Don't be a hero

Abstract

Collecting and analysing evidence on what improves student learning outcomes has been my life’s work. Some may even call it an obsession. Over the last 30 years, I have analysed the findings from more than 1,400 meta-analyses based on 80,000 studies on educational effectiveness – involving more than 300 million students. If I’ve learned anything from all this research, it’s that almost everything a teacher does in a classroom works. The key question is not, “What Works?” but “Is it working sufficiently above the average of all the possible things I could be doing in the classroom?”