A question has been resurfacing recently, including in a conversation during a professional learning day some time ago. Is the idea of “effective teaching” at odds with “evidence-informed practice”? I notice that it tends to emerge precisely when people feel that research is being used to close down doubt rather than to open it up. As if we finally know what works, and the conversation is therefore over.

I understand that discomfort completely. “Effective teaching” can sound as though it refers to a fixed set of approaches that have proven their worth. As if they can be passed on, implemented, and ticked off. That sits uneasily with how I understand evidence-informed practice and with how it has been developed across various international frameworks and projects. More than that, such a narrow view of education risks leading to what some have called lethal mutations: practices that look faithful to the research on the surface but hollow it out in practice.

From that perspective, evidence-informed education is not about recipes, but about decisions. About combining different sources of insight: research evidence, professional experience, knowledge of context, and information from one’s own practice. Not to eliminate uncertainty, but to handle it more intelligently. It is not an endpoint, but a process. Cyclical, provisional, and explicitly open to revision.

For me, the tension does not lie in teaching methods as such, but in the word effective. It suggests finality. This works. Full stop. Anyone who follows research closely knows that things are rarely that simple. Recent replication studies on scaffolding are a case in point. Evidence-informed practice, by contrast, starts from questions such as: what seems to work here, in this context, why might we expect that, and under what conditions? Even then, the answer remains a hypothesis, not a guarantee.

Too often, “effective teaching” is reduced to isolated interventions. Do this, avoid that. Research then functions as a form of legitimation. Science says so; therefore, this is what you must do. That dynamic helps explain why “evidence-based” gradually became a term of abuse in some circles. And it runs directly counter to the idea of professional judgement. Research informs decisions; it does not make them on your behalf.

Within an evidence-informed approach, “effective” therefore takes on a different meaning. It does not mean universal or always valid. It means: based on what we currently know, and taking into account these students, these goals, and this context, this seems like a reasonable choice. And even then, it comes with a willingness to check whether it actually plays out as expected, and to adjust when it does not.

That makes effective teaching less comfortable, but also more honest. It requires being explicit about what you are trying to achieve. About the assumptions you are making. About what you expect to see happen. And what will you do if it does not? Effective for what, exactly? Learning gains, understanding, transfer, motivation, and well-being? These are not peripheral questions; they are central.

Perhaps, then, the problem is not a fundamental opposition between effective teaching and evidence-informed practice, but the way we talk about both. “Effective teaching” sounds as though it is something fixed that can be transferred wholesale. In practice, it looks much more like a temporary conclusion. Today, here, based on this knowledge and experience, this seems like a good approach.

Seen that way, many apparent contradictions disappear. Effective teaching is not the starting point, but a hoped-for outcome of evidence-informed action. Not a checklist, but a well-reasoned choice. And perhaps that is precisely the tension we need. Not the promise of certainty, but the discipline to keep trying to understand, again and again, what it is we are actually doing.