Evidence-based Best Practices for Education

Education reform over the last few decades has mostly failed, because it focused on punishing schools and teachers whose students failed to perform. This is as misguided as spanking a child who doesn't learn to read, while not giving them any instruction.

Reformers haven't shown schools and teachers how to improve because they don't know how, sometimes even actively providing misinformation that contributes to the problems they hope to solve. The following list comprises what works for the most successful schools.

School-wide behavior management system

Students can't learn if they don't come to school prepared and willing to comply with teacher instructions. Ensuring that this happens is the goal of a behavior management system; to be effective, the system must be established and enforced by the school leadership and is not the responsibility of individual teachers. A well-designed system doesn't rely primarly on punishment, but rather focuses on building routines and habits among the students that makes misbehavior much less likely to occur.

Cognitive Load Theory

Everything that follows depends on concepts of this theory. The short version is that the ability to learn is constrained by the size of our working memory, which is very small, and may hold as few as four items. When teaching new concepts, it's important to introduce information slowly and in small chunks so that working memory isn't overloaded. The goal is to help students transfer information in working memory to long-term storage, which frees up space in working memory.

Reading instruction using Structured Synthetic Phonics

The English written language is based on using letters or groups of letters to represent sounds and it seems obvious that the learner needs to be able to connect those letters or groups of letters to the sounds they represent. Yet much of the reading instruction in the US isn't based on that, but relies on other methods of interpreting text, including looking at associated pictures, looking at the words surrounding the one you're not sure about, memorizing the shape of the word, and, believe it or not, guessing. Some of those techniques can work, unreliably, in the short-term, but too many students stop progressing by the fourth-grade, because they haven't been taught the way written language actually works. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds suffer the most.

Phonics instruction focuses on the letters-to-sound connection and the most widely validated method is called "Structured Synthetic Phonics" or SSP.

Knowledge-rich curriculum

While it might seem obvious that schools should teach knowledge, many schools are, in fact, deemphasizing knowledge in favor of trying to teach generic skills, such as critical thinking or problem-solving, which are independent of any particular base of knowledge. This doesn't work, because research has shown that these skills are very dependent on having a strong foundation of knowledge in the domain that these skills are to be applied. No one can jump into a strange subject matter and hope to apply generic critical thinking skills in any useful way.

Explicit Instruction
In popular culture, it's became almost a cliche that leading someone to answer is better than telling them directly. You see this all the time on television programs, where some guru refuses to answer a student's questions and instead leads him through puzzling exercises design to provide insight. This sort of thing doesn't actually work well in the real world. One reason is that it's time-consuming, because students flounder as they try to discover for themselves what the teacher is itching to convey. This often results in the teacher having to conduct one-on-one explicit instruction sessions with each child in the classroom, instead of doing it all at once at the beginning. The second reason it doesn't work is provided in the "Cognitive Load Theory" item.
Spaced retrieval Practice & Interleaving

Merely telling students information doesn't mean that they will remember it. And if they do remember it today, they probably won't a week from now. Spaced Retrieval Practice is a method to ensure long-term retention of information; the basic idea that you force students to recall the information at ever-increasing intervals, because the very act of retrieving information strengthens the memory. And the effect is strongest when students have almost but not quite forgotten it.

Interleaving can be combined Spaced Retrieval Practice; this consists of switching among different but similar subjects over time, rather than focusing on one specific area of knowledge before moving on to the next.