My colleague, Robert McNergney has a post on Education News entitled “Small Ball: Small Teaching” that captures an important idea: Pay attention to the details. He based his brief essay on an enquiry from a student about whether he had read a well-known book about baseball, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael M. Lewis, about the Oakland Athletics. Mr. Lewis documented the success of an approach to assembling a team that was predicated on systematic analysis of less-glamorous achievements rather than the flashy, headline-grabbing statistics; in place of subjective judgements about players’ talents, the Oakland general manager, Bill Beane, employed modern statistical methods to find players whose achievements were correlated with higher numbers of wins and fewer losses.
Professor McNergney argued that, indeed, the analogy applies to teaching as well.
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Where reformers ought to be aiming
Over on Ed Excellence, Robert Pondiscio published an editorial entitled “The Fierce Urgency of Eventually” in which he argues that those reform efforts that ignore curricular and instructional issues present less-than-timely and -helpful alternatives at the very time when US education needs immediate, substantive change. Mr. Pondiscio presses his case for doing the hard work of specifying what students need to know. He wants reformers to talk about—get ready!—curriculum, teaching, and learning!
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