“Evidence-informed” has become one of the least meaningful phrases in education, attached to almost any practice its advocates like. This guide sets out what the research genuinely supports, who established it, and what it means for how a school teaches.
What evidence-informed teaching means
It does not mean applying research findings directly to classrooms. Education research describes tendencies across populations; teaching happens with particular children in a particular room. The useful formulation is the one the UK Department for Education arrived at in its 2017 evaluation of progress in England: teachers drawing on research evidence to integrate and trial in their own practice, rather than implementing findings mechanically.
What follows is not a reading list. It is the small number of findings robust enough that a school can reasonably build its practice on them.
How learning actually works
Nearly everything else depends on getting this right.
Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? (2009) sets out the cognitive architecture in terms teachers can use. Two of his conclusions matter most in practice. The first is that factual knowledge precedes skill: thinking critically about a subject requires knowing a good deal about it, so knowledge and skills are not competing priorities. The second is captured in his phrase "memory is the residue of thought" — students remember what they think about. It follows that the design question for any lesson is not "what will the students do?" but what will they be thinking about while they do it? An engaging activity that directs attention away from the substance produces enjoyment and little learning.
Paul Kirschner, with John Sweller and Richard Clark, established the corollary in Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work (2006). Working memory is severely limited. Novices asked to discover principles for themselves spend that limited capacity on searching rather than on learning, which is why discovery-based approaches consistently underperform explicit instruction for students new to a topic. As expertise grows, the balance shifts — but the starting point should be guidance.
Kirschner has also been among the most persistent debunkers of ideas that persist in schools despite the evidence — learning styles chief among them. A school serious about evidence should be as willing to abandon practices as to adopt them.
Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction
If a school reads one thing, it should probably be this. Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction (2012) distilled findings from cognitive science, studies of highly effective teachers, and research on cognitive supports into ten principles:
- Begin with a short review of previous learning.
- Present new material in small steps, with student practice after each step.
- Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students.
- Provide models and worked examples.
- Guide student practice.
- Check for student understanding.
- Obtain a high success rate.
- Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
- Require and monitor independent practice.
- Engage students in weekly and monthly review.
Their power is in how ordinary they are. None is a novel technique; together they describe what effective teachers were already doing, which is precisely why they transfer well across subjects and age groups.
Formative assessment
The strongest single lever a teacher has, and the most frequently misunderstood.
Dylan Wiliam, with Paul Black, brought formative assessment to wide attention with Inside the Black Box (1998), and set out the practical architecture in Embedded Formative Assessment (2011). Wiliam's five key strategies are:
- Clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and success criteria.
- Engineering effective classroom discussions, questions and tasks that elicit evidence of learning.
- Providing feedback that moves learners forward.
- Activating students as instructional resources for one another.
- Activating students as owners of their own learning.
The common misreading is to treat formative assessment as a category of test. It is not an assessment instrument at all — it is the practice of gathering evidence about learning while there is still time to act on it, and then acting. A test that is marked, recorded and never revisited is summative regardless of what it is called.
Shirley Clarke's contribution has been to translate this into classroom practice at a level of detail teachers can actually use — particularly around learning intentions and success criteria, and the classroom culture that has to exist for formative assessment to work. Her point that success criteria should be co-constructed with students, rather than issued to them, is the difference between a technique performed and a technique working.
Feedback, and its limits
John Hattie's Visible Learning (2009) synthesised many hundreds of meta-analyses and is often cited for placing feedback among the most powerful influences on achievement. What is less often quoted is Hattie's own caution: the variability is enormous. Some feedback substantially improves learning; some makes it worse — particularly feedback directed at the person rather than the work, and grades attached to comments, which reliably stop students reading the comments.
Hattie's broader argument is about teachers seeing the effect of their own practice — "know thy impact". The claim is not that some teaching methods are universally superior, but that teachers who can see what their teaching is actually doing will improve, and those who cannot will not.
Professional learning is part of the evidence base
One finding is regularly left out of these discussions. Helen Timperley's Best Evidence Synthesis (2007) established what makes professional learning change practice: sustained time, a focus on student outcomes, engagement with teachers' existing beliefs, external expertise, and a supportive culture.
This matters because it constrains everything above. A school can know the research thoroughly and still change nothing, if the route from knowing to doing is a single training day. The evidence about how teachers learn is as important as the evidence about how students learn.
What this means for a school
- Teach knowledge deliberately. It is the foundation of the thinking you want, not a distraction from it.
- Guide novices explicitly. Save discovery for students who already know enough to discover something.
- Design for what students will think about, not for what they will be doing.
- Check understanding constantly, and while you can still do something about it.
- Separate feedback from grades, and direct it at the work.
- Review and space practice rather than teaching a topic once and moving on.
- Be willing to stop doing things the evidence does not support.
- Treat teacher learning with the same seriousness as student learning.
Building it into a school
These findings are the reason Setting The Standard is sequenced the way it is: a positive learning climate first, then how we learn, then planning, learning strategies, assessment and feedback — the arc the research suggests rather than the order of a textbook. Every session ends with a reflection check that has to be completed, because understanding demonstrated beats understanding assumed.
And it is why Learnalyze analyses lessons against six dimensions of teaching rather than issuing a single grade: a school improving its practice needs to know which part is improving. Talk to us if you would like to discuss how this might work in your school.