I’ve begun an occasional series where I share five of my strongly held education-related opinions and invite readers to tell me what they think of them.

I’ll publish some of your reactions here. Send them to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.

1. Education researchers need to spend less time studying “low-hanging fruit” and more time researching practical ideas on how we can become better teachers.

I’m getting pretty tired of seeing study after study criticizing the Marshmallow Experiment, learning styles, and “Dale’s Cone of Excellence.”

Yeah, fine, there are issues with the Marshmallow Experiment, learning styles per se don’t exist, and Dale’s Cone was invented out of thin air. However, their three conclusions—the ability to delay self-gratification can lead to success, teachers often need to adapt their teaching to their students’ needs, and we tend to learn more from “doing” rather than “listening"—are all backed by tons of other peer-reviewed research and decades of teachers’ lived experiences.

Researchers, how about helping us teachers figure out better strategies to apply those solid conclusions in the classroom instead of having fun ridiculing the single-out-of-many studies (and, in the “Cone of Experience” case, nonstudy) that may have problems?

2. Every educator should create opportunities for students to learn about the difference between opinion and judgment (and we should be sure to learn it ourselves).

During my 19-year community-organizing career (prior to my 23 year-and-more continuing teacher career), we spent a lot of time helping people understand this difference:

Opinion is what you think before asking questions about the topic at hand and talking with others.

Judgment is what you have, and what you show, after asking questions and talking with others.

I have emphasized this difference with student-teachers before they begin their first day (many of whom are certain they know better than their collaborating teacher), with students (I use versions of Write-Pair-Share and always encourage them to modify their original written responses afterward), and in my own inner voice when—probably more than many—I come to snap conclusions about people and their actions.

In this era of polarization, I’m not sure that there are many more important topics for us to teach.

3. More student learning would take place if we teachers implemented a key missing final step in the Gradual Release of Responsibility process.

It’s probably a safe bet that all teachers know the typical steps in the Gradual Release of Responsibility process: I do, we do, you do.

However, I’ve always thought there should be a final step beyond “you do.”

It should end with “you teach.”

So much research finds that we tend to learn—and remember—more by teaching a topic! And, at least in my experience, student engagement can also be quite high.

4. Artificial intelligence will not “revolutionize’ education, but there are some ways it can relieve teachers of some drudgery and specifically help English-language learners, and that’s not nothing.

Nothing seems to stop True Believers in AI of certainty that its impact on education will be earth-shattering.

Sigh.

That just ain’t going to happen.

But, AI can free up teachers to have more “mental bandwidth” to engage with students by making it a lot easier to create materials and reducing the time required to do certain tasks (like letters of recommendation), along with being particularly helpful to English-language learners (having students use AI chatbots outside of school is a godsend to those who have no one else in their household with whom they can practice their English).

Why can’t ed-tech enthusiasts (and many school reformers) be satisfied with incremental improvement? You put enough of them together, and we can be talking about something big!

5. Differentiated instruction isn’t really that difficult.

I actually made an animated video with Ed Week about this very point several years ago, and it’s one of their most popular ever.

Come on, folks, it’s not hard to tell a student having a hard day that they only have to answer five instead of 10 questions; or giving them a different prompt if they are having difficulty writing an argument essay about the assigned topic; or giving English-language learners a “word bank” to help them answer the questions.

Grace and understanding aren’t that “expensive,” even if you have a big class.

Let me know what you think!

By the way, a few of these opinions have previously appeared in my teacher resource-sharing blog.