Stuart Physics

Anyone reading this and already familiar with my previous series of four blogs from last August https://stuartphysics.co.uk/2024/08/01/improving-education-curriculum-explanations-professionalism-and-more-part-1/ or from the recommendations I made in my PhD thesis https://stax.strath.ac.uk/concern/theses/w66344189 (Farmer, 2024a) will know I would like to see teachers using research and evidence-informed approaches with enquiry-as-stance-based professional learning embedded in their practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).  However, the data I gathered from participants in my PhD study indicated that modes of professional learning likely to achieve this were very rare, and even when middle and senior leaders in schools participated in practitioner enquires, action research or received coaching they were either reluctant or unable to then implement such approaches with other teachers in their communities of practice. A recent paper confirms that when teachers undertake practitioner enquiry, such as part of a Master’s degree, it is often transitory with little enduring impact (Wilson & Dutton, 2025).

This therefore begs the question of how teachers might be best supported to achieve enduring enquiry-as-stance and consistent use of research and evidence supported approaches to teaching, especially as this is essentially the expectations of all teachers in Scotland as it is a part of being registered with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS, 2021a, 2021b). Part of the answer to this is to provide teachers with adequate time to do so, however, lack of time should not be used as an excuse for not prioritising the available time on high-quality professional learning and well-proven teaching strategies. I have also argued before that teachers should be able to use the promised, but not yet delivered (Hepburn, 2025), extra 90-minutes of non-contact time for bottom-up enquiry-based professional learning to address their needs and improve the teaching and learning in their classrooms, supported and facilitated as required by the meso-level of Scottish education.

A teacher’s approach to their professional learning, attitudes towards research and evidence, and beliefs about effective education and the purpose of education will likely be shaped by their own education and their initial teacher education (ITE). For most in Scotland, ITE means a Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) or similar after an initial degree in a subject. This means student teachers have a relatively short time to learn about the wider philosophical elements of teaching as well as to learn the ‘craft’ of how to best teach the core elements of the subject(s) they will be teaching. I am sure many involved with ITE in Scotland will advocate that the first of these two elements is essential to enable teachers as enquiring practitioners and to recognise the complexity of teaching. Exploring such issue can be easily characterised as initial teacher ‘education’ and seen as a more academic pursuit whereas the second could be characterised more as initial teacher ‘training’ with more of an emphasis on an apprenticeship style approach. From my experience, the development of these craft skills such as how to build good explanations, how to use questioning and feedback effectively, how to manage a classroom and other skills essential to good teaching are generally squeezed out of the short time available in ITE, including in the time student teachers spend on placement in schools. This includes exploring what good teaching resources actually look like and why, i.e. how they have been designed, a skill essential for local curriculum-making.

Of course, if we are to focus on how good teaching resources have been designed, and their impactful use in the classroom we need to be able to agree and identify such resources and approaches. For this to be the case we need a better agreed language to describe and discuss education, a clearer agreed view on the purposes of education, and better agreed criteria against which to measure success, all supported by robust research evidence.

The first problem, a lack of a shared language, is a symptom of an immature profession (Carnine, 2000) and some argue that teaching is still not a science-informed profession but one dominated by beliefs (Carnine, 2000; Hewitt & Sachdeva, 2025). Some, such as Doug Lemov, have done much to codify and describe teaching strategies in recent years (Lemov, 2021). Although I find some of his terms tend to grate a bit with UK audiences, and there are many in the educational establishment that baulk at the very notion of his approach, the development of shared vocabulary and terminology is essential if we are to avoid talking past each other and the pitfalls of jingle-jangle fallacies (Wikipedia, n.d.). As well as a shared language regarding teaching strategies, it is important to have a shared language describing the knowledge teachers require, and I have been involved in an attempt to help codify this for those teaching physics and for teacher educators supporting teachers of physics (Farmer, 2024b; IOP, 2024). The second problem, clarity regarding the purposes or education is likely more difficult as different people come to this from very different philosophical standpoints and have very different perspectives. However, everyone is likely to share the view that the purpose of a school education is to provide some balance of Biesta’s ‘qualification’, ‘socialisation’, and ‘subjectification’ (Biesta, 2008, 2020). That is:

• Qualification – providing learners with knowledge, skills and understandings necessary to participate in and contribute to the world around them
• Socialisation – supporting the learner to participate effectively in society
• Subjectification – supporting the learner to become a subject with the ability to demonstrate agency rather than an object of others.

However, what that balance might be, and how to achieve this is likely to be a much-disputed issue depending on one’s education philosophy, as is the third problem of the identification and measurement of success. Rob Coe, for example, has written much about poor proxies for learning, something summarised nicely in a blog by Tom Sherrington (Sherrington, 2021). I have witnessed pupils being busy in class but suspect were not learning much of what the teacher was expecting, and I look back at some of my own practices of the past with some horror.

If teachers are to be educated or trained in the best approaches to teaching a subject, then it is important that these are identified through good-quality research rather than by relying on opinion based on one largely unsubstantiated philosophical position or another. This requires the gathering of robust research data based on transparent criteria. Unfortunately, such robust data can be in short supply in Scotland, and much of the data are essentially evaluations from small scale initiatives or evaluations based on teachers’ perceptions rather than on pupil outcomes. That such evaluations can be misleading is exemplified by a study from over 80 years ago. In 1939, in a five-years study, over 500 primary aged boys from ‘difficult’ areas of Massachusetts were randomly assigned to either a control group involving no action or an intervention group involving participation in activities such as counselling, summer camps, community groups and academic tutoring. In 1978, a follow-up study was conducted (McCord, 1978). When asked in subjective evaluations, participants in the programme considered it to have had a positive effect on them. However, when objective measures such as their occupational status, job satisfaction, criminal records, rates of alcoholism, disease and death were analysed the programme appeared to have had a clear negative effect on the outcomes of the intervention group compared to the control group. McCord does speculate on several possible mechanisms which might explain such an outcome (McCord, 1978), but the overall message is an obvious one, to be sure of the impact of an intervention it is important to collect good objective research data rather than rely on the subjective evaluations of participants.

I refer to the above study, not because I consider that interventions such as counselling, tutoring or summer camps cannot be worthwhile, but to emphasise that gut feelings about what is right, or participant perception-based evaluations should not be relied on as measures of what might be successful in education. It is essential that robust objective measures are used to determine the success or otherwise of educational initiatives, even in a complex field such as education. The response to the findings of another old, but very extensive study, Project Follow Through, shows that even when there is good objective evidence of the route to successful pupil outcomes that when this does not fit with the prevailing expectations, preferences, or philosophy of teachers and educational leaders that it can be ignored or subverted with a resulting negative impact on the outcomes of pupils compared that which could have been possible (Carnine, 2000; NIFDI, 2024).

Unfortunately, that many teachers have a poor understanding of the available research evidence has a long history with education myths being hard to shift from received wisdom. This has spawned several books attempting to debunk common teacher misunderstandings (Christodoulou, 2014; de Bruyckere et al., 2015; Didau, 2015; Holmes, 2016). A recent study involving over 3000 teacher participants shows that many teachers still believe common myths about how pupils learn (Fernández et al., 2025). One of these myths in particular caught my eye, the third most mistaken out of the 27 carefully chosen statements tested in the study. It was that very many, a significant majority, of the teachers considered the statement ‘There is still little evidence supporting the use of project-based learning (PBL) in basic education’ was an incorrect statement, i.e. many teachers mistakenly consider there to be good evidence supporting the use of PBL with novice learners. This was of particular interest because I have been in several conversations in recent times where Scottish education leaders have been very strongly promoting the use of PBL, something for which I can find very little good evidence, except in particular circumstances such as with undergraduate medical students, which by their very nature are not typical of school pupils, and therefore transfer between such contexts must be approached with considerable caution. I think there is very good evidence that PBL is an ineffective and inefficient pedagogical strategy to use with any learner who is learning something new, although it can be more effective for allowing learners to explore further something they already know (de Bruyckere, Kirschner and Hulshof, 2015, p57). As described by (Christodoulou, 2014, p104):

“The aim of education should be for our pupils to be able to solve real-world problems on their own. But we will not achieve that aim if we begin by teaching them as though they can already solve real-world problems on their own.“

I consider it to be very beneficial that pupils appreciate the context of their learning, and how that learning might be applied as this helps justify that learning, however, I come across too many people who seem to consider that PBL should be the main or even the only means to do this. It appears to me that the promotion of PBL is just the latest in a long line of attempts to justify the use of constructivist or progressive pedagogies that have been described by various names over the years, and which have always been shown to be less effective than teaching using interactive direct or explicit approaches.

These waves of constructivist pedagogy can trace their roots to Rousseau in the 1700s and the likes of Herbert Spencer’s ideas from the 1800s where he considered pupils could follow a natural evolutionary path to discover for themselves knowledge which somehow already lay within themselves rather than being the recipient of the knowledge of others via teaching. Last century, the work of John Dewey and many others, including famously A. S. Neill at Summerhill, revisited similar ground. In the 1980s, Ivan Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’ (Illich, 1973) was a set text during my PGCE. I was sceptical about its contents then, but in the last decade or so, having found out about biologically primary and secondary learning (Geary, 1995), as well as other aspects of cognitive science, many of which were already well-known when I was doing my PGCE, has strengthened my views on the issue, and the essential role that teaching and schools have to play in biologically secondary learning. In short, although learners always have to construct their own meaning in their learning to some extent, the pedagogies which best support learners, especially novice learners in any given topic, are well designed more traditional interactive direct and explicit teaching.

Constructivism is a theory of learning, and I think it very mistaken for it to be considered a theory of teaching. I think that many advocating constructivist, less guided approaches, such as PBL, suffer from the ‘curse of knowledge’ where they either have forgotten, are simply unaware of, or just overlook the extensive background knowledge they themselves have built up which enables them to use such approaches with some success themselves not realising that those without this knowledge are very poorly served by these approaches. In evaluating initiatives, there is also the danger of what are in effect placebo effects. If time, energy and commitment are devoted to any initiative then these are likely to have a motivating effect and lead to positive evaluations of subjective nature regardless of whether they are actually impacting positively on teaching and learning or whether alternative approaches could be much better. This is why comparative studies are so important as well as the gathering of objective data.

Concerted, sustained effort is required to counteract myths or misunderstandings, such as the evidence for use of PBL with novice learners, that are well-embedded in educational orthodoxy. If such myths are to be counteracted teachers must be supported to access good-quality research and also supported to develop a critical, enquiring mindset.

An important part of cycles of enquiry is the recognition that if the status quo is to be improved then new information from research papers, from other teachers or schools who have experimented with research and evidence-informed approaches, or from knowledgeable others is required to help shape the changes in practice that any teacher makes. It is therefore important that this input is robust and well-informed. There is a clear space for the findings from good-quality research to be presented in a form readily accessible to time-poor teachers but in a way that is not over-simplified as this can easily lead to lethal mutations of the original ideas, particularly if non-existent ‘silver bullets’ are being sought. This does of course also rely on teachers and education leaders critiquing information sufficiently and being open to those research results that refute their accepted position, or what is currently generally accepted across the profession in Scotland.

Busy teachers do not have a great deal of time to engage with research, even if they have access to it, although this is becoming better with the move to open access publishing. There is a need for intermediaries to synthesise and translate research into accessible forms and also to exemplify how findings from research might be operationalised in the classroom. This space, which had largely been empty for the majority of my career has started to be filled in the recent decade or more by a combination of grassroots bottom-up teacher led activities and by government initiatives in some countries. Bottom-up activities have included researchED (researchED, n.d.) and Pedagoo (Pedagoo, n.d.), which have also supported and been supported by an explosion of readily accessible education books. Some governments have funded organisations to act as knowledge brokers and to make educational research information more easily accessible for teachers. In England, the government funded the Education Endowment Fund (EEF, n.d.) which has produced a series of guidance reports and advice on the effectiveness of interventions. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC, n.d.) performs a similar function in the USA, as does the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO, n.d.). Despite the need for teachers to have better access to education research than has been the case in the past, and therefore a need for knowledge brokers, there are those in the educational establishment who argue strongly against such organisations, as evidenced by the current debate about the role of AERO (Ashman, 2025a, 2025b; Blackmore, 2025; Dwyer et al., 2025; Hendrick, 2025). It may come as no surprise that I am more sympathetic with Greg Ashman’s and Carl Hendrick’s interpretations than those of the others.

In 2023 in Scotland, Jenny Gilruth, Cabinet Secretary for Education, announced the setting up of a Centre of Teaching Excellence (Scottish Government, 2023) which has now been set up at the University of Glasgow as the Centre for Teaching Excellence (University of Glasgow, n.d.). The subtle change in its name is an important distinction. This is a different approach to those taken in England, the USA, and Australia described above where the organisations set up to provide guidance to teachers essentially were essentially outwith the existing educational establishment, presumably because some policymakers did not consider that the existing educational establishment could deliver what they considered was necessary. The Centre for Teaching Excellence in Scotland has been set up in a well-established university education faculty and states it will be working closely with Education Scotland, Scotland’s existing national support agency for education, and will go beyond providing research briefs to also facilitate communities of practice and practitioner inquiry groups.

Will this be an effective method of helping time-poor teachers access relevant research and evidence-informed advice for improving the outcomes of pupils?

Will this be an effective method for challenging, questioning and critiquing much of the educational orthodoxy within the Scottish education system?

Will the Centre for Teaching Excellence be able to provide professional learning for teachers and education leaders which both meets their already identified needs but perhaps also addresses the things they do not yet know that they do not know?

Will Education Scotland’s Curriculum Improvement Cycle provide a national curriculum framework which will encourage research and evidence-informed approaches in schools and classrooms?

Will the cosy culture of consensus and compliance (Bhattacharya, 2021; Humes, 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2021) that has been a brake on significant change in the Scottish education system be disrupted?

Only time will tell.

References

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