Technology for Classroom Orchestration - New Science of Learning - page 518

Each species includes a large variety of animals whose features (size, fitness,
etc.) follow more or less a Gaussian distribution of animals. There can be a rabbit
that is 1 m long but not many. A method that “works well” cannot be generalized if
it is designed for exceptional teachers simply because the researcher was lucky to
find one exceptional teacher, for instance teachers who cope easily with situations
where there is some chaos in the classroom. The very fact that teachers accept to
participate in our experiments is an unavoidable bias in the representativity of these
volunteers. The trivial implication is that pedagogical methods must be adaptable to
differences between teachers. Our point goes further: designing for the ecosystem
means that most teachers should be able to apply our method, not only a few of
them.
Factor 10. Design for all . The method can be conducted by most skilled
teachers, not only by exceptional teachers
Selection
A method that “works well” in an education ecosystem has to pay respect to the
rules that govern life and death within the ecosystem.
Teachers are not free to teach what they want; they have some degree of freedom
in primary school, almost no freedom in secondary schools and a bit more at univer-
sity level. Our community has been quite creative in designing activities that address
skills that are not in the curriculum or only in the “meta”-section with transversal
skills. An extra-curriculum investment from teachers and students is acceptable for a
short duration (the time of an experiment), but such an environment will not be used
over long term if it is justified by the importance of its learning objectives within the
curriculum.
Factor 11. Curriculum relevance . How important are these learning objectives
within the curriculum of these students?
Whether we like or not, the educational ecosystem is shaped by large-scale eval-
uations such as PISA or TIMSS. Our research community tends to neglect or even
disregard these assessments. Instead, we should contribute to the improvement of
the quality of these measures. Meanwhile, these large assessments and more gener-
ally all exams are part of the educational ecosystem. A method that “works well”
is a method that does not put teachers, directors or ministers in an undefendable
position when the results of evaluations are published. At the university level, we
don't have large-scale assessments, but the same argument applies: a method will