Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense

Preface

Our last book, The Knowing-Doing Gap, struck a chord with lots of people. In many companies there were experienced, intelligent, motivated people who, both individually and collectively, knew what to do but couldn’t or wouldn’t act on that knowledge. We identified the main causes of knowing-doing gaps and how organizations could avoid or reverse such impediments to action. We also found that the problem was not confined to for-profit companies. We heard story after story from people in educational research and school administration about how decades of research on teaching and learning was neglected in the practices actually enacted in schools. As we write this preface in the fall of 2005, we see the problem playing out once again. The ...