I vote for DOCUMENTATION before research. Research done without prior documentation of what people (students, teachers) are actually DOING is going to ask the wrong questions. Because the researchers don’t know in depth and in detail what students and teachers are doing (or what we want to do), their questions will be uninformed and even irrelevant.

You cannot quantify before you “qualify” … but researchers are in a hurry, so they skip the long, slow process of first listening carefully to people (students, teachers) as we DESCRIBE what we do, how we do it, what we want to do, etc.

That’s why I find most research useless and irrelevant. It seems to ignore what I do, which is no surprise because the researchers have created their measuring instruments in the absence of rich documentation about what is going on. We document nothing about teaching at my school (we don’t even share syllabuses in the open), and the only data we record regarding the students’ work is ABCDF.

Result: we have a five-word vocabulary for describing what our students do.

We need a BIGGER VOCABULARY. And as long as researchers speak our impoverished vocabulary, using outcomes likes grades as meaningful measures, they are saying nothing of use to me.