by Jan Schwartz
Mike Rose, a faculty member at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, wrote an article on Resolutions someone should make for 2011
He had 13 resolutions with a 14th being a repeat of the first. In case you are curious the 1st is: “To have more young people get an engaging and challenging education.”
Although I found all of the resolutions interesting, the resolution that struck me was #9. Rose is talking about standardizing things–curriculum, test, etc. in our rush to make everything measureable in exactly the same way.
To rethink, or at least be cautious about, the drive to bring any successful practice or structure “to scale”. Of course we want to learn from what’s good and try to replicate it, but too often the notion of “scaling up” plays out in a mechanical way, doing more or building more of something without much thought given to the fact that any human activity occurs in a context, in a time and place, and therefore a simple replication of the practice in one community might not achieve the same results it did in its original setting.
This, in my opinion, is also a danger of peer pressured best practices. It is good to have best practices when it comes to things that don’t have lots of interactions involving people, but I wonder if something that works in one region, culture, community, would necessarily work in others? Thoughts?
Photo credit: vauvau
