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Since the earliest days of organized education, teachers have asked questions such as: What should we teach? How should we teach? How should we organize knowledge? How should we assess learning? It is a rare educator who cannot supply a wealth of reasoned and reasonable answers to these questions. Why then, after so many years, are we still asking them? Why have their answers failed to create an educational process that builds on excellence rather than constantly recreating itself?



The word should conjures up thoughts of duty, responsibility, and proper behavior. Since childhood, people have been told how they should and should not act in various contexts. Yet even the most conscientious among us frequently behave in ways contrary to what we believe we should be doing. For example, we should exercise regularly and eat a balanced diet—yet, many of us do not.



Many teachers welcome ideas and theories that promise to improve their practice. Hundreds of books, magazine articles, and professional development opportunities provide answers to traditional questions about what teachers should do. Yet even while cognitively accepting those answers, teachers often fail to implement them in effective ways. Why?



One important reason is that these answers—these ideas—are neither understood nor applied in the same way by individual teachers. Each teacher has a unique mental representation of the world of education and the role he or she plays in that world. That representation is a tangled web of beliefs, values, metaphors, and thought processes.



This constitutes the individual's worldview—his or her "reality." If a new idea or mandate fails to fit a teacher’s inner reality, it is often rejected at the subconscious level. Even if the teacher consciously accepts the mandate and attempts to implement it, his belief that it is “wrong” will force him to perceive ways in which it fails to work. This, of course, validates his beliefs.



Even when new ideas fit a teacher’s existing “inner world,” they may produce a variety of behaviors other than those expected. The idea/theory/ methodology may seem perfectly clear to the person proposing it. She may have had great success implementing her ideas because they are completely consistent with her inner world. However, assuming that they will be equally effective for all teachers fails to recognize the tremendous variability in those teachers’ “worlds.” Even the meanings of such basic words as teach, learn, or understand vary enormously from one teacher to the next.