I've been struggling with a term and idea that I've heard a lot of lately: "evidence-based practices" has been all over the education world and with it, a notion that all of our instructional practices should be rooted there. All the practices I know are very good, sound, instructional practices that are good for kids. My problem isn't with the practices, it's with people saying that you need to implement evidence-based practices in a way that comes off as if it should be a singular approach. Before you go blowing up my comments section about my blasphemous rantings, follow me down the rabbit hole for just a second. Alice was glad she did.
My problem lies with us saying we need to be grounded in evidence-based practices without any thought or consideration given to how we might innovate and develop the next "evidence-based practice." By their definition, evidence-based practices are not highly innovative. There's evidence to support what they do, how well they do it and what some expected outcomes might be by implementing them. The long and short, they've been studied and they've been done before. That's great and wonderful. We should do things like this. My question is who started this practice and what evidence did they have to support it? The answer? None. Someone was innovative, Somebody designed something that they thought would work well and put it in place. We must be innovative too. We can't focus our entire approach on the use of evidence-based practice. We need innovators, someone to create something that works or something that doesn't. We need those risk takers to keep us moving forward. We have to be like a starting pitcher in baseball, we need more than a good fastball to get us through an outing.
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AuthorJeff Lahey Archives
January 2020
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