We have become much better at talking about evidence-informed teaching. Teachers and leaders are familiar with ideas such as explicit instruction, retrieval practice, cognitive load, metacognition and deliberate practice, and schools have invested significant time in turning research findings into professional development, agreed approaches and classroom routines. This is a good thing. We want teachers to understand how pupils learn and to use approaches that have a sound evidence base, and we want some consistency across a school. Shared approaches give us a common language and, in some areas, provide important guard rails. Yet knowing the cognitive science does not automatically make us expert teachers. We can know about retrieval without being particularly good at using it. We can understand cognitive load without necessarily making good decisions about what to remove, model or practise. We can know that explicit instruction is useful without knowing exactly what our pupils need us to explain, model or practise at a particular point in a lesson.
Teaching expertise comes from deciding what to do with what we know. It means taking our knowledge of learning and using it to make decisions about what to do, when to do it, why it is appropriate for the pupils in front of us and what to do next. Those decisions are shaped by the evidence, but also by the pupils, the lesson, the curriculum, the time available and what we know about what has happened before. This is where the idea of a thinking school becomes useful. We need teachers who understand the evidence behind the approaches they use, but who also think carefully about how that knowledge applies in their particular context. They need to be trusted to make professional decisions, expected to look at what happens as a result and given the time and structures to reflect on what they have learned. I have thought about this a lot since working as an instructional coach. I spent much of my time taking professional development into actual lessons, seeing what happened and then coming back to think about it with teachers. Something we had discussed in the abstract became much more useful once we had tried it with a class. We could look at what pupils had actually done, consider whether the approach had achieved what we intended and decide what might need to happen next. That experience stayed with me into headship. If we want teachers to become expert at applying what we know about learning, we need to build that thinking into the way our schools work.
So what might that look like?
Know the agreed approach and understand its purpose
I am very comfortable with agreed approaches. In some areas, fidelity really matters. Take a well-designed, scripted phonics programme. I would walk over hot coals to make sure phonics stayed on the timetable in my school. I would probably do the same for PE, but that is another debate. If you work in a primary school, you know that nativity season has a habit of eating into the timetable. There are rehearsals, performances, children being collected early, an extended lunch on Christmas dinner day and a hundred other things that seem to appear in December. Time waits for no man. That does not mean phonics disappears. If the timetable is under pressure, the lesson might have to be squished, but I would still expect it to happen.
The important thing is that the teacher understands the approach well enough to make good decisions when circumstances change. If you understand what each component of the phonics lesson is designed to achieve, you are in a much better position to reduce the lesson without losing what matters most. You can protect the essential elements rather than simply cutting bits out until the lesson fits the remaining five minutes. The same applies when a child is falling behind. Knowing the programme is more than knowing the sequence of lessons or following the routine. It means understanding what each part is doing and being able to work out where the gap might be and what the pupil needs next. This is where I think we sometimes make a mistake with the idea of fidelity. Fidelity should not mean following an approach blindly regardless of what is happening in front of us. The stronger position is to know the approach inside out, understand the purpose of its different components and then use that knowledge to make sensible decisions in context.
The same thinking applies to the wider toolbox of evidence-informed practice. If I understand retrieval well, I can decide when retrieval is useful and what I want it to achieve. I am not simply doing retrieval because retrieval is an agreed thing that happens in lessons. For example, if I am about to teach two-step word problems in mathematics, I might retrieve multiplication facts that pupils will need during the lesson. I might want those calculations to be more fluent so that pupils can concentrate on the structure of the problem. I might also use the retrieval to find out whether those facts are secure before pupils need to use them. The practice is the same, but the professional decision is different. I have selected it for a reason, I know what I am looking for and I have a better idea of what I might do next depending on what I find.
Put the thinking into planning and professional development
One of the things I found particularly useful as an instructional coach was taking an idea from professional development straight into planning. If we were working on checking for understanding, for example, teachers could look at tomorrow’s lesson and decide exactly where they wanted to check understanding, what they wanted to find out and what they would do with the information. A teacher using targeted questions and mini whiteboards might decide that if most pupils are secure, they will move on; if a common misconception appears, they will stop and address it; if a smaller group is unsure, they will respond differently. The teacher is thinking about both sides of the check: what pupils might show and what they will do in response. That is where the gap between knowing a strategy and using it well starts to close. The strategy itself is relatively simple. The expertise lies in deciding when it is useful, what information it should give you and how you will respond.
This is also why professional development needs to include application. If teachers spend an hour learning about retrieval, cognitive load or checking for understanding and then leave with the expectation that they will somehow work out the application themselves, we are leaving out a large part of the learning. The most useful conversations I had as an instructional coach often happened after teachers had actually tried something because we were no longer discussing teaching in the abstract. We were talking about a particular lesson, the pupils in front of us and a decision the teacher had actually made. Application, review and discussion need to be part of professional development itself. Teachers need opportunities to take an idea into planning, try it with their class, look at what happened and talk through the decisions they made. The heavy lifting is part of the professional learning; it cannot always sit around the edges as something teachers are expected to find time for afterwards.
Look at what happened and decide what comes next
Schools are rightly interested in whether agreed approaches are being used. We can see retrieval happening, observe explicit instruction and check that agreed practices are visible in classrooms. Those things are worth checking, but they only tell us what was done. The more interesting conversation is what happened as a result. If a teacher has tried something new, I want to know what they were hoping would happen, whether it happened, how they know and what they think they should do next. It might sound a little like the Spanish Inquisition initially:
Why did you choose to do that?
What were you hoping would happen?
Did it happen?
How do you know?
What will you do next?
But these questions are useful precisely because they take us beyond compliance. They make us interested in the teacher’s thinking and in what pupils actually experienced.
The same applies when a leader visits a classroom. They should not simply complete a compliance tick sheet and move on; they should be curious about the teaching and learning and, at an appropriate time, ask questions. Why did you choose to do that? What were you hoping it would achieve? What did you notice? What will you do next? Teachers need to know that explaining their thinking is not the same as defending themselves. They also need to understand that professional autonomy carries responsibility. If we trust teachers to make decisions, we need to give them the opportunity to think about those decisions and look at their consequences. Over time, these conversations should become part of how the school talks about teaching. A teacher comes back from a conference with an idea they want to try, someone reads something that changes their thinking, a piece of pupil work raises a question or a lesson does not go as expected, and the conversation naturally moves towards what they were trying to achieve, what happened and what they might do next. The questions are not reserved for formal observations or brought out when something has gone wrong. They become part of ordinary professional conversation.
We have an enormous amount of knowledge available to us about memory, attention, prior knowledge, cognitive load, retrieval and effective pedagogies. Researchers and academics have done much of the work of helping us understand learning. The work for schools is to use that knowledge well with the pupils in front of us. The aim is not simply for teachers to know more about cognitive science. It is for them to use that knowledge, alongside their understanding of their pupils and context, to make better decisions about learning. That means asking what the evidence suggests, what these pupils need now, what happened when we acted and what we should do next. It requires teachers to make professional judgements, act on them with integrity and then examine the result. That is where cognitive science becomes teaching expertise: in deciding what to do with what we know.
The real value of cognitive science is not that it gives us a set of strategies to follow. It gives us a better understanding of learning from which to make better decisions. That means knowing the evidence, understanding the purpose behind an approach, paying attention to what happens when we use it and being prepared to change course when the evidence from our pupils tells us to. This is what professional expertise looks like in practice: knowledge becoming judgement, judgement becoming action, and action giving us something new to think about. A thinking school is one where that process is part of everyday teaching. We know more, we think harder about what that means for the children in front of us, and then we ask the question that keeps the work moving: what next?
References
Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). Evidence-based teaching practices.
Deans for Impact. (2015). The Science of Learning.
Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). (2019). Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation.
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86.
