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As a teacher, I am constantly bombarded with orders from my administrators to use the latest "research based" teaching method. Like others, I constantly look for ways to improve my teaching techniques and increase the learning by my students, but I am not always helped by being forced to use someone else's methods.

the term "research based" is supposed to indicate that someone has tried the method on one or more groups of students and found it has merrit. In my former career as a research scientist, I am aware how difficult it is to come up with significant results when working with inanimate objects. People are even more difficult to work with. Results are harder to reproduce. I am abhored at the relatively small number of experimental subjects used by these researchers. I question if their results are always statistically significant. As a former scientist, I question if research really did show the method to be an improvement.

Effective teaching requires a large amount of preparation. Administrators often present and require the use of a particular "research based" teaching method, but only provide a minimum of training on how to implement the method. Generally the teachers are not given enough time or materials to adequately prepare to use the new method. No wonder the results we obtain may not be what came out of the research.

Students and groups of students vary significantly from region to region, school to school and sometimes from class to class. There is no guarantee that the researchers were working with students similar to the one I teach. Unless one takes the time to look up the research paper, one has no way of knowing what type of students were used in the research study. I started the year with a perfectly wonderful algebra book based on a research based method. I was trained at a workshop and started the year with optimism and enthusiasm only to have the book fall flat on its face. The students were not prepared for such an approach. With a different group of students, I think the book would have been a success. Thus it is that some methods that work with some groups may not work with others.

If by "local" methods one means the techniques used in a school or district year after year, there is no assurance they are good methods just because they are "local". I am not so much arguing that teachers should use "local" methods as that teachers should not be directed to use any particular method simply because an expert thinks it is great even if it is "research based". Teachers need to be given tools and then given the freedom to use those tools that seem to work best with the students they are teaching.

Learn more about this author, Reynold Conger.
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