Surprise! Cara and Derek interrupt the regularly-scheduled flow of episodes to talk with one another about the themes or through-lines that are emerging across the conversations that have been hosted on the podcast so far, think through some of the questions we got from our friends and colleagues at the PES conference, and reflect on the field of philosophy of education as a whole.

Also, Derek says some potentially mean things about educational research sometimes being conducted "thoughtlessly." As luck would have it, this NBER working paper on the cumulative effects of teacher evaluation policies 2010-2023 just dropped. What was the impact of these massive reforms on the outcomes of interest? "No effect." Why not? Among other reasons, the authors say, reformers forgot to enlist the support of key stakeholders -- I.e. researchers' models left out a really crucial piece of the puzzle as their findings predicted big gains. If that's not thoughtless, it's certainly not thoughtful, is all I'm saying.

For the transcript of this episode, click here.

On Thinking in the Midst (bonus #1)