Rethinking 'How Teaching Happens'
Caroline Sherwood summarized research arguing that teacher effectiveness depends on context and sustained practice rather than one‑size‑fits‑all 'best practices'—a call for context‑aware reforms and local experimentation. The thread pushes leaders to invest in implementation supports, not just lists of strategies. (x.com)
Caroline Sherwood is Deputy Headteacher at Pilton Community College and has been publishing threads and articles on classroom practice and leadership. (sw-ift.org.uk) The thread points readers to the book How Teaching Happens (Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick, Jim Heal, 2022), which synthesizes 30 seminal works and explicitly frames “teaching” as a set of recurrent instructional processes teachers can adopt. (taylorfrancis.com) How Teaching Happens ends with a chapter titled “What’s Missing?” that highlights gaps in how teachers learn to teach and signals the need for structured supports for implementation and teacher development. (books.google.com) England’s Education Endowment Foundation guidance lists six implementation recommendations — including “treat implementation as a process,” “create a leadership environment,” and “support staff, monitor progress, solve problems” — to turn evidence into classroom practice. (dera.ioe.ac.uk) The U.S. Institute of Education Sciences published a June 2023 guide urging researchers and leaders to embed implementation research in impact studies so schools document fidelity, adaptations, and contextual barriers during rollouts. (ies.ed.gov) A 2025 Frontiers systematic review of 23 studies (2020–2024) found effective professional development shares collaborative, hands‑on, ongoing mentorship and institutional support, and recommended sustained, context‑specific PD rather than one‑off workshops. (frontiersin.org) A meta‑analysis of 118 STEM PD studies covering 2010–2022 reported a pooled effect size of 0.739 (95% CI [0.637, 0.842]) and found programs longer than 80 hours produced substantially larger impacts — a concrete dos‑age benchmark for sustained STEAM PD. (researchsquare.com) A mixed‑methods study of 150 Norwegian elementary schools implementing co‑teaching found most leaders emphasized structural supports but often overlooked psychological and emotional supports tied to self‑determination theory, underscoring the implementation gaps Sherwood flagged. (mdpi.com)
