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СТРАТЕГИЯ И ПОЛИТИКА ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ
T
Arthur K. Ellis
Professor, Director, Center for Global Curriculum Studies, Seattle Pacific University
E-mail: aellis@spu.edu
Ш
THE NATURE OF EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION
"Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time."
Bill Gates
"Out of every ten innovations attempted, all very splendid, nine will end up in silliness."
Antonio Machado
Introduction
Innovation and novelty come from the same Latin word, "novus." These words imply something new. The idea that something is new is dear to our hearts. We have been conditioned by advertisers and promoters to associate "new" with "improved," whether the product is laundry soap, a smart phone, or a school curriculum. The Oxford English Dictionary defines innovation as "the introduction of novelties." Innovation is a noun related to the verb "to innovate," first found in print in 1561 in Thomas Norton's book, Calvin's Instructions, in which Norton wrote, "a desire to innovate all things moveth troublesome men." (Calvin, 1960). In his poem La Jolie Rousse (The Pretty Redhead), Apollinaire writes of "this long quarrel between tradition and imagination." We can see that this term innovation appears to have touched emotions, both positive and negative, from that time to this day, and perhaps it always will.
The purpose of this paper is to identify, define, explicate, and document certain educational innovations,
Как цитировать статью: Ellis, A.K. (2017). The Nature of Education Innovation. Otechestvennaya i zarubezhnaya pedagogika. V. 1, 4 (41), p. 8-22..
some of which seem to have found a permanent niche as well as some that come and go. Notably, the reader is directed to certain high-profile centers of innovation around the world and to a description of how innovations diffuse from inception to widespread usage. Additionally, this paper addresses the current state of two notable innovations, that of the phenomenal world-wide growth of internet-based distance learning in higher education and the continued attempt to influence academic achievement in public schools through such federal interventions in the United States as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core. A summary note raises questions of the intrinsic worth of certain innovations, and the extent to which innovation and improvement are, or are not, the same thing.
Whether an innovation finds a niche in the scheme of things can be a sometime thing. The overhead projector, an apparatus that may well be unfamiliar to the younger generation, was touted in the second half of the 20th Century as an indispensable apparatus in classrooms. Advocates of the overhead projector argued that it was an improvement over the blackboard. Millions of overhead projectors were sold to schools. The idea was that the overhead projector allowed the teacher to face the class while presenting material that was illuminated on a screen. But critics pointed out its static nature which allowed only one slide at a time as well as its teacher-directed quality that made it mainly a tool for presenting material to passive learners. In time it was replaced by an older innovation, the blackboard, which allows greater space to illustrate and idea, and a more dynamic, interactive pedagogical flow, especially in its 21st Century incarnation as the smart board.
Every innovation has a certain nature, that is, inherent characteristics that define it as a thing in itself. The flipped classroom, for example, is a simple technique that "frontloads" information for learners prior to instruction. The centuries-old idea that it is natural for students to come to class to listen to an instructor as he/ she teaches a lesson with assignments to follow, is turned on its head. Students view a podcast or read certain material prior to class, thus they are better prepared. This changes the nature of the time spent by students in class from that of reception learning to an experience in dialogue with the teacher and with one another. To traditionalists, this may seem quite unnatural. After all, the teacher is an expert in knowledge and skills, and student knowledge at best is amateurish. Without doubt, the whole idea of the flipped classroom touches brings reaction for and against.
It is also the case that every innovation must be considered from a struc-
tural viewpoint. In fact, this is in large measure the determinant of success or failure. An innovation may be good in itself, but in order for it to succeed it must find its place as a structural element. Schools and classrooms are complex systems with interacting parts. Any given change means that something is replaced. When teachers are evaluated, typically someone in authority sits in the back of the classroom and makes notes on, among other things, the extent to which a class is under control and whether are not the students are engaged. If the teacher is in the front of the room, standing up, and the students are seated at desks in rows, then this simple syntax makes it rather easy to determine whether students are compliant and seemingly attentive. But if a teacher elects to place the students in small groups for purposes of student discussion, then the structure of the classroom room changes from a more static to a more dynamic arrangement, making traditional elements of control more complicated. Whereas the frontal teaching mode tends to eliminate or a least diminish the need for social skills on the part of the students, a decentralized, learner-centered structure such as cooperative learning depends heavily on the need for student civility and self-direction. Thus in small group cooperative learning, students need to learn both subject matter and to practice civility and self-direction. In such a context, both academic and social growth are expected.
Innovation is related to, but not identical to invention. An innovator is not necessarily an inventor. United States patent law defines invention as "a new, useful process, machine, improvement, etc., that did not exist previously and that is recognized as the product of some unique intuition or genius, as distinguished from ordinary mechanical skill or craftsmanship." (US Patent Law, 2016) Therefore, an inventor or team of inventors brings to mind such inventions and inventors as Alexander Popov (the wireless), Thomas Edison (light bulb, phonograph, etc.), or Stephanie Kwolek (Kevlar). Inventions can be as world-changing and intangible as calculus, invented separately by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, or as immediately practical as automobile windshield wipers, invented by Mary Anderson, or the post-it note, invented by Arthur Fry. Johannes Gutenberg is credited with the "invention" of moveable type, which made the printing press possible. In fact, printing was an ancient process first developed in China, but not moveable type. The spread of printing to the Western world was slow. But with the invention of moveable type, Gutenberg and a number of printers whose work led in a collective sense to the print revolution, changed the world. The thing all these inventions have in
common is that something came into existence that did not previously exist.
An innovation, on the other hand, refers to the introduction of an existing process, program, or way of doing things that offers new capabilities to users. Early in the 19th Century, a Scottish schoolmaster named James Pillans, a geography teacher at The Old School of Edinburgh (yes, there really was a place called Old School), attached a large piece of slate to the schoolroom wall. His idea was that when he, or perhaps his students, wrote on this "blackboard," the whole class could view whatever it displayed, all at the same time. Pillans realized that maps or charts hanging on the wall could be viewed by one and all, and that the handheld piece of slate each student brought to class could be written on, erased, etc. (Buzbee, 2014) In that sense, there was nothing new here. But the fact that a wall-mounted blackboard has a dynamic element (as opposed to the unchangeable static element of a wall-mounted map or chart) and can be seen by everyone present was indeed an educational innovation. His idea combined visibility with changeability, resulting in something new. Over time, slate changed to porcelain-baked enamel on pressed board, blackboards became green boards, and then white boards, chalk replaced slate and was itself replaced by felt markers, but the basic idea remains the same. In the 1960s a competitor innovation emerged in the form of the overhead projector. But its severe limitations were exposed in time, and the overhead projector was relegated to the dust bins of pedagogical history. Take an overhead projector into a primary classroom today as an artifact for young children to study. Can they figure out what it was used for? Today we have the smart board, a highly interactive incarnation of the blackboard, and no doubt continuous upgrades will be made, but the blackboard remains.
In the world of education, from primary through tertiary, innovation seems to be all-important. Schools and teachers want to be on the leading edge, to know the latest trend, to avoid being old-fashioned or possibly out of date. Keeping up is crucial. No one wants to be left behind. Perhaps the most overwhelming innovation that schools at all levels have had to take into account is the personal computer and its connection to the internet and worldwide web. These innovations are so profound that the extent to which they have and will change access to knowledge remains uncertain. One result of these innovations is the sudden appearance, like mushrooms after a spring rain, of online virtual universities and the exponential growth of online education.
An educational innovation need not be a new idea in itself; rather, it often represents an insight on the part of a person or persons who devise a novel
application for a pre-existent idea. The "project method" in school learning represents such an example. European university students studying art and architecture have, at least since the 18th Century, been required to create or construct projects that exemplified their growth and development toward mastery. Such projects were typically capstone or valedictory projects following a course of study. Working at Columbia University early in the 20th Century, Professor William H. Kilpatrick published his ideas for the project method to be utilized in school settings with children. He advocated project learning as an active learning counterpoint to the passive read and write, drill and practice methods so common in American education at the time. His article in a 1918 edition of The Teachers College Record attracted an astounding level of interest among teachers and administrators across the country with more than 100,000 requests for reprints (Kilpatrick 1918). The Teachers College Record was certainly a high profile prestigious journal, but the diffusion of this idea, which remains popular to this day, was accomplished largely by word of mouth. This innovation's power was based on the persuasive idea that students can learn by doing, through construction, and by working together.
Today innovation is a magic word in education, business, and in the arts and sciences in general. One need only Google the term to see how ubiquitous it is. Innovation has in fact become institutionalized. Centers of educational innovation abound. We can expect even more of them to develop world-wide. Permit me to cite five such centers, ones that have a high profile and which clearly focus on concrete steps to be taken in the name of innovation.
The Center for Education Innovation (educationinnovations.org) is a non-state organization funded by a number of foundations including Cambridge Education, Aga Khan Development Network, UNICEF, OECD, and Deshpande Foundation of India. Its outreach is world-wide with a focus on educational technologies, low-cost private schools, teacher quality, and school improvement from primary through tertiary levels.
ExxonMobil Perspectives (exxonmobil.com) is a foundation supported by the petroleum giant and which focuses primarily on funding for research and development in the areas of mathematics and science education. The foundation sponsors the National Mathematics and Science Initiative, designed to bring innovations to teaching and learning in these content areas in American schools. Of course, science and mathematics loom large on the American school agenda, fueled by
fears that the USA is falling behind in achievement in these areas. The STEM initiative (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in which nearly every university now participates in STEM teacher training underscores the strategic importance of these subject areas. The Office of Innovation and Improvement (innovation.ed.gov), a department of the United States Department of Education, focuses on support for initiatives in a wide range of topics including teacher quality, charter schools, arts in education, principal and school leadership, and university museums, to name a few.
The Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (iie.org) of the Institute of International Education sponsors research and development for new ideas in economic growth, leadership and human capacity, and vision. The Center is administered by the U. S. Department of State and is a player in the well-known Fulbright Foundation. Educational Innovation, a Center located at the University of Wisconsin Madison Campus. The Center's mission is to empower faculty and staff to be agents of change and innovation to transform, engage, and inspire students and empower communities. The Center includes all facets of the University including economics, agriculture, sciences, arts, etc.
These centers are merely illustrative of the hundreds of centers of educational innovation located around the world. Innovation is indeed a catch-word of our times. What person or institution doesn't want to be considered innovative? A given innovation, however, may be "good" in itself, but how do others learn about it. And when they learn about it, how do they implement it faithfully? Centers such as those just cited act as collector/distributors of innovation. They provide infrastructure and support through research findings and means of diffusion. It may have been the case that Kilpatrick's project method innovation spread largely by word of mouth, but such current-day innovations as cooperative learning and problem-based learning find support in the form of research articles published in refereed journals, how-to articles published by professional associations such as ASCD, presentations are regional and national conventions, and workshops offered to school districts by gurus who tout a particular way of implementing an innovation with fidelity.
A particular innovation is one thing. The extent to which it finds favor and is adopted is quite another. One of the pioneers in the study of the diffusion of innovations, that is, the study of how innovations spread, was Everett Rogers, an American social scientist whose specialty was rural sociology. Rogers was
able to demonstrate why certain innovations spread and are sustained and why others do not. In his book Diffusion of Innovations, Rogers (1983; 2003) lists five characteristics to consider with regard to any innovation:
1. Relative Advantage, the degree to which an idea is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes.
2. Compatibility, that is, the degree to which it seems consistent with existing values, past experience, and needs of potential adopters.
3. Complexity, which is the degree to which an innovation seems difficult to understand and use.
4. Trialability, the degree to which a new idea may be experimented with on a limited basis.
5. Observability, that is, the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.
How and why do certain innovations diffuse successfully? What causes others to die on the vine? The level of success an innovation achieves represents an effect. Therefore, it is reasonable to search for causation although direct cause and effect relationships in this regard are not always easy to determine. In some cases, the cause may be external to the simple idea that the innovation itself caused its own spread. This is true of the innovations of the 1960s, for example, the New Science and New Math, which were based largely on process approaches such as problem solving, higher level thinking skills, and the very idea that students should behave as scientists and mathematicians, exploring ideas, documenting findings, explaining proofs, etc. The external cause was the launch by the USSR in the autumn of 1957 of the Sputnik, the Earth's first artificial moon, placed in orbit by Soviet scientists. This event shocked people at all levels in the United States, and the blame for America's failure to be first in space was levelled at the schools. The curriculum was too "soft," school was more carnival than learning laboratory. Congress allocated large sums of money to fund curriculum projects that could bring rigor and discipline to the teaching of science and mathematics in particular. Of course, the space race was a proxy for military strength, so this external threat actually served to bring many excellent innovative programs to the schools. Unfortunately, these programs, in spite of their excellence, did not receive proper infrastructure support, and most of them gradually disappeared. This was a lesson learned in the successful diffusion of innovations. It is not enough to have a good product or method. It will not, cannot succeed without support systems. This story of innovation diffusion failure is well told by Hargreaves
and Shirley (2012) in their book, The Global Fourth Way.
With the publication by the United States National Commission on Excellence in Education of the Nation at Risk report (1983), the motivation to innovate was once again an external threat, this time in the form of Japanese economic competitiveness. Americans were buying such Japanese products as cameras, automobiles, computers, and television sets to the point that American jobs were being lost and companies were going bankrupt. The rise of other Asian Tigers and ultimately of China further fueled the argument that the USA was falling behind in a time of economic globalization. This, coupled with the dismal results America has achieved in PISA and other international tests, has led over the past 30 years to a demand for subject matter standards, a more rigorous curriculum, better teaching methods, and standardized examinations to measure academic gains.
Whether this attempt at innovation will prove to be more helpful than harmful to education remains to be seen, but I myself am skeptical. One difference in these two externally derived attempts to innovate is that although the Sputnik era did represent federal funding at the levels of curriculum development and teacher training, it was not nearly as top-down at the Nation at Risk movement. For the past 14 years the federal government, both executive and legislative branches, has imposed conditions, complete with purse strings, on schools in the form of "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) legislation under President George W. Bush and "Race to the Top" (RTTP) and "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA) legislation under President Barak Obama. Top-down edicts rarely succeed in organizations. (U. S. Department of Education, 2016).
An alternative to attempts to diffuse innovation through external threat and/ or top-down edict, is the so-called grass roots effect in which innovations take hold largely through word of mouth and widespread support among the rank and file of an organization, for example teachers and administrators, students and parents. To be sure, grass roots enthusiasm without proper theoretical and empirical foundations has not been sufficient to sustain certain innovations. One such innovation, called Instructional Theory into Practice (ITIP) swept the country during the period of the 1970s through the mid-1990s (Hunter, 1976). ITIP was reckoned to be the most widely adopted innovation in modern American school history (Slavin, 1989). The protocols of this method of teaching and learning involved eight "steps in effective instruction." The steps formed a template for lesson plans, but also for evaluating teachers. Teachers were hired on the basis of the knowledge of the steps. Schools of education
in universities and teacher training institutions taught the ITIP approach to per-service teachers. Workshops and courses were held for in-service training as well. But in 1989, Robert Slavin, of Johns Hopkins University, produced evidence in an article in the journal Phi Delta Kappan, that showed that ITIP was little more than a superficial mélange of psychological theories which had not been tested when put together into the ITIP format (Slavin, 1989). Empirical research was almost completely lacking. It was a situation reminiscent of The Emperor's New Clothes. There was no evidence of it positive academic effects, but no one had really challenged it until Slavin came along. As a result of Slavin's article, ITIP melted away like snow in a warm spring rain. Today, most younger teachers have never heard of it. Still, as innovations go, it began on a small scale with regional workshops and scaled up remarkably. Whatever we might think about this approach, it was indeed well diffused.
Why some innovations wither on the vine while others scale up successfully is a question not easily answered. In education, we can ask whether an innovation, perhaps one that is shown to be efficacious in experimental or quasi experimental studies, offers the potential for widespread diffusion. Instructor feedback, for example, has been shown in numerous controlled studies to increase academic performance by students (Walberg, 1984, Hattie, 2012), yet there is little evidence that it is routinely found and systematically applied in classrooms. On can speculate on its lack of scalability, perhaps because it is seen by teachers as yet one more task in an already overburdened workload.
An innovation in higher education that shows considerable evidence of scalability is that of online learning. Advocates of online learning point to its relatively modest tuition structures, its appeal to nontraditional students across age groups, and its outreach to students around the world. Online learning in higher education fits the profile of what Clayton Christensen describes as a "disruptive innovation." The term "paradigm shift," coined decades ago by Thomas Kuhn (1962) comes to mind. Kuhn described a paradigm shift as a discontinuity or disruption in the linear progress of development which is thought to take place cumulatively and gradually. The introduction and widespread use of the printing press changed ideas of literacy and access to knowledge once and for all. It disrupted centuries of limited access to books and made possible the Reformation among other things. It allowed ordinary people to become their own teachers.
At Southern New Hampshire University, in the United States, the on-campus student population is slightly less than 3,000 students. But online enrollment
as of 2014 was roughly 32,000 students (Huffington Post, 2014). Universities such as Stanford have instituted MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) that enroll as many as 100,000 students around the world. In 2013 Harvard and MIT created a joint venture called Ed X. EdX is a consortium of universities including UC Berkeley, University of Texas, University of Toronto, University of Kyoto, Japan, and others. EdX delivers MOOCS to huge audiences around the world. Coursera (see coursera.org), a rival venture developed by Yale, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin, enrolls huge numbers with 74% of students outside the USA. Nearly every institution of higher learning in the United States offers online learning from individual courses to entire degree completion programs. So we have a phenomenon in the form of a disruptive innovation that has grown from non-existent 10 years ago to enrollments in the hundreds of thousands today. Kathleen Ives, CEO of the Online Learning Consortium notes that "the trend of increasing distance learning enrollment in the face of declining overall higher education enrollments suggests an important shift in the American higher education landscape" (babson.edu/ news-events, 2016, p 1)
Beyond the sheer prestige of the world-class universities that sponsor MOOCs, four factors will account for the continued success of this diffusion: 1) price difference; 2) product quality; 3) international markets; and 4) traditional-age university students. At this point two of these appear to have been achieved, that of cheaper prices of online courses compared to campus-based courses, and the huge interest displayed by international students. One can cite online teaching and learning (using the example of MOOCs) as an example of a controversial theory known as "Disruptive Innovation." Thomas Samuel Kuhn introduced the world to the term "paradigm shift" in his celebrated book (Kuhn, 1962). As we all know by now, a paradigm shift represents a disruption in the linear progress of knowledge by which advances are typically made gradually and cumulatively. Two world class examples of scientific innovations that qualify as true paradigm shifts are the printing press and the internal combustion engine. They changed everything. Christopher Columbus' voyage to the New World in 1492 is an example in the annals of discovery. Whatever one might think about the positive and negative effects of his explorations, there was the world before Columbus and the world after Columbus. The term paradigm shift is no doubt over-used, so I will limit my examples of educational innovation to more modest terminology. Nevertheless, I will offer two examples of change and innovation that offer constructive
disruption to our field of education.
Disruptive innovation theory represents the work of Richard Foster (Foster, 1986) and that of Clayton Christenson (The Innovator's Dilemma, 2016). Christensen, a professor of business at Harvard, explains that the opportunity for disruptive innovation in a system occurs when the system is, or appears to be, meeting the needs of many while a significant number of others are not having their needs met. Disruptive innovation is typically characterized by a cheaper, seemingly inferior (Christensen, 1997) product compared to that which is currently offered. Henry Ford recognized this need for a disruptive innovation when he mass-produced the Model T automobile at a price that ordinary people could afford. To be sure, cars were being sold to wealthy people, but Ford saw an opportunity to expand the market by offering a cheaper product of lesser quality but still adequate to meet certain needs and wants.
In the case of feedback/formative assessment as a pedagogical tool, the conventional wisdom in American education from the mid-1980s to the present day has been that high stakes summative standardized testing is the best route to reform. The idea is that if students and teachers are held accountable for student learning, academic gains will surely follow. There is some evidence that this is working, but it is surely not working for all students. This top-down movement has inadvertently given rise to a corollary phenomenon, that is, the rise of low-impact, cost free, formative assessment in which students reflect on what they are learning in the form of simple written "I learned" statements which students write and submit at the end of a lesson and which are marked by the teacher and returned to the student. Solid evidence exists that this results in higher achievement (Black and William, 2010).
Computers entered education in the 1980s accompanied by the promise that this would raise achievement and transform classrooms. Similar hopes had been raised and then dashed regarding the potential of radio and television and film to change school learning. In spite of the huge sums of money spent on desktops, notebooks, and hand-held mobile devices, there is not much evidence that this innovation has improved learning as measured by test scores. The problem ultimately is not that these devices get in the way of learning. Rather, the problem seems to be that they are not suited to traditional classroom- and school-based teaching and learning. Enter online learning. The criticisms of online learning coming from traditionalists have been many and in some cases valid, for example, the loss and absence of human contact and interaction, of a motivating force in the form of a teacher, of the esprit
de corps that develops in a class of students, of the low completion rates of online courses by students. But the advantages of online learning include cheaper costs for delivery, flexible times when a student may choose to learn, and the convenience of not having to attend a school where many students simply do not feel comfortable or even welcome. It is popular to cite the obvious drawbacks of online learning, just as people could cite the drawbacks of the automobile compared to horse-drawn transportation early in the 20th Century: bad roads, engine failures, flat tires, inadequate numbers of petrol stations, etc. Online learning will need to improve in order to become viable and sustaining. Already, hybrid forms, known as blended classes and flipped classes are becoming common, getting us beyond the either/or stage. Online enrollment was approximately 45,000 in the year 2000. Today it numbers nearly 7 million students and is growing rapidly. In 2013, it was calculated that 73% of students in higher education are enrolled in at least one online course (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2015). The numbers continue to grow.
Today more than 77% of university administrators express a favorable attitude toward online learning, according to a 2012 poll taken by the Babson Research Group and the Sloan Consortium. This is a change from 57% who responded to the same poll in 2003. The Babson Group (2016) reported a 3.9% enrollment jump from 2014 to 2015. Administrators continue to voice two concerns about this innovation: 1) the need for more self-discipline on the part of students, and 2) low retention rates. However, a U. S. Department of Education (Aud, 2010) sponsored meta-analysis of experimental and quasi experimental control group studies found that "on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction" Beyond that, even better performance was evidenced by students involved in blended courses. This finding advances the argument that an "either/or" situation is less favorable than a mix of online and face-to-face teaching and learning.
Taking into consideration Rogers' five factor innovations diffusion model, MOOCs and other forms of distance learning appear to fare rather well. Their relative advantage includes cost which ranges from no cost or lesser costs to flexibility with respect to learner-determined access. They meet the flexibility requirement far more than do time and place determined courses, an especially important criterion for working people who may have no time for classes during the day. Complexity of use is greatly diminished since all one
needs is a computer with internet access. With regard to trialability, MOOCs offer the ultimate in course shopping with little to lose if one decides not to complete a given class and with hundreds of MOOCs from which to choose on almost any topic. The observability component is made readily available through numerous search engines from high profile Google to a myriad of less well-known outlets. Prestigious universities including Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford use MOOCs as part of their branding outreach, creating high institutional visibility thus countering the perception that these schools are places reserved only for the wealthy few. In all, MOOCs and other forms of distance learning meet Christensen's disruptive innovation requirements in the sense they have resuscitated an old idea, correspondence course learning, thanks to new technological developments.
It can be argued that we are learning more about what works effectively as well as what does not, but there are many contingencies. We never "prove" anything in "soft" social science research, but we do build a case for support or lack of support over time. Innovations come and go. More often than not, they fade away in spite of the early promises made by their promoters. Increasingly, we are learning ways to test their effectiveness, and this enables us to make evidenced-based arguments. However, there will always be cultural factors of likes and dislikes, ease of implementation, teacher training, and, of course, cost. A prominent example of an innovation that was highly touted by its developers and promoters was that of Learning Styles. This innovation promised higher achievement and student satisfaction if students' learning styles were diagnosed (Kolb, 1976). The various categories into which the inventory placed student included auditory learners, visual learners, tactile learners, and kinesthetic learners to name a few. This innovation promised a sound theoretical basis as well as one validated through empirical studies. However, the evidence was not particularly compelling, and teachers who face perhaps 25-150 students per day hardly knew what to do in order to meet the range of styles. As a result Learning Styles has nearly disappeared from the American educational scene. One could speculate on the reasons for the demise of the learning styles phenomenon, and a reasonable place to start is with Rogers' five characteristics of successful innovations, especially complexity of implementation and compatibility with existing school curricula.
Determining "what works" obviously implies a pragmatic approach to the value of an innovation, but it also suggests the question: "what works for whom?" Currently in the United States a phenomenon known as "value-
added" assessment is in vogue. Value-added assessment ties student academic performance as measured by standardized tests in mathematics, literacy, and science to teacher influence. We could ask ourselves, why shouldn't teachers be held accountable for the achievements of their students? However, when we examine John Hattie's (2012) list of effect sizes we find that television yields an effect size of negative 0.18 and student mobility an effect size of negative 0.34. American students watch a great deal of television, and when time is spent by students playing video games is added, we can see that school has a very real competitor. With regard to mobility, the Annual Social and Economic 2004 Supplement to the U. S. Census found that 15-20% of American students moved in the previous year.
A deeper question of "other directedness" arises when we ask ourselves "what works?" If the calculation of what works is found in test scores, then we are in the position of yielding the ultimate measure of education to test makers and those companies, like the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Pearson Publishing, two giant corporations who make millions of dollars on the sale of their tests to schools. We have a saying, "what gets measured is what counts." Where are the measures of citizenship, self-realization, student and teacher empowerment, team building, and happiness? Are these not important? Do they not count as part of a person's education?
Finally, one thing is certain: the promises of innovations will continue to be made by those who develop and promote them. Surely the pace at which educational innovations appear will increase. This will underscore the need for critical appraisal on the part of those who are expected to consider and possibly adopt any particular innovation. The process of education is complex and always situated in a certain context. What works well in one context may not in another. The elusive quest to perfect a science of education where experiment, replication, and implementation follow logically in a pattern is problematic at best. Conclusions are bound by time and space and culture, none of which is the same from setting to setting. We cite probability, not proof, when we make inferences about the outcomes of even the most well-controlled experimental study. Paradoxically, the better a study is controlled, the less it resembles the messy chaotic world of classrooms. But as we continue to benefit from brain function research and neuro-science studies, from cognitive science research that delves into factors of motivation, self-regulation, and goal setting, from developments in technologies that expand access to information in ways that seemed unimaginable only a few years ago, and from studies in organizational
and human resources sciences, the promise of advancement does seem real.
The word "school" comes from the Greek word "schola." It originally meant an educational world view or set of ideas about what is important in teaching and learning. Over time, the word school came to signify a place of bricks and mortar, a building or set of buildings in a certain location. It became a place to which you had to go in order to learn important things. The great promise of recent educational innovations is that we now are given another opportunity to reconsider thoughtfully the ancient meaning of school.
"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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