I got a question:
“Hi Ben, I am preparing some documents that support CI teaching to show my administrators. I looked through the blog and found some great articles but was wondering if there is a list of research based links/articles that blog members have access to. I am building a case to defend CI in my classroom and need the research to back it up.”
I responded:
Switching the “Big WL Lie” (i.e., the textbook model) in the minds of admins will be a very slow process. Yes, much research and all sorts of articles have been collected here, thousands over almost 20 years now.
I didn’t put them all into one document because I didn’t think about it. Also, I have a life to live outside this job. I now just teach according to the dictates of my own experience. That will have to do for me.
As I come across support, I make a note of it, try to put it into my practice if it’s really good, sometimes put it in a file, but I don’t stress too much about it. There is a ton of information just in my books, esp. my last three books.
If they don’t like what I’m doing, let them fire me. They won’t and we all know how hard – almost impossible – it is for them to fire us once we are tenured. So keep that in mind. Those admins are really paper tigers, chimeras who are in most cases temporary annoyances that leave the schools they are in every few years. Why worry about what they think then?
You really don’t have to defend yourself – if admins want to know, there are some resources below in some of the comments made to this post, there are articles everywhere online and as I said on this blog, not jut this Patreon blog (more up to date) and the old free one here:
https://benslavic.com/blog-2/
I want happy kids, not happy admins, and as long as my kids are happy and learning, I’m not going to stress too much over convincing others that what I’m doing aligns swimmingly with the research.
I think of admins as not really interested in doing the research, having more bluster than bite (they have no bite), failed teachers who have bumped themselves into admin jobs because they like to have control over teachers and don’t care that much about the art of what we do, and so I give them that much respect.
Just be yourself and don’t worry about things too much. I appreciate your desire to defend why you do what you do, but again, they can educate themselves. You have enough to do already.