Because good teaching has always been part science… and part craft.

#Pedagogy #HigherEd

Not one that treats them as perpetually falling short of the latest “evidence-based” standard.

So what fills the gap? Judgement.

We need to cultivate a culture that trusts instructors’ situated knowledge of their students and classrooms (alongside research and with accountability of some sort, of course).

Then maybe, more likely than not, with a little luck, and if all goes well, you MIGHT get the same results.

But you’ll never actually know unless you assess the whole thing… and most instructors don’t have the bandwidth or training for that.

*IF your students resemble the students in the study sample,

*IF your institutional context resembles the institutional context in the study,

*IF your deployment of the pedagogical method more or less faithfully mimics the way it was deployed in the study,

And that’s because anyone who has actually done a deep dive into education research knows that the empirical findings of any given study (assuming they’re methodological sound!), just means something like this:

Here’s my potentially controversial hot-take of the day on higher ed pedagogy:

let’s move away from the language of “data-driven” pedagogy.

Yes, of course your pedagogy should be data (and research) *informed*… But not to the neglect of your expertise and judgement as an instructor.

Feels less like governance and more like group chat with nuclear codes. Joe, I don’t think this was the flex you think it was.

#PolicyMaking

Don’t know about you, but the notion that influencers can just text the Pres and things happen because they have a large following doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the administration’s policy-making process.

On the other hand, Joe Rogan going on national TV and basically saying he texted the Pres and the Pres was like, “Done!”, isn’t exactly a win. It’s a case study in exactly how major federal policies SHOULD NOT BE MADE. 🤔

On the one hand, I’m glad that restrictions on doing research about the health effects of psychedelics are being loosened.

When moral commitments make honest diagnosis harder, we risk losing the very thing we’re trying to protect and promote: our students’ learning and well-being.

#HigherEd #Pedagogy #teaching #AssetVsDeficitThinking

And we can hold two things at once: there are structural inequities in education that we need to take seriously AND as a result, many students lack skills that are really important for civic, professional, and just modern life writ large.

I hope it’s unnecessary to state this, but just in case: the point is not that there’s something to be salvaged from deficit thinking. The point is just that good teaching requires both care and clarity.

if we can’t just say in plain language, this is stuff students don’t know and we believe it’s stuff that is really valuable for them to know given the society we live in), it’s really hard to figure out what the best course of action might be.

And that’s a problem. Because if we can’t name learning gaps (or opportunity gaps or equity gaps or whatever you want to call them;

But in some spaces in the past several years, that critique expanded into a stronger moral norm, one that made it uncomfortable, even taboo, to say that a student might lack specific skills or knowledge.

Let me be clear: the critique of “deficit thinking” matters. It has an important history. It pushed back against explanations that blamed students (often along racial or class lines) for structural inequalities in education.

Everyone seemed to take for granted that we were on the same side, deeply committed to our students well-being and success, so there was no shame in just naming the gap. Just really committed, caring instructors asking: What’s going on here, and how do we help students learn this?

And here’s the part that struck me: the room was able to talk about this plainly. No hedging. No long-winded prefaces listing a bunch of positive things about their students before getting to the issue. Essentially, no fear of being accused of deficit thinking.

(There’s a whole literature on “metacognitive fallacies,” which refer to misunderstandings students have about their own learning and how it works.)

They misjudged their own understanding, describing it as a “silly mistake” after seeing the right answer when, in fact, in the professor’s judgement, it reflected a deep flaw in their math knowledge.

And in several cases, the journals made something very clear: some students had big conceptual gaps in their understanding. There was stuff they just didn’t know. Moreover, they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

The presenter used reflective journaling in their classes. You know, asking students to explain what they struggled with, how they worked through problems, and what they felt confident about.

Today I attended an education research talk by a math professor and, as someone who mostly lives in these pedagogical spaces within the social sciences and humanities, it was a total breath of fresh air.

#Looksmaxxing

Ooof, definitely not a pic you want to be remembered by. 16 years in power is, like, you know, A LOT of years.

#AlwaysStandForDemocracy #DemocracyRequieresTheCirculationOfElites #MaxWeber

Trump Was Watching a U.F.C. Fight in Miami While Iran Talks Collapsed

Seems like Trump really enjoyed the UFC fight on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Iran talks collapsed. #Priorities

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/u...

Not everything is vibes and credentials. Some of it is… you know… actually knowing stuff.

And historically, the best way to systematically teach large numbers of people stuff is... wait for it... SCHOOLS!

#GotoCollege #CollegeIsAPublicGood

Carolina Arteaga finds the latter, using a natural experiment at a top university in Colombia where coursework was reduced but student selectivity stayed the same. Wages fell by ~13–16%.