One of the bigger challenges in education is upscaling. Something worked like a charm in a project, but when the project inspires other schools or even inspires new legislation, things often get much less spectacular. Maybe it was an example of the Hawthorne effect. Quite often, it was because the original participants in the project really believed in what they were doing, and the people who are afterwards copying it or who are even forced to copy it ‘because it works’ don’t share the same belief.

Was it then the approach that worked, or was it the belief that delivered the spectacular results?

Once, I heard a school team share their story at a conference about how open spaces had made their students learn much more. This puzzled me, as we know that in the best case, open spaces don’t have an effect; often, they have a negative effect.

I didn’t tell them they were wrong. They had data to show that it actually worked, so I sat down with them and listened. I asked them what they had done while introducing the open spaces and noted many things that could explain the better learning results. The biggest probably was the huge enthusiasm of the team, which clearly showed what we call collective teacher efficacy, currently resulting in the highest learning effect in Hattie’s list. I can’t tell for sure, but there is even a chance that the learning results would have been better without the open spaces. It can also be that this ineffective approach was the catalyst for the good stuff the team did.

That’s why the most difficult question in education can be: what is actually working?