If you’ve been teaching for a while, you’ll have experienced multiple cycles of “best practice” in education. I started my career in the midst of positive psychology, and am now trudging my way through the trenches of direct instruction. But why do we change focus so often?

Lessons from experienced teachers

I love having conversations with my older, more experienced colleagues. I always learn something, making it clear just how much there is to learn. At a recent conference on AI in education, a core part of the discussion was ethics. How do we teach students to use AI ethically, both at school and beyond? The retirement-aged teacher sitting next to me remarked that they put a lot of work into explicitly teaching ethics across the curriculum when I was young enough to be in school, but it had dropped off and been forgotten.

Lessons from reality

I heard a story recently about a predominantly Aboriginal school in a remote community. They were having serious trouble with attendance, engagement and behaviour. What the principal of that school decided to do goes against conventional wisdom and may even seem somewhat distasteful – they split the boys and girls.

They had gendered classes for every subject and what they found was that everyone could focus more on learning. Educational research states that single-sex schools benefit girls but are detrimental to boys, while this school found the opposite. Many of the teachers at this school initially scoffed and opposed the decision, but the results speak for themselves.

At my school, we’ve recently made the decision to “level” all of our middle years maths classes. It is essentially streaming, but if you say that word all of the parents complain because the research says that this doesn’t work. Our mathematics coordinator who made the decision still gets several phone calls from parents at the beginning of each semester, complaining that the school doesn’t know what it’s doing because the research says that levelling is bad. In reality, our students have been thriving with this new system as we have huge discrepancies in numeracy levels and now teachers are able to provide students with the support that they need. Each teacher is only teaching to three year levels of maths instead of six or seven in the same classroom.

The truth about evidence and research

Research is designed to be generalisable. We try to limit the variables of a situation and have as large a sample size as possible. This means that we get evidence for and against isolated strategies within an essentially arbitrary statistical threshold.

While evidence for one strategy may be stronger for another, the art of teaching is being able to know your students and know what they need. There isn’t one way to teach – any teacher can tell you that! But our schools and leadership don’t always extend that to mean that evidence doesn’t always indicate what’s best.

To be an excellent educator you need to know the research so you can fill your bag of strategies and adapt to any situation. There’s a fair amount of creativity in good teaching too, and not in curriculum or resource design that most people limit themselves to. Being able to solve a problem in your classroom takes a breadth of knowledge and skill that can’t be achieved by simply adhering to the popular practice at the time.