Educational Insanity

I remember walking into the bookstore at Teachers College, Columbia U. as a new doc. student and thinking, “what value am I going to add to the ed. research enterprise?  A book has been written on everything; all the answers to all of the problems in education are right here in these books.”  I still have those feelings when attending major research conferences. 

Today, I was looking through one of the many catalogues I receive from publishers of educational texts.  This one is from Corwin Press, one of the biggies.  There are over 130 pages in the catalogue with 5 or 6 books described on each page.  The range of topics and title is incredible, and this is only one of the many publishers of educational texts.  I was amused when browsing through just the sections on Leadership and Principals I found the following titles:

• Twelve Roles for Facilitators for School Change
• Eight Habits of the Heart for Educators
• More than 50 ways to Build Team Consensus
• 36 Tools for Building Spirit in Learning Communities
• Leading Every Day: 124 Actions for Effective Leadership

Can you imagine the permutations?  If as a school leader, I could/should take on 12 roles, develop 8 habits, use 36 tools and take 124 actions, that should do it, right?  No problem.

1. Lisa says:

   March 3, 2008 at 4:40 pm

   And then in spare time we can: communicate with our parent organization, repair friendship issues on the playground, act as a counselor, be a nurse, and figure out what new teaching tool I should give my teachers.

   Very interesting post.
2. Jon Becker says:

   March 3, 2008 at 4:47 pm

   Yes, I only got to page 20 of the 130+ pages. I just randomly flipped to page 62 and found “Shouting Won’t Grow Dendrites: 20 Techniques for Managing a Brain-Compatible Classroom.” See if you can get your teachers to learn 20 new techniques today; that’ll go over well I bet.
3. Justin says:

   March 5, 2008 at 3:01 am

   Yeah, great post Jon. I got that Corwin Press brochure the other day too and I thought the same thing as I flipped through the education leadership pages. These books may have some value, so I don’t want to say they are useless, but as far as advancing educational research? – yeah … not so much. I especially love how they all make it seem so easy, like you said 8 of this 12 of that, when really being a school leader is one of the most complex jobs in the United States.
4. Further to my point « Educational Insanity says:

   March 19, 2008 at 8:24 pm

   [...] by Jon Becker on March 19, 2008 In an earlier post, I wrote about the overwhelming amount of “knowledge” out there about education and [...]