BY CHRIS EDWARDS
THEORIES FOR EDUCATIONAL REFORM SHOULD come in two parts: first, a call for a personal philosophical shift for teachers to use best practice, and second, institutional change. Effective institutional change facilitates an environment that helps to develop and sustain practitioners of the new philosophy. In 2012, Skeptic published my article Three Cheers for Teachers: Educational Reform Should Come from Within the Classroom and Science Can Inform those Reforms. That essay compiled new research findings from neuroscience and education with lessons from the history and philosophy of science to make a call for a theoretical shift among teachers-as-practitioners. Since that time, the ideas presented in that original essay have been implemented through a series of summer institute programs for math and science teachers that I have facilitated. They have also been absorbed into a graduate degree program for secondary biology teachers. These programs help create the personal theoretical shift of secondary classroom teachers. The evidence produced through these programs warrants a further and more comprehensive experiment at a larger institutional level.