Current mood:	chipper
Entry tags:	education, management, pedadogy, research

Evidence based education

It is entirely professional for teachers to insist on viewing the evidence when told how to engage with new technology. It never hurts to ask, "Show me the research and pedagogical evidence that underpins this decision or practice of education".

If I do engage with a new technology, it often is because I am myself am exploring what I can do with it to help answer these questions. I am not necessarily going to always model best classroom practice or expecting that others will follow from this informal ethnographic research. What works well for me, might not work well for others.

Good research takes time for planning and must be carefully structured, It must be openly reviewed by our peers. This involves an academic rigor that is often missing from department classroom trials that are sometimes set up to always succeed to justify their funding. Whilst some anecdotal field observations are fine and help us to work at the cutting edge. If a case study being presented is so compelling, then insist that they submit it for publication in a peer reviewed research journal. It doesn't excuse us from asking the hard questions and insisting on the hard evidence when we are presented with this in  the workplace.

Anything less makes a joke of the science we call education and allows others to pull the wool over our eyes.