Evidence Based Practice

In his book Geoff Petty describes evidence based practice as needing the following:

1. You need all the evidence to make a sound decision
2. It is not enough to know what works, you need to understand why
3. You need to find the critical success factors that are failing in your teaching context and fix these
4. You need to review your teaching constantly in the light of the evidence from the points above

Evidence based teaching, does not show you what you should do; it shows you how best to achieve your own values priorities and goals. Evidence based professional development should give teachers control over initiatives to improve learning.




I find these points very useful to hear.

I have been searching in books for most of my career for a magic pill to make all my students behave beautifully and learn vast quantities every lesson. Moreover, from the beginning of my teaching career senior management have been pushing one way of doing things across the school. Geoff Petty seems to be advocating that one size fits all pedagogy is not necessarily the best thing and that it isn't important to take on all different approaches, but rather the approaches and techniques that work best for me.

It is interesting to me that in recent years the schools I am aware of take a more personalised approach to CPD, asking teachers to work on their own project for improving practice in someway. However, none of the schools I know of use the idea of evidence based teaching to justify this.

In my current role I will have more input into my own practice and look forward to developing my own teaching in an evidence-based way.



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