When in a cynical mood (which can occur frequently), it seems to me that educational innovations are very often rediscovery (without attribution) or rehashes of older ideas.
- Growth mindset = effort attribution
- Flipping = preparing for class
- Individual progress = the Personalized System of Instruction
I claim no great insight for making these connections. I am old and the paired ideas were simply ideas that were advanced during different points in my career. In some cases, the new idea is better. Not because the new idea is new – often it is not. Present circumstances (e.g., access to online technology) may make an old idea more practical.
One of the core ideas my wife and I have pushed for the past 15 years has been the value of externalization. My wife would likely prefer that I not use this term because it sounds abstract. Externalization pretty much just means show what you know. Specific versions of which might involve authoring to learn or teaching to learn which we have used as a way to offer ideas to educators. The more current terminology used by others might be Making Thinking Visible.
I tend to equate the origins of our version with writing across the curriculum or generative learning (Wittrock).
Simply put, externalization is beneficial because such activities:
a) require of the learner cognitive processing that may not occur without the demands of producing the external representation,
b) reveal limitations in personal understanding due to the struggles to externalize (a remedy for failed metacognition), and
c) offer others (the teacher) information that can be used to address learner limitations. We used to call this showing your work.
What I think would be interesting is to investigate what happened between then and now. Assuming these concepts are very similar, what happened to the original ideas that prevented them from being widely adopted? If this is known, should we assume a better result this time?