Bell asks, “Why do you want ‘innovative’ practices? What’s wrong with ‘effective’ ones?”

It’s not a bad question to ask. My entire career, we’ve been striving for “innovative” practices that razzle-dazzle, that engage children. But the truth is, we need to be going deeper on effective practices. That is, evidence-based teaching practices that foster long-term information retention, that introduce students to new ideas/information and scaffold their understanding from surface to deep to transfer learning. Those practices aren’t innovative…rather, it’s innovative that we choose to use them.

The definition of innovative is “the introduction of something new.” In many classrooms, effective or evidence-based strategies ARE innovative. They are new to all the young people, and certainly, to many of the teachers who learn about them and then try to implement them in their classrooms.

Of course, I’m referring to evidence-based strategies like those I highlight in this Google Sites, or this series of blog entries.