It’s kind of disappointing how many shitty takes on learning come from within the field of education itself.

Imagine some portion of pro basketball coaches deciding one year that their players don’t need do any drills or spend time building foundational strength in the weight room, all they’ll do during practice is have a group discussion about the sport and their relationship with it.

(Of course, the drills need to be relevant, at the edge of the athletes’ abilities, scaffolding up to higher-order skills, etc. My point is that in every practice, the athletes would be engaging in a massive volume of action-feedback-adjustment cycles and developing automaticity on foundational skills, not just discussing / spectating.)

Thanks to the level of accountability and incentives in athletics, this situation would naturally resolve: the team would get their ass handed to them every game, and the coach would get fired.

It all comes down to measuring performance and holding coaches accountable for obtaining results – that is, high or at least rapidly increasing performance.

But in education, lots of people avoid measuring performance or hide behind nebulous proxy metrics instead (e.g., engagement).

That’s another funny convo to imagine having with a basketball coach:

“Is your team winning?”

“No, but they’re smiling!”