Pedagogical fit

Hey 👋

I hope you’re having a grand week. Today, we’re wrapping up this snack series on thinking…

Big idea 🍉

What our students pay attention to and think about is what they end up learning. There are a variety of tools we can deploy to guide thinking, some better (such as elaboration or retrieval), some worse (such as learning styles and brain gym).

However, effective teaching is not just about having the right tools to hand, it’s also about choosing the right tool for the job. Using elaboration when your students need retrieval is as futile as using a hammer to tighten a bolt or prescribing painkillers to fix poor eyesight—it will just lead to wasted time and frustration.

When we focus only the teaching, we miss half the story.

Effective teaching (like medicine) is a contingent act—it depends on the learning needs of our students (or patients). If a teacher delivers a stellar explanation but what the class needs in that moment is a boatload of practice, then little learning will happen. This ‘pedagogical fit’ is a core component of adaptive expertise.

It’s also why graded lesson observations don’t work (they focus on teacher action while generally ignoring student needs). And why, as a system, we should invest our efforts in developing teachers, not trying to judge them. And why formative assessment is so damn vital—it gives us the data we need to select the right tool for the job.

Teaching doesn't happen in a vacuum. It’s a deeply contingent craft, shaped by dynamics that contemporary narratives struggle to capture. Unless we acknowledge this, we risk mistaking the show for the substance—and students will pay the price.

🎓 For more, check out this chapter on the two mains dimensions of adaptive expertise.

Summary

• Effective teaching isn’t just about having a bunch of great (pedagogical) tools in your kit, it’s also about selecting the right tool for the job.

• This is because teaching is a contingent act—the most effective teacher action is the one that best fits the learning needs of the class.

• Pedagogical fit helps us understand why graded lesson observations are often underpowered, and why formative assessment is so vital.

Little updates 🥕

• Review of link between creativity and education → suggests that formal schooling can support (but also sometimes hinder) student creativity.

• Study exploring reading for knowledge building → finds that reading multiple related texts supports retention and metacognitive accuracy (whereas rereading single texts promotes overconfidence without long-term benefits).

• Paper exploring prior knowledge & curiosity → finds that students learn most when they experience a ‘not quite sure’ state of knowing (moreso than feeling ‘curiosity’).

• Study testing how exercise affects memory → suggests that vigorous exercise during memory retrieval enhances recall (this is not you call to start doing star-jump retrieval quizzes folks 🫥)

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