Alexandra Laing is A Worthy Educator and a Champion for bringing together educators around our common values and mission!
She is currently pursuing her passion as a STEAM Education Specialist with the Belize Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology through the Peace Corps Response program.
I have often found myself pondering grand questions in education. Questions such as: Why does the multi-billion dollar testing and assessment industry consistently report that student learning is pretty much stagnant? What is the true blockage of investment in teacher salaries when more than 70% of Americans believe salaries should be raised? Why do teacher preparation programs persist to inadequately attract and prepare teachers? Why are students in high-needs schools failing and dropping out of school at higher rates? Is the education system as we know it truly serving the needs of our students?
One year ago to date, I was deep into my doctoral journey, driven by these very questions, and struggling through hundreds of pages of single-spaced transcript data while I worked tirelessly to complete my dissertation. Surely I could find the answers to these questions, right? I'll save you the complexities of my study that sought to understand public high school principals' influence on grading practices that accurately measure student learning - that's another blog post. But long story short, all of my participants consistently made two key reflections: that grading doesn't measure learning and that they didn't know what should be the right way to grade. But through this study, I also made a discovery separate from my intended research.
I discovered that there is a distinct and pervasive void between scholarship and practice.
The Higher Education system is at the helm of scholarship. It studies, analyzes, reports, infers, identifies gaps in knowledge, publishes findings, and describes opportunities for future research. Higher education churns out graduate and doctoral degrees and has created an entire ecosystem of scholarship and research that drives faculty and graduate students to study, seek funding for studies, and publish. There are all levels of publications - from ones you can pay for your work to be published in to highly regarded, blind, peer-reviewed journals. The Higher Education system converges in huge conferences and consortia full of researchers who conduct research, read research, discuss research, and publish research. And rightfully, research is governed by Institutional Review Boards and guided by federal agencies to protect human subjects and participants of research so that basic ethical principles are upheld - especially when investigating protected groups like children. But research is often myopic, inward focused, and can be more interested in producing research than in assessing research for quality or acting on research findings.
On the other hand, the PK-12 system is at the helm of practice. It is working as hard as it can and doing more today than ever. It churns through initiative after initiative in the haste to educate while barely stopping to check if its deeply held beliefs are grounded in research-informed discovery. The industry feeding the system hosts feel-good conferences and spits out blogs and books for the next best thing. And we are quick to throw something out because it "isn't working" after a short sprint of effort or quick to call something else a best practice. We are in a constant rat race for bigger, better, and faster. And that constant race sees PK-12 iterating at high rates which drives the focus on improvement to the totality of the system. But the reality is that just because a lot of people do something, that doesn't mean it's best.
Think about it - how many of us have turned to highly regarded peer-reviewed journals or even to Google Scholar to find the latest research when we stumbled upon a challenge in our profession? In the past, I sure didn't. I would Google whatever it was that was bothering me, inevitably find at least five sponsored pay-for services or blogs, pick the thing that seemed the most approachable, and keep it moving. That's IF I Googled at all. We don't have the time, right? Plus, with publications, there is such a wide array of quality within published research, and many excellent peer-reviewed journals are behind paywalls anyways.
Herein lies the void. In that space between the quest for research and publication and applying what we learn, something falls apart within the educational landscape.
With the topic of grading, for example, I've heard that it is a best practice to give extra credit for students to bring in paper towels or school supplies for the classroom, to hold firm on deadlines because that's like the real world, or to give zeros for failing grades. But each of those are examples of subjective measures that teachers use to influence an already demonstrated system of grading that is variable, biased, unreliable, and inequitable according to the research. In fact, the research demonstrates that grading has been relatively unchanged in its purpose, intent, and use for nearly one hundred years despite its well-investigated flaws. Think about what's different now from one hundred years ago. One hundred years ago, women had just been granted the right to vote and segregation was the accepted norm. America's automobile industry was only emerging, and there was no fully developed interstate highway system. We lived in an age where a computer wasn't even a dream, televisions didn't exist, and refrigerators and air conditioning were rare. But we are still grading students in the same way as we were one hundred years ago - because it's a best practice?
To close the gap between scholarship and practice, we have to be willing to do things differently. Researchers and practitioners need to step into each others' worlds, inform each other, learn from the challenges each face, and create action from findings. We need a space where researchers and practitioners conference together, write together, learn together, and understand the educational system together. We need to foster a space within the educational landscape where we challenge the quick-fix solutions taped on top of the broken parts and do the messy political work of dismantling the systems that no longer serve us.
Researchers and practitioners, higher education and PK-12, teachers and leaders, and parents and students at all ages deserve an educational system that is reflective, informed, inclusive, accessible, responsive, and focused on investigating the problems that hinder our forward progress. But just because we deserve this doesn't mean that it will be created for us. Institutionalized functions within the educational arena that no longer serve us should be dismantled and reformed. Systems that are hindering the success of all children should be critically challenged. The deficit thinking that pervades the education sector must be flushed out and replaced with the many stories that exist that highlight success and opportunity within the system. And while we're at it, let's promote high-quality research without hiding it behind paywalls or limiting access at certain institutions because of budgetary constraints to create accessibility and transparency within the system. This is the work of The Worthy Educator - to bring together like-minded educators who are ready to have real conversations and begin the authentic work of reclaiming education by the very professionals who lead it.
Closing the gap between scholarship and practice is an everybody effort. Let's stop waiting for someone else to start.
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