A Gut Check for Innovative-Sounding Ideas: Would I Tolerate This for My Kids?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the double standard in education reform where educators experiment with unproven ideas on other people's children that they would never accept for their own.
Key Takeaways
- The double standard is revealing - Educators willing to try unproven approaches on other families' children often wouldn't tolerate the same risks for their own kids
- Discipline reform is a key example - Some reforms eliminate consequences without adequate planning or evidence, creating unsafe learning environments
- Personal willingness is a useful litmus test - If you wouldn't allow someone to try it on your kids, it probably shouldn't be tried on anyone else's
Transcript
How can you tell if a new idea in education is a good idea or a bad idea?
Something occurred to me that I wanted to run by you that I think can help us sort out promising innovative ideas from ideas that are just bad.
And over and over again, I think what we've seen is that people are willing to experiment on other people's children.
People are willing to try things that are unproven on other people's kids that they would never tolerate for their own kids.
And yes, I think experimentation is a good thing.
I think learning from experience, learning from trying innovative and risky kinds of things is generally a good thing.
As a science teacher, I like experiments, but it really bothers me when we're always willing to experiment on other people's kids and never on our own.
We can tell an idea doesn't have enough merit to try it on our own kids, but we're willing to try it on other people's kids.
And I think this especially happens with discipline reform, that for some reason we feel like it's okay to just eliminate consequences and see what happens.
We can try that for other people's kids.
We can allow their learning environments to become unsafe and allow their teachers to be assaulted, even though we would never tolerate that kind of thing in our own kids' schools.
So let me know what you think about this as a general kind of rule of thumb for how we can vet different ideas.
I've got bubbles going behind me here.
For how we can vet different ideas that people are tossing around and proposing.
If you wouldn't allow someone to try it on your kids, should we be trying it on other people's kids?
Let me know what you think.