Have you ever chased after the latest magical edu-trend? Did it seem incredibly important and then… sort of faded away.
I wasted tons of time revamping lessons, experimenting with untested trends, and spinning my wheels.
Nowadays, I let time filter out the unimportant for me. When a hot new idea pops up on the education landscape, I just wait. I wait for at least three years. Five years is probably even better! Wait a decade to be sure.
If an idea is still the focus of everyone’s attention in ten years, then perhaps it is actually important.
But, you’ll find that almost everything turns out to be unimportant when compared to education tools that have existed since my grandparents were kids.
Time Will Truly Tell
See, the longer something has already been important, the more likely it is to be important in the future (this is called The Lindy Effect). For example, I’m confident that, in 20 years:
- 1939’s The Wizard of Oz will still be an important film. My grandparents grew up with it, my parents grew up with it, I grew up with it, and now my 5-year-old son is obsessed with tornadoes because of it.
- The Beatles will continue to be a pretty big deal. Bands will come up with new ways to cover their songs. Kids in 2043 will pick up their guitar and learn the chords to Yesterday.
- People will still be reading 1851’s Moby-Dick. You’ll still hear references to white whales. Folks will still quote, “Call me Ishmael.”
Yet, these timeless classics had a rough start! The Wizard of Oz didn’t turn a profit for a decade. The Beatles were told that guitar groups were out and struggled to land a record deal. Moby-Dick sold so poorly that it was out of print by the end of Melville’s life. It didn’t earn back his initial advance! Humans completely misjudged these classics in the short-term.
Other things were initially far more popular than The Wizard of Oz, The Beatles, and Moby-Dick. But now those things are long forgotten. They were hot and then burned out. They turned out not to matter.
This is why it’s best to wait and let time do the filtering for you. You can’t tell which of today’s ideas will turn out to be important. But things that have already stood the test of time will continue to stand the test of time.
Old Ideas in Education
The Lindy Effect is quite applicable in education. I’d wager several dollars that Bloom’s Taxonomy will still be used by teachers in 20 years. It was first published in 1956! No, you don’t need to switch to whatever the trendy replacement is. Save some time and use what has already worked for decades.
I base many of my lessons around the work of John Dewey (born in 1859), Hilda Taba (1902), and Jerome Bruner (1915). Their work has stood the test of time! Probably the newest thing I use is Depth and Complexity, which is from the 1990s.
But, as a young teacher, I didn’t really know how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy. Of course I had heard of it. But I was a white belt at best. Sure, I had heard of Dewey – but only because I had confused him with the other Dewey who organized the library.
Instead of building on what already worked, I was frantically re-writing my lessons, chasing untested ideas that became embarrassing in five years.
Ask A Veteran Teacher!
We can all save an enormous amount of energy by zooming out and understanding the larger context of our field. Listen to teachers who have been around a while! Ask them, “Have we already done this? Was this problem already solved decades ago? Did we already try this and fail?”
Most of the problems you face today are the same problems educators have faced for decades. Is anyone even checking?
I love this paragraph from Alfie Kohn’s The Case Against Grades (which itself is over a decade old):
Most of the criticisms of grading you’ll hear today were laid out forcefully and eloquently anywhere from four to eight decades ago (Crooks, 1933; De Zouche, 1945; Kirschenbaum, Simon, & Napier, 1971; Linder, 1940; Marshall, 1968), and these early essays make for eye-opening reading. They remind us just how long it’s been clear there’s something wrong with what we’re doing as well as just how little progress we’ve made in acting on that realization.
Are we acting on decades of prior work? Are we even aware of what previous generations discovered? I wasn’t!
So, friend, if you’re overwhelmed, ignore the untested trends. Reach for the things that have already survived for decades. Master them, and you’re set for your career!