One easy way to "amaze" your education colleagues, according to this jargon generator, is as simple as clicking a button at the top of the page. I click that button often—daily, even. Like a slot machine, every result involves some combination of symbols. In this case, those symbols are words that an algorithm arbitrarily strings together into a sentence.
On a recent afternoon I clicked the button and got "We will empower research-based relationships throughout multiple modalities." Ooh. That had a nice ring to it, but in the pursuit of more amazingness, I clicked again: "We will recontextualize holistic mastery learning with a laser-like focus." Double ooh; I was hooked. Again, again! "We will utilize flipped inquiry through the experiential-based learning process."
On a roll, I let myself do it once more. It turned out to be my favorite result of the day: "We will assess emerging curriculum compacting across cognitive and affective domains." This would surely impress, I thought.
… Not.
No, you’re not dumb. No, those phrases aren't smart. And no, writing them out definitely didn't make me amazing. However, many of the policymakers and pundits (and even journalists!) who help shape education reform would probably argue there’s value to using them. Edu-speak—the incomprehensible babble used to describe what are often relatively straightforward teaching methods, learning styles, and classroom designs—is plaguing the country’s schools. Intended to help people understand education reform, edu-speak often ends up doing the exact opposite: It muddles those reform strategies and, left unchecked, it could end up making positive change a lot more difficult to achieve. As Liz Willen, the editor of The Hechinger Report, wrote in 2013, it all adds up to a "communication breakdown that hampers education reform." Just like its cousins in the corporate or legal worlds—synergy! Ex parte!—such jargon only adds confusion to already-confusing things.