I believe that most of us agree that changing one’s mind in the face of new evidence is a mark of maturity.

Today’s post begins a short series in which educators share what they’ve changed their minds about over the past five years.

For me, it relates to technology use. I seldom ever used tech in my English-learner classes—peer tutors were always the much better option. In my English-proficient classes, however, Chromebooks were always in use post-COVID-era distance learning. In my final year in the classroom, it became clear to me that was a mistake. I saw that, especially for students with the greatest challenges, tech was a hindrance to their learning. If I was still teaching, laptops would only make an occasional appearance.

Let’s see what other teachers think ...

Not Hiding Exhaustion

Craig Aarons-Martin is the CEO of CCM Education Group:

For years, I believed that great leadership was about being polished, prepared, and always in control. As a Black male principal, I thought vulnerability would be mistaken for weakness—especially in rooms that didn’t look like me.

But over the last five years, I’ve let go of the myth of the flawless leader. And I’ve replaced it with something more liberating: permission to be human.

Here’s what shifted for me:

1. Imperfection built connection. When I started sharing my own learning edges with staff—admitting when I got it wrong or didn’t have the answer—it didn’t diminish my credibility. It deepened trust.
   
2. Modeling emotional honesty transformed my culture. I stopped hiding exhaustion, grief, or fear. I didn’t trauma-dump—but I showed my team that emotional literacy isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom.
   
3. Trying to be everything is unsustainable—and unnecessary. I used to believe I had to be an expert, counselor, systems thinker, and peacemaker all at once. Now, I believe in interdependence. I build with others. I delegate. I rest.
   
4. Feedback became fuel, not a threat. I shifted from defensiveness to curiosity. From “Am I doing a good job?” to “How can we thrive together?”
   
5. Vulnerability changed how I coach others. I stopped giving people the polished version of my leadership story. I told them about the tears in the car. The self-doubt. The days I wanted to quit. And that transparency gave them the courage to stay—and lead.
   

Letting go of perfection has made me a braver, more honest leader. And it’s helped me create cultures where others can do the same.

Pace of Change

PJ Caposey is the superintendent of schools for Oregon CUSD 220. He is the former Illinois State Superintendent of the Year and a runner-pp for the National Superintendent of the Year through the American Association of School Administrators:

For years, the prevailing belief in education has been that meaningful change must be gradual, involving careful planning and phased implementation across multiple years.

This approach is seen as essential to ensuring that change is sustainable, manageable, and rooted in sound strategy. Yet, the pandemic shattered this notion, showing that rapid, large-scale change is not only possible but can also be highly effective when driven by necessity. When faced with the urgent need to shift to remote learning, school districts across the nation accomplished in 10 days what might otherwise have taken five years.

This experience has prompted a reevaluation of the pace of change in education and led to insights that challenge the traditional thinking around educational progress.

1. When It’s Important, We Find a Way; When It’s Not, We Find an Excuse

The pandemic showed us that when something truly matters, we make it happen. Remote learning, for example, was a necessity that left no room for delay. Teachers and administrators didn’t wait for ideal conditions; they adapted rapidly, overcoming technical, logistical, and instructional challenges because there was no other option. This urgency taught us that we often use “time” as an excuse to postpone difficult changes, even when those changes are essential to meeting students’ needs.

Takeaway: Identify what matters most in educational goals and create a bias toward action. Perfect is the enemy of progress. Just keep moving forward.

2. Slow Change and Bureaucracy Are Convenient Shields

Despite nearly universal frustration with slow change and bureaucracy, the education system often falls back on them for convenience, hiding behind layers of decisionmaking and protocol. The pandemic forced schools to shed these barriers and focus purely on solutions. Teachers were given the freedom to innovate, and they rose to the challenge.

This experience revealed that while certain procedures ensure quality and safety, others unnecessarily slow progress and act as convenient shields when we’re hesitant to embrace new ideas.

Takeaway: Look in the mirror and be honest with yourself when you are leaning on “change in schools takes forever” as a crutch and an excuse to not be fighting for what our kids and communities need.

3. Education Must Progress at the Rate of Society to Remain Relevant

Perhaps the most significant realization was that education cannot afford to lag behind the rate of societal change. In the past, schools operated as constants within communities, but today, societal advancements in technology, workforce demands, and global connectivity move at a staggering pace. Education has a duty to keep pace, continuously adapting to equip students with relevant skills, knowledge, and perspectives. If we resist this pace, we risk becoming irrelevant, with schools out of step with the world students are preparing to enter.

Takeaway: We cannot slow down. Ever. Because society simply won’t.

4. Leadership Matters More Than Ever Before

None of this change is possible without leaders who are on the front lines, actively pushing for progress rather than seeking comfort or stability. Leaders who focus on doing the work—not merely doing enough to secure their next contract—are the ones who truly drive impactful change. When leaders set the tone by prioritizing students over convenience or job security, we create a culture of forward-thinking action and authentic service.

Takeaway: Leaders should embrace their roles as catalysts for change, modeling a commitment to doing the hard work necessary to serve students effectively. Leadership focused on progress rather than self-preservation is essential to meet the challenges of today’s educational landscape.

Conclusion

The pandemic taught us that slow, incremental change is not always necessary. We’ve seen that education can be adaptable, decisive, and relevant when driven by a clear and urgent purpose. By prioritizing what truly matters, dismantling unnecessary bureaucracy, and embracing an ethos of progress, we can create a more agile and impactful educational system.

The opportunity before us is clear: But it is our responsibility. Each of us must resolve to be leaders and fight quickly and urgently for what our kids need.

Not So Fast on Tech

Susan Barber teaches Advanced Placement English Literature at Midtown High School in Atlanta and serves as co-chair of the AP literature-development committee. She is the co-author of 100% Engagement: 33 Lessons to Promote Participation, Beat Boredom, and Deepen Learning in the ELA Classroom (Corwin, 2025) and The Norton Guide to AP® Literature: Writing & Skills (2022):

Close your Chromebooks; we will not be using them in class today. 

Five years ago, instructions would be completely different: Open your Chromebooks and login to Membean, Kahoot, or pull up your interactive notebook. Classrooms were fully embracing technology; many teachers were getting graduate degrees in instructional technology. I remember feeling so excited when my school went 1:1 with Chromebooks (or even more old school reserving a computer cart or signing up for the computer lab), believing the classroom lagged behind in teaching students how to incorporate technology into learning. 

I have always been an early adopter of technology in the classroom. Students were creating websites, hyperdocs, podcasts, blogs, and there has been great value in these activities. I urged colleagues to include technology in lessons, teaching them how to create and use Google Classroom, new platforms, and online research and editing tools. 

Fast forward to 2025. I’m not sure anyone could imagine the force with which technology took over in schools. Opening a Chromebook was now like opening Pandora’s box. Students were present in class (or often not even present) but not engaged in daily work as they were held captive behind a screen either completing work for another class, gaming, or watching a movie.

I prided myself with having all of my lessons and assignments online, fully accessible to students at any time, which was particularly helpful when students were absent, almost eliminating the value of a shared classroom experience. Instead of technology being a tool in my classroom, technology had become a distraction, an enabler, and even a burden. 
Close your Chromebooks; we will not be using them in class today. 

Today, my class has taken a big step back from screens and technology in general. Students now keep composition notebooks in the class and pick them up on their way in. We spend time warming up with pen to paper using meteor sentences to play with punctuation, sentence structure, or spotlight reading. After a skill-based mini-lesson, students spend time engaging with a text and each other. This looks different each class but includes activities such as 

• Piecing together a poem that has been cut up 

• Thinking like a poet while transcribing lines from a poetry recitation

• Responding to a tablemate’s annotations with more thoughts and questions in different colored ink

• Creating mind or body maps for characters that use text evidence to support insights

• Designing protest posters inspired by justice-centered texts

• Practicing analysis skills with visual art

• Teaching tone with paint chips

• Reviewing novels by making novel notes and one pagers

• Making connections within a text through hexagonal thinking

• Highlighting movie/song/television reviews for claims, evidence, and analysis to teach argument

• Writing two-sentence horror stories to introduce revision

• Introducing thematic ideas in a text through playing musical chairs

The list goes on and on, with inspiration for creative lessons everywhere. And what I’ve found is as screens were removed from the center stage in the classroom, student apathy decreased while student engagement increased. Is technology banned altogether? No, but technology is only used as a last resort.

The focus is now on hands-on and engaging activities that emphasize collaboration, creation, discussion, thinking, and all of the other activities that signal a vibrant (and sometimes loud and chaotic) learning community. 

Beware of Consultants

Thomas R. Guskey, Ph.D., is professor emeritus in the College of Education, University of Kentucky. He is the author/editor of 30 books and over 300 published articles on professional learning, assessment, evaluation, grading, and reporting, and may be contacted at guskey@uky.edu:

I used to believe that changes in education policies and practices were guided mainly by the work of dedicated education scholars and researchers. Today, I am convinced that change is influenced most by education consultants. And while education consultants are generally good people, most ignore the extensive knowledge base in education established by the brilliant scholars and researchers who came before them.

Coming to education without formal training in the field, I learned about education primarily through graduate coursework. My professors emphasized the critical importance of studying foundational texts written by influential scholars whose research established our current understanding of effective teaching and learning. Our required readings included works by educational pioneers like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Lev Vygotsky, Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom, Jerome Bruner, and others.

My professors also stressed that a rigorous, comprehensive literature review must precede any scholarly writing or thesis development. This practice guarantees that new ideas build on education’s established knowledge base. It also ensures that new authors are contributing to that knowledge base and moving our field forward, rather than simply redescribing established principles with new terminology.

Although that may have been true in the past, it is certainly not true today. The book lists of the most popular education publishers today include few works by established scholars or researchers. Instead, they are dominated by books by education consultants. Despite the fact that most of these consultant-authors hold advanced degrees in education—credentials that required them to conduct systematic literature reviews for their theses or dissertations—most have abandoned this foundational scholarly practice in their published work.

As a result, old ideas are constantly being rediscovered, renamed, and unknowingly credited to popular conference speakers and consultant-authors. This was confirmed for me during a presentation to a large audience at a recent national education conference. I asked the educational leaders in attendance if they knew from whose work I took the following quotes: “Learning depends on the connections we make between our present and past experiences,” and “All experiences are carried forward and influence future experiences?”

Participants quickly named a dozen consultant-authors who advocate cognitive science, brain-based learning, and culturally responsive education. Not a single person recognized that these quotes were taken directly from John Dewey’s classic book, Experience and Education, published in 1938!

This obliviousness to the established knowledge base in education and the work of the brilliant scholars and researchers who came before us thwarts meaningful progress in education. Instead of steadily moving forward, building on what was learned in the past, and furthering that understanding as is done in other social sciences, progress in education is best described as a pendulum that goes nowhere but simply swings back and forth between competing trends and fads.

When asked what research supports their ideas or contentions, some consultants respond by asking what research supports practitioners’ current policies and practices. But this, “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine” response not only diminishes the level of conversation, it casts doubt on the idea that education can be a steadily advancing, evidence-based profession.

Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” We have significant giants in the field of education—brilliant men and women whose ideas and research brought new meaning to education and furthered our understanding of teaching and learning. True progress in education will be made only by recognizing their contribution, acknowledging that we stand on their shoulders, and extending their remarkable work.

Education is a dynamic field with an established knowledge base built by outstanding scholars and researchers. Progress in education will be slow and improvement elusive if we continue to ignore their extraordinary work. So instead, let’s recognize their accomplishments, acknowledge their contributions, build upon and extend what they developed to deepen our own understanding, so that we can improve education policies and practices at every level.

Thanks to Craig, PJ, Susan, and Thomas for contributing their thoughts.

Responses today answered this question:

Over the past five years, what is at least one belief you had about education/teaching that you have substantially changed and what made you change it?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on X at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social

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