fully.  It's okay to choose not to use those, but if you only implement the easy parts, don't then blame the technique if it doesn't produce results.  You may have seen recently, for example, some negative feedback about growth-mindset in online conversations.  Schools who were attempting to implement it were not finding the results they felt Carol Dweck had promised.  When looking deeper, however, what happened was that some teachers were introducing it on the first day of school and then never doing any of it again or hanging posters about learning from mistakes but then speaking as people with fixed mindsets.  After a 20 minute seminar, they took away, "Sure, I can tell kids they aren't good at math YET" but didn't take the time to recognize that there is more to it than that.  It's not the fault of the researcher that we apply only a tiny part of a complex practice.  When choosing a technique, take the time to find out if it is okay to pick and choose parts or not.
4. Now, you are ready to choose a technique, guided by the input you just received from a speaker, a book, or a podcast.  How do you choose?  I'm going to suggest that you do a little cost/benefit analysis.  Some techniques are difficult or time intensive to implement.  Not everything that takes a long time to develop or implement is worth the time you put into it, but some things are.  Look at the breadth and depth of the outcome.  If the technique can be used for multiple chapters with the results you want, then it might be worth investing the time it takes to do it.  If there is a technique that takes very little time to implement, try it because any benefit you get out of it will be a good return on that small amount of time.  For example, I recently read a blog post about framing your objectives as questions instead of statements (I would cite this, but I read so many things that I have forgotten the source - like the Learning and the Brain website).  According to the post, evidence shows that students have more sustained attention and slightly better test scores when the objective is presented as something to explore.  This takes me ZERO time to implement because I was already writing the objective on the board, so now I write it as a question rather than a statement.  If there is any result at all, I am looking at an infinite benefit-to-cost ratio.  

Don't be afraid to tweak or drop something that isn't working.  Not all techniques are for everyone.  Even the best technique is not the best match for every class.  Teachers are humans and are able to do some things better than others.  Choose those that will work for your class, with your philosophy, based on your goals.  The science of learning is not meant to prescribe what every teacher must do.  It is meant to give you knowledge of the impact of a variety of strategies so that you can choose what matches you and your classroom goals.  Some may work exactly the way they did in the experiment; some may need a little adjustment to adapt it to your environment.  Some may just not be a good fit for you, and that is okay.