“But you can’t divide a fraction by another fraction unless you find the reciprocal.” “Yes, you can and here’s how.”

It was a typical math department meeting in which I decided to, once again, bring in something controversial out of sheer boredom. Yes, I’m that guy. We spent the next 30 minutes arguing why this method works over a more consistently functional method like multiplying the reciprocal. Of course, I made the argument that teaching kids to divide fractions by actual division instills the actual concept of division better than the workaround.

Did we all come to agreement? No. Did more people start seeing the value? I hope so. But all of this presumes that we all had the same theory about how children learn.

Over the years on this blog, I’ve wrestled with the challenges of bringing education research into the classroom, but also when research has actually been successful at getting me to think differently about our work. Now that I’m squarely in the research work, I’ve been reflective on moments like the math department meeting. Everyone in the room had years of experience with teaching students math and plenty of pedagogical knowledge about the work. But each of us also had some conceptual framework about how students learn best before we got there.

Without knowing it, every teacher comes into their work with at least one theory that they mobilize as they’re writing lesson plans and instructing their students. Even those of us who rebuke(d) educational theory have a philosophy somewhere in there. These beliefs then become foundational to the “best practices” that either align or conflict with their classroom work. Over the course of a few months, if not years, teachers start developing a theory or two about what works and what doesn’t based on some evidence.

A list of random ideas that contribute to theories:

• Students learn best when the room is quiet.
• Students don’t need to know all the math before getting to a concept.
• Repeated practice helps with foundational skills.
• Teachers should assign students “jobs” in the classroom.
• What worked for me as a student can work well for the students I teach.

Unfortunately, teachers have been given short shrift when it comes to the “best practices” conversations for several reasons. The obvious one is that, unlike K-12 teaching, colleges and universities ostensibly give their practitioners the respect to move forward with their research with degrees of autonomy. Policymakers have abided given the important function of academics as examiners for the effectiveness of programs and laws. The second obvious one is that, yes, the teaching profession consists mainly of women. Even within the profession, society views high school teachers as more professional than elementary school teachers because high school teaching staffs have higher percentages of men, particularly in STEM content.

The third, and less obvious, reason is that teachers can quickly implement a practice and can scale it for the set of students they have, but can’t determine if the practice will work for different sets of students, teachers, or schools. Researchers have the opportunity to do this. Not to say that teachers can’t do what researchers do, but to say that teachers aren’t doing what researchers do. Or vice versa.

This dynamic complicates the work for school leaders, who also have their theories about how children learn best. Our society is still too caught up in test scores as the primary measure for whether students have learned content, thus applying pressure to school leaders across the country. It’s hard to both implore teachers to raise test scores and grant full autonomy to teachers to do what they do best with systemic accountability hovering over everyone on the ground. By the same token, buying a popular curriculum wholesale without attending to the theories that mobilize that curriculum often ends up with conflict between administrators, teachers, and students in various ways.

Recently, Governor Kathy Hochul introduced a statewide initiative to implore more people to focus on the “science of reading.” It feels like proponents of balanced literacy are catching hell right now. Of course, I’ve detailed how focusing on reading and not literacy hurts everyone involved. But, while a subset of parents, policymakers, researchers, and educators have sought to wave the victory flag over these new initiatives, a national survey suggests – as I have – that most reading teachers sample from multiple curricula to best address students’ needs.

Ultimately, that’s the problem: we rarely ask teachers (and almost never current students!) whether the broad narratives about education actually mean anything when enacted in the classroom. Pundits blame schools of education for not prepping teachers, but, based on my observations, the best programs help teachers sort through nonsensical practices before they even arrive in front of students. We blame teachers, particularly veteran teachers, for their stubbornness, but rarely ask why someone would have skepticism about another theory sold to them as a magic bullet.

We criticize the popularity of “critical” theories, but rarely ask why a teacher from a marginalized background would come back to a school system that didn’t serve them well in the first place. Some of these critical theories have kept teachers working on behalf of their communities in ways that more dominant theories could not. In fact, some of these dominant theories still saw children across the board as unworthy of the full breadth of knowledge this Earth has to offer.

But now, teachers ought to name what theories mobilize their work into practice, because more of the world needs to hear what goes into teaching. Treating teachers as automatons easily replaced by artificial intelligence belies the heart of the work. The best teachers I know may not have the words right now to explain why they do what they do, but they most certainly have more clarity about their actions and how they move about the classroom.

They bring that clarity even to their meetings among peers. And if that’s not theory in action, then I don’t know what is.