Trends Causing Ineffectiveness in Pedagogical Innovations

Abstract

In the course of their work, teachers and researchers are faced with increasingly intense challenges affecting the school as well as the extraordinary number of innovations that promise solutions to these challenges. However, the exceptionally large number of perceptible problems and professional solution efforts do not result in a general experience of quality improvement. Analysing the effectiveness of the innovations, it seems that the innovative efforts are not utilized with the expected efficiency neither in practice nor in the field of scientific research. This complex problem is determined by countless parameters. This study focuses on a group of symptoms among these parameters, which, in our opinion, may be related to the failure of many innovations. In the background of the failure of innovations, eleven tendentially recurring and interrelated factors can be identified, which make failure probable even when it does not show itself in practice. One group of factors appears in the theoretical development of innovations (the confusion of ends and means, interchange of cause and effect, the reflex of a reaction in the same direction to the change of the world, oppositions based on category confusion, circular reasoning, lack of reflection on the history of education, sloganeering) and the other group occurs during implementation (intervention initiated from above or from the outside, defining actors as obstacles, a prerequisite for a paradigm shift). The purpose of the study is to make these tendencies recognizable and avoidable, so that innovations can be implemented more effectively in practice.