The hardest part about improving as a teacher is trying to find the particular areas that give the greatest impact.

This is difficult because researchers are constantly telling us what one thing will improve teaching, students learning, and get them to a level beyond their current achievement status.

Unfortunately, all of them miss the nuances of the classroom.

There is no one particular, simple thing to “fix” all of education.

A simple explanation is not going to suffice to solve an entire education system full of students with a wide assortment of backgrounds, abilities, motivations and character traits.

Good teaching is a multitude of things that come together. It’s an art of making hundreds (if not thousands) of tweaks that work in a particular environment and it will look different for every school and every teacher.

This isn’t unique to teaching, as we do this in society as well.

We like to point to a problem and say the solution is this one simple fix. Just look multitude of daily clickbait articles that tell you you only need these three things… or this one simple thing will…

No. The answer is no.

It’s not that one simple thing and it’s not those list of things. You can’t reduce a complicated problem to a simple solution. The problem is more nuanced than that.

Solutions to major problems are not simple.

They’re doable. We can work at them. There are many solutions and we should implement those, but there’s not one single solution that’s going to work.

So for those who are skeptical that one solution will fix everything–you should be. But don’t disregard it as something to not even try.

Big problems require many solutions.

It’s just figuring out what’s going to work here and now.