When Our Identity Is Wrapped Up in an Ineffective Practice, It's Hard to Move On
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why educators struggle to abandon practices they've built their professional identity around, even when evidence shows those practices don't work.
Key Takeaways
- Identity makes change hard - When a teacher's sense of self is tied to a practice, criticizing the practice feels like a personal attack
- This explains the resistance - Teachers who've championed balanced literacy, restorative practices, or other approaches resist evidence against them because it threatens their identity
- Separate practice from identity - Professionals must be willing to update their practice based on evidence without taking it personally
Transcript
How do we move on from ineffective practices with our professional identity intact?
Or how do we rebuild our professional identity when it's been wrapped up in practices that are discredited?
Maybe this has happened to you.
It has certainly happened to me as a person who is a principal.
Like 15 years ago, we were using a lot of balanced literacy approaches.
And I was speaking with Timothy Shanahan today about his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives.
And basically almost everything we were doing with small groups and leveled libraries and leveled reading instruction, so much of that has now been decisively proven to be ineffective.
There are much better ways that we could have been teaching.
And I think about how much of our identity as educators gets wrapped up in the specific things that we do.
And I see it here on this platform all the time where I'll make a video with just like some paper that's just devastating evidence against a practice.
And people will come in the comments and say, Yeah, but I kind of like it.
It works for my students.
And like in the paper that I'm talking about in the video, it's very, very clear that nobody should be doing this practice.
That like it's the nail is in the coffin.
And yet we can't move on.
And I get that.
Like I feel that pain of not wanting to admit that I put a lot of effort into something that turned out to be wrong.
But the reality is we have got to accept evidence and not all evidence, not to not be skeptical of anything.
I think we've got to have high standards and be thoughtful and take our time.
Like we have to accept evidence as the guide to what we should be doing and not just our personal preferences if we want this to be a profession.
And I came across a book that was about 25 years old on resisting reading mandates against And it did not age well.
Like, if you've listened to the Sold a Story podcast, it basically is defending everything that has been disproven or proven to be ineffective that you hear about in Sold a Story.
And I wonder, like, did that only come from the fact that people thought they were right, right?
I understand if you think you are right about something, you're going to defend it, you're going to resist people who say that you're wrong.
But there comes a point where we start to kind of know that we're wrong, right?
We realize, oh, I was on the wrong side of this issue and I have to deal with that.
I have to admit that and I have to change my practice and I have to, again, move forward with my professional identity in some way.
and not be too embarrassed or dragged down by that.
I think the thing that we have got to reorient our professional identity itself around is the same thing that we should make our decisions based on, which is evidence, which is research.
Let me know what you think.