The Misguided Effects of "Cause and Effect"

What is needed for education is a model of professional action that is able to acknowledge the noncausal nature of educational interaction and the fact that the means and ends of education are internally rather than externally related” (Biesta, p 36).

It will surprise no educator (or logically thinking person) to consider that education ought not be aligned to models of factory or medicine. Teachers are neither transforming raw material into products or curing disease through a clearly designed method. The variables attached to every educational situation are instead moral-laden and begin with the importance of context.
Somehow while I feel like I always inherently knew this, it wasn’t until reading Good Education in an Age of Measurement by Gert Biesta that I realized what the very nature of educational research implies. He makes the point that even though research can tell us what works, it is not possible (in our field) to determine what will work every time. Results are not generalizable even from student to student in the same classroom–something that every teacher obviously learns through their own interactions. This understanding is fundamentally at odds with any blanket decision to apply a strategy or pedagogical approach that requires teachers to assume that if something worked once, it will work always (as opposed to the opposing view that just because something worked once does not mean it can ever be repeated because the variables of the context cannot be controlled for). These are people we are talking about after all–not organized systems that can be studied but unpredictable entities influenced by “fuzzy stuff” such as motivation, emotional state, prior knowledge and experience, attitude, and beliefs…
And thus, the very act of engaging in this research can create the illusion that what is “discovered” must be applied. At the heart of this application, however, lies one of the most important attributes of the teacher: professional judgment. As our states and districts continue to limit the degree to which teachers are able to draw upon professional judgment in navigating which research to test out when and how to adapt it for their unique situation, we are placing all of our faith on a causal understanding of what teaching is and how it should be studied–a frightening trend that I am just learning how to articulate.