Malcolm Gladwell on Panicking and Choking: The Different Ways that Amateurs and Professionals Fail

Professionals, by definition, are more skilled than amateurs in any given field, but they both experience failure.  And to an average observer, they appear to fail in similar ways.   The practitioner is moving along nicely in carrying out his or her craft -- and then suddenly it all falls apart.  The golf ball flies off …

Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose

This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. This is a summary of the argument:             Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college students a win-win option:  By becoming corps members, they can do good and do well at the same …

Larry Cuban — Timelessness of Teacher-Centered Instruction

This post is a piece by Larry Cuban, which he recently published on his blog.  Here's a link to the original. It's all about how some things never change in schools.  Despite the enormous disruption of Covid shutdown and Zoom classrooms, American classrooms remain in the age-old format of teacher-centered instruction.  SKIP TO C Timeless …

Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers

This post is a chapter from my 2004 book, The Trouble with Ed Schools.  Here's a link to an earlier version that was published in 2003 in Educational Researcher.   I wrote this in response to my experience teaching doctoral students in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.  Nearly all of the students …

Why Do We Need a Graduate School of Education?

This post is a brief talk I gave in 2013 for the occasion celebrating the renaming of the ed school at Stanford, complete with a new logo and branded swag.  It had long been called the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE for short) and at that point it changed to the Stanford Graduate School …

An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University

This post is an essay I wrote about the history of the uneasy relationship between American teacher education and the university.  It was published in 2008 in the 3rd edition of the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and John McIntyre).  This is a PDF of the original. Here's …

Teach For America and Teacher Ed: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose

This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original. Here's a summary of the argument:             Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college students a win-win option:  By becoming corps members, they can do good and do …

Life on the Margins — Why Teacher Ed Has So Little Impact on Ed Policy

This post is a paper I presented as part of a panel on the politics of teacher education at the annual meeting of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2005.  It was  published that same year in the Journal of Teacher Education.  Here's a link to the original.  The paper draws …

Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research

This post is a short piece I wrote in 2011 for a special issue of the journal Teacher Education and Practice on "Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Scholarship." My one take is that research in education is not necessarily well positioned to enhance education; on the contrary, it often does more harm than good.  See …

Panicking vs. Choking: The Different Ways that Amateurs and Professionals Fail

Professionals, by definition, are more skilled than amateurs in any given field, but they both experience failure.  And to an average observer, they appear to fail in similar ways.   The practitioner is moving along nicely in carrying out his or her craft -- and then suddenly it all falls apart.  The golf ball flies off …