Evidence-Based Practice Makes Perfect

5/13/2025

An innate communitywide culture of learning would lead to fewer quick fixes that seem to work at first and then backfire.¹

Over my 30 years as a teacher (and my nearly 20 years as a student) in pre-K to 12 education, I have been exposed to “the latest thing” in education more times than I can remember.

Sometimes these new ideas are grounded in good evidence and rigorous science; sometimes they are based on ideology or untested intuition. Sometimes these new ideas stick, sometimes they disappear almost as soon as they are introduced. Unfortunately, an idea’s longevity isn’t always determined by its soundness.

That doesn’t mean that people are necessarily acting in bad faith when they introduce these novel ideas or hang on to outdated ones. Some ideas seem at first glance to achieve a result we want, but fall short when measured over the longer term, or were suited for particular conditions that no longer exist. Some have emotional appeal or even seem fun but don’t lead to better learning. Some were based on the best scholarship available at the time, but we have since learned more.²

One book that I have recently been reading that tackles this issue head on is Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?³ A cognitive scientist by training, Willingham begins by discussing the latest scientific understanding about how learning actually happens, and then on the one hand debunking some persistent myths about teaching and learning (learning styles, for example), and on the other proposing some more evidence-based strategies (like the importance of distributed practice) moving forward.

Of particular interest to us as a school for gifted children, or, more accurately, for children who demonstrate gifted behaviours, is the evidence that children “who switch from an undemanding school to one with higher expectations and more resources show an increase in intelligence.”⁴

This reinforces what we also know about the importance of good professional learning for teachers. If our teachers are themselves up to date—with the latest scholarship, not the latest fad—and we both provide high levels of support and hold students to high expectations, then we are not just meeting the needs of gifted learners, we are actually making them smarter.

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¹ Peter Senge, et al., Schools That Learn (New York: Crown, 2012), 4.
² See, for example, ISM, Ideas and Perspectives, vol. 50, no. 4 (April 2025), 3.
³ Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School? (Hoboken: Jossey-Bass, 2021).
⁴Ibid., 4.

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