The papers by Barrett and Jansen came from different directions with a huge gulf in their sense of pragmatism.

Barrett is research for its own sake.  Introspective, indulgent, semantic – indeed anything but practical.  When one eventually gleans some meaning out of the flowery language, there is some sense in the analysis of personality type among teachers and how it governs their teaching behaviour – but it doesn’t take us anywhere.  There is a broad conclusion that, for progress to be likely, it has to build on teachers’ experience and their sense of their role but I think we might have guessed that!

Jansen by comparison is ruthlessly practical.  He demolishes the development education target setting process from conceptual, methodological and organisational points of view and concludes that the process is more to do with meeting the political needs of donor and donee than any expectation of targets being met.  The only disappointment is that he does not offer advice on a better path, only concludes that target setting does drive some beneficial action.

My own preference would be to talk about reference data rather than targets and about “straw-men”* rather than firm propositions.  Individual situations can then be mapped against the reference and a framework for action devised that can replace all or part of the straw-man.  That would achieve the same progress in a more meaningful process with more likelihood of local buy-in.

* A “straw-man” proposal is US parlance for a model proposal that is intentionally simplistic and designed to be changed and improved but triggers focused discussion more effectively than a blank sheet of paper.