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Cool People You Should Know: Kathryn Boudett
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May 23, 2013
Through the lens of social science, eduwonkette takes a serious, if sometimes irreverent, look at some of the most contentious education policy debates. (Find eduwonkette's complete archives prior to Jan. 6, 2008 here.)
I just requested this book yesterday, so I hope its in early next week. I'm looking forward to reading your insights!
One of the most amazing things about this and other blogs is that it treats teaching like a horse race or spectator sport.
The actual work of teaching is more complex than heart surgery. Good teachers are deeply focused on the procedures and protocols and the content at hand. They are quite careful about the moves they make, and are attuned to the response of students. Their work takes place in a dynamic environment where opportunties to improve learning arise without warning, and challenges to student understanding require constant fine-tuning of the teaching moves. All of this in environments where good teaching is challenged by no-nothing DC-wonks, or angry teacher colleagues who hate assessments, or parents caught between self-esteem and self-realization dreams for their children.
If you spent less time searching for photos of celebrities and more time understanding what expert teachers do, I would be reading your blog constantly. Since you don't know what teachers do with any deep understanding I can ignore this blog forever and be none the worse for it.
It's sad that you have such a large soap box from which you can spot uniformed, unstudied, and outright incorrect nonsense. But isn't that always the way?
It's clear that "policy scholar" has already ignored the vast majority of content on this blog. Unlike the typical education policy blowhards, eduwonkette actually *does* care about what happens in the classroom. And it shows in almost every post.
As for claiming "uninformed, unstudied, and outright incorrect nonsense," policy scholar is again on extremely shaky ground. I've been an eduwonkette reader from the beginning, and she has consistently tried to introduce rigorous research--form well-regarded academics in top peer reviewed journals--to the broader policy community. Contrast this approach to 99% of other edblogs, who claim "research shows" (without citation) whatever they want it to show, or cite "research" from places like Fordham or Education Sector, which is really not "research" at all.
D. D. That giant sucking sound you just make scares me. Any independent thinking going on here, or just mindless cheerleading for an anonymous, superficial, celebrity-drunk blog-hard?
Bulletin, this just in: People at Harvard don't have all the answers.
You'd be amazed to know how many on their faculty have limited or no pubic school classroom experience at all.
Research can be insightful but you have to wonder with all the "reliable" research in the field, why are our schools still operating the way they did ten, twenty, fifty years ago?