Those "new teaching practices" are more effective than direct instruction...if the teacher knows how to do them right and the students want to learn something and be successful. But figuring out how to teach a completely different way and preparing good materials and activities for it takes a whole lot of time and energy, which are obviously things that teachers have in abundance, right?

A lot of those interventions work extremely well in college classes, where a full-time teaching load is 12-15 classroom hours a week and the ones who don't want to be there aren't forced to be. They do these studies about how effective they are (and they really are typically very effective), but then someone at a high school hears about the initiative and wants to implement it. Next thing you know, there's a half-assed PD about it for one afternoon and the teachers are just told to figure it out on their own, without any extra time or support and often with only a vague idea of what the practice is actually supposed to entail. No wonder it's a disaster. But then the administrators are looking for you to do it in their evaluations and walk-throughs and pop-ins, so you have to do it anyway.