Trust Teachers.

Education has long been compared to medicine. They both involve professional care, given by individual experts. They both involve sensitive data. They both directly impact the wellbeing of every person in the community. They are both based on complex human dynamics and interactions that are more difficult to capture into an equation than, say, physics. So if medicine could go from largely-considered-an-art to largely-considered-a-science, why can’t education?

Some things we never ask:

• How can we measure which doctor in a given hospital is really the best doctor?
• How can we force doctors, especially veteran doctors, to change how they do their job?
• Why are doctors not using the tools the hospital administrators want them to use?
• Do the doctors care enough about their patients?

We can do all the quantitative, qualitative, experimental, and observational data gathering and analysis about education we want, but it’s not going to make it a science, because it will not change a crucial attitude problem we have in the field of education. We don’t trust teachers.

When education experts consider tools for education, they look for how those tools can either bypass teachers and/or enforce a particular way for teachers to do their jobs, based on the beliefs of the administrators.

Despite the absolute obsession in the startup world around talking to your customers, edtech companies do not center the experience of the teacher — ultimately, teachers are neither the ones buying the product (that’s the administrators) nor the ones whose outcomes are measured to evaluate the effectiveness of the product (that’s the students). They are completely bypassed by companies who are purportedly designing tools for them.

One reason that creating a science of education is challenging is the sheer number of “moving parts” in the classroom. Each student is unique — cognitively, emotionally, and socially — creating countless variables that affect learning. Teachers hone their intuition for exactly what each student needs at each moment. And it has to be intuition; there is simply not enough time to do some quick reading of scholarly articles or solving of some multivariate regressions when you are teaching. Luckily, psychology has found that human intuition is great at processing vast amounts of data and coming to decisions in the moment.

In medicine, doctors follow a sort of mental flowchart that they learn in med school, to diagnose a patient based on symptoms. Their expertise is respected, despite the fact that it could be fully described and thus by definition does not include enough complexity to require human judgment. This is illustrated most clearly in the recent study that found that AI did better than doctors using AI. The doctors’ human judgment only got in the way, yet it is culturally unquestioned.

Teachers, on the other hand, who are making much more complex decisions, have their judgment questioned, precisely because the decisions they are making are so complex.

Now, am I saying that every teacher is perfect? Of course not! In fact, no teacher is perfect. Perfection is just really really hard. Different teachers have different strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and even personalities, that all affect how they teach.

But standardizing teaching by forcing teachers to all do the same thing is not going to solve the problem. Teachers need the latitude to do what makes sense to them. And if they are not given it, they will take it anyway, because it’s crucial to doing their job.

Some then jump directly to the opposite: maximize autonomy. Unfortunately, maximizing autonomy does not solve our problems either. If every teacher “can do whatever they want”, then 1) new teachers will be completely lost, and the learning curve will be that much more unforgiving for them and 2) the curriculum will not be cohesive within and across grades, making it more difficult for the students to build up understanding.

So what’s left?

Trusting teachers. Rather than approaching teachers with a deficit mindset that looks for ways they can be improved, we should take teachers’ intuitions as a valid starting point. After all, even those who critique teachers would agree that teachers are not flat out wrong, it’s just that they (like all of us) usually approach a problem from their own perspective, and might miss other perspectives.

Let’s center and validate teachers’ perspectives, and create tools that support them in what they are trying to do. And if these tools support them so well, teachers will be able to create better teaching experiences, which then actually create better learning expereinces for students.