David Wait

Interesting thread here. My opinion: Lots (probably at least a small majority) of teachers, leaders and teacher trainers don't know the basic foundations of evidence-based practice Where they do, often their understanding is hazy and incomplete Implementation with true fidelity to source material is extremely rare None of this is to blame anyone. It's a fault that comes from three places: 1. Training is still inadequate: teacher trainers of all stripes are still transmitting outdated or inaccurate ideas. 2. Even where it's adequate, only the "frontier" teachers and schools are actually implementing with fidelity at the moment, because "the research" doesn't actually tell you "what to do tomorrow." 3. Culturally, as a profession, we don't prize scholarship and the need to keep "up to date" If you want to get better at implementing evidence based practices, you need to engage with and understand the research, then map it to a real classroom context. That's hard. It takes effort, innovation, and iteration. We shouldn't be surprised then if *at this specific point in time* it isn't widespread. Solutions: 1. Better training on the rudimentaries 2. Better dissemination of *concrete strategies* that work in the majority of classrooms 3. Stop saying things like "we've always done this", because we haven't, and we aren't But we have to be honest that this will take a LOT of time!