Ed Blog / Why Write At All

The Modest, Real Value Of Describing What You Tried

You are not reforming anything, and a plain account is still worth writing.

It helps to be clear-eyed about scale. A post describing something you tried with one group in one term is not evidence of anything general, and the person who reads it should not treat it as such. What it is, at best, is a usable description: here is a thing, here is roughly how it went, here is what I would change. Somebody in a comparable position reads that, recognises their own situation in it, and decides whether to try a version. That is the whole mechanism. It is small and it is not nothing.

The reason it is worth doing is that this kind of writing is scarce. There is a great deal of principle available, and a great deal of polished narrative in which everything worked, and comparatively little plain description of an ordinary attempt by an ordinary practitioner. Plain description is unglamorous to write, which is precisely why it is thin on the ground and why yours has value. The useful post is often the one you thought was too mundane to bother with.

Keep the claims proportionate to what you did. Describe the context honestly, including the constraints that shaped the choice, because context is what lets a reader judge transferability. Say what you would not claim. A sentence like this worked for me with a small group over six weeks and I do not know whether it would hold anywhere else costs you nothing in credibility and gains you a great deal, because a reader who trusts your limits will trust your description.