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 what’s important. When a hot new idea pops up on the education landscape, I just wait. I wait for at least three years. Five years is 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, I’ve found that basically everything turns out to be unimportant.
Only a few things survive the test of time.
Time Reveals The Classics
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 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 rough starts!
- The Wizard of Oz didn’t turn a profit for a decade!
- The Beatles were told that guitar groups were “out.” They 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.
People 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 turned out not to matter.
This is why it’s best to wait and let time do the filtering for you. You cannot 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.
Wait. Be patient.
Old Ideas in Education
Let the Lindy Effect guide you as an educator. 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 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. (And I only use bits and pieces of that.)
If you work in gifted education, you need to be looking at the work from the 1950s-1960s. During the Space Race, the United States government cared a whole lot about our brightest kids. Lots of money went into developing methods for teaching them.
Know the classics.
I Didn’t Know The Classics
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. I wasn’t fluent. 20 years later, I’m still improving my understanding of Bloom’s.
Sure, I had heard of Dewey as a new teacher – but only because I had confused him with the other Dewey who organized the library! I sure hadn’t read any of his work.
Instead of calming building on what had stood the test of time, I was frantically re-writing my lessons every year, chasing untested ideas.
And so many of those ideas 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 exact thing and fail?
Most of the problems you face today are the same problems educators have faced for decades. Are we checking?
I was fortunate to have parents and aunts who were teachers. Even as a kid, I had been warned of education’s endless lurching towards the next new thing.
We Already Did This 80 Years Ago
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 building on our decades of prior work? Are we even aware of what previous generations discovered? I sure wasn’t!
So, friend, if you’re overwhelmed, do less. Ignore the untested trends. Reach for the things that have already survived for decades.
Master them, and you’re set for your career.