The Science of Unlearning: A Design-Driven Approach to Teacher Growth

Ashley Kincaid’s article, “How to Unlearn Problematic Teaching Practices,” highlights a critical challenge in education—how to unlearn deeply embedded but debunked teaching practices. As someone who works at the intersection of school leadership, professional development, and design thinking, I see this challenge not just as a research question, but as an opportunity for systemic change in how we support educators.

Unlearning is not just about replacing one set of strategies with another. It’s about shifting mindsets, shifting our behaviors, rethinking our approach to professional learning, and ensuring that teachers feel both supported and empowered in the process. The research on refutation texts failing to create lasting change is no surprise. Simply telling educators that their prior approaches were wrong—without providing a scaffolded way to explore and test new methods—triggers cognitive dissonance, resistance, and often a retreat to familiar practices.

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