When I saw the title of this article by Robin Nagy, the music lover in me had to chuckle. It left this Cake song stuck in my head for the rest of the day. But the article itself is much more serious. Nagy is not presenting new research or a theoretical paper. Instead, as an experienced practitioner, he reflects on a topic very close to my heart: the gap between research and practice in education.

Nagy starts with an interesting reversal. The gap between research and practice is often framed as a problem on the practice side: researchers know something, but how do we get that knowledge to teachers, and, more importantly, how do we make sure they actually use it? Nagy asks a different question: how do we ensure researchers take their work far enough so that their findings become genuinely useful in the classroom?

Because, according to him, this is where things regularly go wrong. Research finds, for example, a positive average effect, and pretty soon this becomes a recommendation for the teacher. Only, the average teacher doesn’t exist. Neither does the average classroom or the average student. Teachers differ in experience, expertise, beliefs, and context. They teach different students, in different schools, and have more or less room to make their own decisions. A recommendation that helps one teacher may add very little for another.

Then there is something Nagy calls research fatigue. This is something I have recognised myself for quite some time. Teachers have already seen quite a few waves of supposedly evidence-based innovations come and go. Learning styles and multiple intelligences, for example, were once ideas that did indeed come from scientists. They were promoted with considerable confidence, schools started using them, and later the scientific basis turned out to be much less solid than initially suggested. This can create a kind of The Boy Who Cried Wolf effect. If you have repeatedly heard that “research shows that…” only to hear something different later, why would you simply believe the next message? Personal note: this is one of the reasons why I don’t like talking about effective teaching.

Nagy also describes something some teachers will probably recognise, although fortunately I have seen much better approaches too. Sometimes new approaches are presented during professional development with the implicit message that if you aren’t using them yet, you must be behind the times. If a colleague then asks critical questions, they can quickly be dismissed as being against change or even against science. Others may nod during the professional development session and then simply carry on as before.

One of the more interesting ideas in the article is therefore that, when translating research, we should take into account not only the development of students but also that of teachers. A beginning teacher may need much clearer, more concrete, and explicit guidance. A very experienced and effective teacher may get more from understanding the principles behind an approach and then deciding how that knowledge fits their own practice. Nagy even suggests that something resembling the expertise reversal effect might exist for teachers. We know this effect from research on learning. Support that helps beginners can become redundant for experts and, in the worst case, may even get in their way.

Do note the word might. Nagy doesn’t demonstrate this empirically. It is a hypothesis based on research and his own experiences as a teacher. But I do find it an interesting one. We now find it quite obvious that students’ prior knowledge and expertise determine the support they need. Perhaps we should ask the same question about the professional development of teachers.

This also brings Nagy to a debate that has become quite heated in recent years: explicit instruction. He doesn’t deny that explicit and structured instruction can be particularly useful. Quite the opposite. He refers, for example, to its benefits for students who struggle more cognitively. His problem starts when such findings are turned into explicit instruction as the prescribed approach for almost all teachers, students, and situations. After all, we also know the expertise reversal effect in students. Support that is useful for a beginner can become redundant once someone has acquired sufficient knowledge, automaticity, and skill. Nagy doesn’t mention lethal mutations, but this fits rather nicely with what we describe in our recent book on teaching.

And, just as in our book, the discussion doesn’t necessarily need to be about whether explicit instruction works. The more interesting question is for whom, when, for what, and under which circumstances it works.

That may sound like the dreaded “it depends”, or like paying far too much attention to context, both of which can kill almost any discussion about education. But fortunately, that isn’t what Nagy is arguing. His point is that researchers should do a better job of finding out what these differences actually mean. Average effects are useful, but they can hide important differences between groups. He therefore argues, among other things, for more attention to different profiles of teachers and students, and for research into how they interact.

At the same time, Nagy places great emphasis on autonomy. An evidence-informed recommendation can, somewhere on its journey from research to classroom, turn into a compulsory step-by-step plan, or what I sometimes call tick-box teaching. Nagy gives the example of a school that required teachers to make the lesson objectives explicit in every lesson and return to them at the end. At first sight, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea. For Nagy himself, however, it was restrictive. His lessons became more predictable. He also lost some of the freedom to change direction when what was happening in the classroom gave him a reason to do so. For another teacher, he adds, exactly the same structure might have helped.

Perhaps the best summary is this: evidence-informed should not be reduced to evidence-dictated.

Now, you might think I agree with the man completely. I don’t.

For one thing, I find his statement that teaching is a craft rather than a science a little too easy. Of course teaching is a profession in which many things come together. Experience, adaptability, relationships and, let’s be honest, quite a bit of improvisation too. But scientific knowledge about learning and teaching can help with all of these. It would be a pity if an argument against an overly rigid application of evidence-informed education ended up becoming an argument that “every teacher knows what works”. We don’t always know that as well as we think we do.

I would also be a bit more cautious about the emphasis Nagy puts on motivation and relationships, however important both are. Nagy warns that schools can pay too much attention to instructional design and knowledge acquisition and too little to motivation, engagement and the relationship between teacher and student. There is certainly something to that, but again, we need to be careful not to create a new opposition. Good instruction and a good relationship with students are not competitors. In my own research, the two actually turned out to be strongly intertwined. An excellent teacher will preferably combine both.

So, no major new insights in this piece, but plenty of material for a good discussion.