What is going on with research in education??

Okay, so I got this assignment where I needed to look at an aspect of literacy and just talk about it aimlessly. I was stuck on it because that goal was a bit vague for me but it was fine, I picked something and saw if I could just throw a bunch of stuff on the page and clean it after. The problem was...all the terminology I was running into was frustratingly vague and just inconsistent enough to be kind of confusing. The issue, moreso, was an utterly bizarre reluctancy to define in detail terminology that has been used for decades, along with an open disdain and condescension for anyone that gets the terminology confused or incorrect.

Take for instance “whole language instruction”. That’s been around for decades. Everyone in education is familiar with it. Anyone who’s been in education long enough has opinions on it. Despite pouring through dozens of academic papers, articles, and textbooks, I have yet to find someone willing to define it in any meaningful detail. There’s a high-level definition. But when trying to describe it, a description is skipped and example exercises are doven into instead. I noticed that as a trend for terms. Discussions agree that there are good and bad parts to this instruction, as well as the fact that it can be readily and easily identified. You would think that by pointing out that there are parts to this instruction that you would be able to then identify and elaborate those parts, if only the set of known parts, but you’d be wrong. People can barely agree on whether whole language instruction includes effective phonics instruction.

There are only like, three camps of instruction: phonics, whole language, and balanced (i.e. a little bit of both). And the only one of these we can kind of define is phonics. You’d think that one would be easy, but there’s like four different kinds of approaches, only one of which is...recommended? See, I can’t even say with confidence whether synthetic phonics is the way to go because of how non-committal the industry is. I have never seen a profession so unwilling to describe methodology and use “it depends” as a cop-out comment for everything. If you use an approach and most of your class ends up illiterate something went wrong like come on.

I cannot believe I had to spend some of today discussing the grammar of phonics terminology to figure out what the hell professionals are describing. What is “systematic explicit phonics instruction”? Things we didn’t have a definitive answer for despite several textbooks and articles in front of us, along with an extremely experienced and knowledgeable professor:

Holy SHit! HOW are these questions unanswered? Why haven’t they been asked? It is so unbelievable that a profession who regularly assesses our vocabulary does not themselves have one. I have read paper after paper of academics crying, asking why are we still having the same conversations over and over again. How can you possibly have a constructive conversation if none of you can agree on a set of terms and definitions with which to have the conversation with!? I mean what???

Sorry, I come from a computer science background. In my field, when it’s time to discuss something, we first state a set of assumptions, a context, and define any relevant terms before starting. If someone wants to discuss something that we don’t quite have specific words for, we give the term a name, a definition, and where the term goes relative to everything else. Then, the community goes back and forth refining the term and definition until we either reach a satisfying conclusion or refuse to use the term at all. For example, if I want to talk about a program’s performance, everyone knows, at a high level, what I’m referring to. My audience will then sit and wait patiently hoping I will elaborate, so they know what specifically about performance I want to talk about. If I’m talking about a website’s performance and I say I want to discuss time to interactivity, those that know the terms will nod and know what I’m getting at. They don’t have to check to see if my personal opinion of what those words mean differs from theirs, which apparently is what educators do. ...How can you live like this.

I spent a whole week trying to look up what whole language instruction and balanced reading instruction are, and the answer is we don’t really know. Two out of three methods of instruction, in the entire profession, and we don’t know?? Are you kidding me? Technology has entire certifications dedicated to the various methods of development, but educators can’t even describe and summarise what they do? Are you serious? Even stranger, there are skills that consistently show up as skills necessary to prove literacy, such as reading comprehension, phonemic awareness, etc. (otherwise known as “The Big Five/Six”). And since those seem like a genuinely useful and complete way of describing and evaluating forms of instruction, you’d think it would catch on as a framework. But...it hasn’t? The terms show up all the time, but inconsistently, in differing orders, and mixed with a random assortment of other concepts.

The profession that has perhaps more exposure than any of us on the futility and complexity of defining a set of instructions that can be followed relatively consistently, and you’re not going to put some time aside to put together a set of useful rules of thumb to guide the many, many judgment calls a teacher has to make all the time? Having a bad teacher at some point in your life is one of the most ubiquitous experiences of humanity, and yet as an industry you can’t think of a single thing that could possibly be done to perhaps identify and discourage bad teaching? How is that possible? And don’t “just look at the evidence” me, as if y’all haven’t been constantly berating each other for making and referencing dogshit studies for decades.

I’m just stunned, really.