The Ship of Theseus

A model of change, because schools aren't butterflies

The first person who explained the ship of Theseus to me was a childhood babysitter, who also happened to be a grad student studying philosophy. She told my sister and me that Theseus returned to Athens from Crete in a ship with thirty oars. For hundreds of years afterwards, Athenians made an annual pilgrimage in the ship, maintaining the boat through the centuries by replacing each rotten plank with a new one. Eventually, every board had been replaced. The philosophical question was whether it was the same ship or a new one.

I think this is a decent model for how classroom teaching improves. One by one, I discard old practices and replace them with better ones. I used to teach third, fourth, and fifth grade special education, and so I had some students for three years in a row. By the time they were in fifth grade, I was a different, better teacher than I had been when they’d started third. I had Ship-of-Theseus’d myself into a more effective teacher. And they had Ship-of-Theseus’d themselves into much more capable humans. I guess this is literally how humans grow and change: day by day, cell by cell.

This is how instruction improves in the aggregate as well. Bit by bit, our knowledge improves. District by district, curriculum gets a little better. No single act seems satisfactory, and nothing will ever improve fast enough for the kids we already taught. But, like most living organisms, schools spend so much energy to just keep existing day to day or week to week that shutting down for a complete metamorphosis is never possible. Schools aren’t butterflies. We’re too busy existing to be revolutionized. The only method of change available is plank by plank. Never sufficient but always necessary.

In the aggregate, classroom literacy instruction across the country probably fits some sort of normal distribution. Whenever we can pry away an old plank and replace it with a fresh one, we nudge that distribution towards greater efficacy.

For example (scale made up and exaggerated for effect):

States ban three-cueing, and it nudges some of us towards teaching phonetic decoding. Districts adopt LETRS training, and teachers get a bunch of knowledge they need to understand what’s happening for the young readers they see everyday. Schools adopt new curricula, which they know isn’t perfect but hope is at least good (sometimes it’s not). Teachers learn from each other and inherit the best practices they see in each other’s rooms. Plank by plank, the ship is remade. Hopefully. That’s the idea anyway.

The risk is that in some districts and schools the changes come so slowly and piecemeal that people change their minds before any improvements can manifest. Then they decide to put old rotting wood back into the boat. After all, to many grown-ups, it felt like the boat worked just fine when it was built out of that old timber. For not just these folks but most places, the push towards effective, evidence-based literacy practices needs to be sustained and cheerful over a long period of time

Because change will be necessarily gradual, the sustainability of a push for improving instruction becomes more important than each individual improvement itself. And by sustainability I think I more or less mean vibes. Moral urgency is always warranted when it comes to kids learning to read, and that urgency was and is useful for getting people to pay attention to tragic weaknesses they’ve grown accustomed to accepting or ignoring. However, we’re not going to rebuild the ship of Theseus in a decade-long moral panic.

Moral urgency is difficult to sustain. It’s hard for me at least; for years I’ve tried to keep this question from Kareem Weaver running in my head: If you lost a finger for every student who didn’t learn today, how would you teach? My own personal mantras aside, use of violent bodily imagery to internalize the costs of failure is not a strategy that will work at scale.

Rather, the application of evidence to improving classroom practice needs to become a joyful default. It needs to be part of the professional culture of schools the same way Instagram classroom decorations are the culture. When the rate of change is one plank at a time, it requires people feeling included, teachers feeling empowered, and kids being excited by the new things they’ve learned and the new things they can do.