What happens when every teacher in the state gets trained in cognitive science and evidence-based teaching practices?
I first met Margaret Lee sometime last year, when she was still the director of organizational development for the Frederick County Public Schools in Frederick County, Maryland, a socioeconomically and racially diverse district of nearly fifty thousand students about an hour west of Baltimore. At the time, I was really digging into the research on teaching and learning. I’d launched this newsletter and focused my other reporting on it as well. But I was looking for something specific: was anybody beyond the grassroots group of insurgent teachers I’d connected with on social media trying to put that research into practice at scale? It was all well and good to talk about cognitive science principles—but I wondered if (and how) big, slow, lumbering school districts might actually move the needle using them?
Lee was the first person to give me a glimpse of what evidence-based teaching and learning might look like at scale. With support from district leadership, over the last decade she’d transformed both early teacher training and ongoing professional learning into something evidence-based, usable and practical; pointed curriculum and instruction in all subject areas toward research on what worked; and homed in on specific research-based moves, like explicit instruction and retrieval practice, shown to work with all students.
Impressed with Frederick County’s slow and steady improvement for all student groups—including the groups who often stubbornly remain farthest behind—I wrote a story about the work, focusing on the part about “scale.”
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One consequence of working for a very data-centric private school is that I routinely hear stories from parents about extremely high end private schools that are academically and behaviorally mediocre or just poor. Basically a 50 thousand dollar/year placebo.
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in California, too, I’ve heard a weird number of stories of parents assuming that the high price tag and good reputation meant a private school would offer rigorous academic instruction and then it….didn’t.