Abstract
In recent years, teachers in England have increasingly been urged to “follow the evidence”, and “evidence-informed practice” has become a powerful watchword in educational debate. One influential site for this discourse is researchED, which presents itself as a movement committed to raising research literacy, challenging intuition-led practice, and bringing teaching into dialogue with substantial evidence bases.
This piece looks closely at one publicly available researchED HOME session by Pritesh Raichura on planning effective teacher-led lessons. It is not intended as a judgement on Raichura’s teaching, nor as a claim that this single session represents all of researchED. Rather, it treats the session as an illustrative case of how evidence-talk can operate within a professional movement.
The argument is that practitioner testimony – valuable though it is – can acquire a particular authority when placed within an institutional frame of “research literacy”, “myth-busting” and “evidence-informed practice”. In this example, distinctions between “student-led” and “teacher-led” teaching are asserted rather than researched, while the former is represented through a weak novice lesson and the latter through the speaker’s mature teaching repertoire.
The issue is not that teachers share accounts of practice. Such accounts are important. The question is what happens when professional testimony, common sense and personal repertoire are rhetorically rebranded as research-informed knowledge. The piece therefore asks what kind of teacher identity, pupil identity, model of knowledge and classroom authority are being normalised through this form of evidence-talk.
In this piece I want to look at the nature of evidence in teaching at a time when teachers are repeatedly urged to “follow the evidence”, and when “evidence-informed practice” has become a powerful watchword in English educational debate. One important site for this discourse is Tom Bennett’s organisation, researchED which on its website presents its mission as (my emphasis):
Our mission
ResearchED’s mission is to raise research literacy in the teaching profession and the education sector more generally. We do this because we believe that teaching will be improved the more it engages with evidence bases that are as substantial as possible. It is no longer acceptable for education to be governed by instinct or intuition alone. Where there is evidence- in its many forms- we should reflect upon it. Where there is research, we should face its conclusions. There must be a dialogue between the craft of teaching practice, and the evidence bases that inform it. The space where these two spheres interact is where researchED operates.
A number of conference sessions are on the researchED YouTube channel; and I would applaud every speaker for being brave enough to go public in that way, as it makes one potentially very vulnerable. My discussion here will focus not on any judgement on the quality of any teacher’s practice or the presentation, but on the legitimacy of the claims made. My argument here is not intended to criticise a teacher. Rather I am deconstructing what is seen as legitimate dialogue at a researchED session in the face of its mission statement.
researchEd does have extensive number of sessions uploaded to its YouTube channel [1] and it is likely that there is a variety of approaches evidenced on there. I am not however undertaking an in-depth study of researchED sessions more widely; I am merely using an analysis of one session to construct an argument about evidence and teacher accounts of practice. I do acknowledge that at present, this is an analysis of just one single session on researchEd HOME which may be claimed as quite unrepresentative of researchED’s output. I have not attended a researchED conference myself.
The first presentation I will look at is from a researchED HOME session in 2020 by Pritesh Raichura, who at the time was the head of science at Michaela School, and is now Director of Teaching at Athena Learning Trust. He states he has been a teacher in inner-city London for over 10 years. I have not yet looked at or studied Pritesh’s blog (https://bunsenblue.com/).
Planning Effective teacher-led lessons – Pritesh Raichura
This session is published publicly on researchED’s own website and is uploaded to its YouTube channel. Pritesh has posted videos of his lessons on X. where he has 16.9K followers. One of his lessons features on Steplab[2].
We will all look at those lessons and form our own opinions. Indeed, this was exactly part of a methodology I worked with at the Open University in the 1990s for watching videos of lessons – the importance of separating what you actually saw from what you think you saw, and thereby being cautious on any tendency to be evaluative.
However, the issue here is not what we think of Pritesh or his teaching style, it is what is being counted as evidence, what counts as a legitimate contrast between teaching styles, and what kind of teacher ideology is being authorised.
This session illustrates how, within some researchED discourse, practitioner testimony can be treated as if it were evidence-informed professional knowledge, even when the evidential warrant is weak, unstated, or absent.
Pritesh is clearly a very committed, experienced and successful professional. His social media posts place him firmly aligned with a conservative-traditional pedagogical stance in which knowledge, teacher authority, explicit instruction and pupil compliance are highly valued. I am sure Pritesh is firmly committed to this as a positive prdagogical practice. I am less interested in Pritesh’s practice as a proponent of Explicit/Direct Instruction, than the public claims made about classroom practice.
I offer extracts from the first 10 minutes of his session below.
At the moment around the country, student-led learning continues to be the norm the popular mode of delivering lessons, but I think there is a bit of a shift that is happening and more and more people are inclined toward using teacher-led lessons.
There is a claim here that there are two ways of teaching: “student-led” and “teacher-led”. These are introduced as if they are clear categories, but without any attempt at definition or provision of evidence. As a presentation at a researchED conference, whose mission is foregrounding evidence-based teaching, it is presented as legitimate to offer a typology with no supporting research evidence.
When I started teaching my lessons were very much student-led whereas now I would say my lessons are entirely traditional teacher-led. And it comes under different names, it could be explicit instruction, direct instruction.
I want to share strategies that have really worked for me as a teacher-led teacher.
Teacher-led teaching can sound a bit like us lecturing really but it isn’t just the teacher talking for a while not asking many questions and the pupils are nodding along making notes.
Teacher-led learning has a bad reputation in many ways. Contrasting the two types of teaching I might say student-led lessons might have a bit more buy-in from the kids because they have more of a say in what goes on. It might be more of the content is made relevant to them. Subject knowledge is contextualised. In a way that makes it feel relevant to the pupils.
The engagement in teacher-led lessons has to come from the subject content itself. It is not making it relevant to the kids in a way of bringing something they enjoy to the lesson that’s current, that’s hip, that’s cool for them. That is not what it is about.
It is not made clear just where this characterisation of a distinction comes from. The implication in the space between the first two sentences in the final paragraph is that student-led teachers do believe they improve lessons by bringing something hip, or cool so that pupils “enjoy the lesson”. From critical discourse analysis this is an example of “expurgation of the other” referring to a sociological concept examining how societies construct threats from outside the dominant group. This originates from John Thompson’s analysis of ideology. In Thompson’s terms, expurgation works by constructing a threatening or inferior “other” against which the preferred identity can be defined. [3]
So how do you make teacher-led lessons interesting. The truth is all of my lessons are highly interactive. It is certainly not me lecturing; it is certainly not me talking for more than a minute at a time without me asking questions. In fact, I ask 50, 60, 70 questions in a 55-minute lesson.
Here interactivity is equated with asking at least one question a minute. No evidence is presented here for the effectiveness of this strategy, nor is the claim connected to the extensive research literature on classroom questioning. Whether this is indeed an effective strategy and how we would know, is glossed over.
Arguably student-led lessons are less accessible and teacher-led lessons are more accessible if they are done properly. This means it builds more motivation, more success and a big feedback loop.
I am going to talk about three things today that are key aspects of teacher-led lessons
One is breaking down the subject matter and explaining it really clearly really explicitly
“Explaining really clearly, really explicitly” is offered here as non-contentious, and the main strategy for “teacher-led” lessons, again with no evidential warrant or recognition of a vast literature on teacher talk and questioning. There is no construct operationalisation of “explain”, “clearly” or “explicitly” which might help other teachers to understand and put into effect such a practice.
Two, it is all about firing questions and this high interactivity is what builds engagement but it also holds them to account to make sure they are listening.
It might be argued that frequent questioning, checking for understanding, cold calling, retrieval and explicit instruction are supported by a broad evidential base. I do not deny that possible evidence exists, but the session, as presented, does not establish the evidential chain. It moves very quickly from “this works for me” to “this is what good teacher-led teaching looks like”.
Thirdly as a teacher-led teacher the teacher must exaggerate everything so that the pupils notice you are making it explicit your emotions, your expectations as well as the subject content.
There may well be research evidence on the effectiveness of exaggerating emotions, but I suspect this is something Pritesh believes works as part of his teaching repertoire rather than something for which he has robust evidence. This is exactly a part of the broad research into teacher thinking.
Teaching Repertoire
The idea of a teaching repertoire (though not all studies will use that exact phrase to describe the collection of strategies a teacher uses) is an important concept in educational research and has been extensively researched since at least the 1980s. What this session is foregrounding is aspects of Pritesh’s teaching repertoire. What we might legitimately take away from this session is that one’s teaching repertoire may not necessarily be informed by research or systematic study. This indeed would be a significant finding – that knowledge of research does not influence some teaching repertoires.
The issue is not that teachers have repertoires; all teachers do. The issue is the rhetorical movement from “this is part of my repertoire” to “this is what effective teaching looks like” without provision of an evidential warrent.
To illustrate his repertoire, Pritesh went on to describe a student-led lesson he used to give in his early years of teaching (left). He argued:
“Pupils are researching themselves, reading, teaching themselves and helping each other. The reality is in 15 minutes their entire understanding comes from posters.”
Pritesh criticises this lesson – quite rightly in my view – but rather than being an example of a “student-led lesson”, it feels to me, with some 30 years working in the training of teachers, like a weak lesson by an inexperienced teacher; haven’t we all been there? But the description of this as a typical example of a “pupil-led lesson”, is not substantiated. What we see here from a sociological perspective is “the construction of the progressive other” where a weak early-career lesson involving posters becomes the implied representative of “student-led” learning, even though this is not substantiated.
So how would Pritesh teach it now, what does a teacher-led lesson look like? Pritesh would recap, telling them important facts, “I would make sure they know …. I would have them chant the names, “I say, you say. By doing this I am getting them familiar with every single element.” Now there is some research evidence that choral response may be an effective strategy in some situations, so this could have been a good opportunity to explore that issue. Especially the empirical question as to whether chanting the names of each alkaline element does indeed go further than help pupils pronounce the words correctly, to having them become “familiar with every single element”. Research into classroom practice is often nuanced in this way. Pritesh goes into this technique in his blog but does not link to the evidential warrant. [4]
One important thing to notice about this session is it is not drawing on or referring to research in any way that anyone would identify it as such. It is a teacher telling an audience how he teaches, how he used to teach, and why he changed. It is not a problem that he shares his practice; the problem is that this kind of practice-sharing is hosted within a movement that claims to raise research literacy and challenge intuition-led education. Pritesh was not presenting a research paper. He was sharing practice on a researchED website whose mission includes bridging research and practice. That is the question for this session. Does it help bridge the gap between research and practice or does it perform a different function?
Pritesh comes across to me as an enthusiastic teacher who enjoys his subject (actually I learned something about alkali metals for which I am grateful). He appears to genuinely want to communicate to other teachers. To be fair to Pritesh, he nowhere claims this is research; he is merely telling people what he does, why he does it – very much like a “what I do in my classroom” CPD session – an exploration of his teaching repertoire. Yet researchEd is sold as an organisation that is based upon evidence-informed teaching:
The goal of researchED is to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. Researchers, teachers, and policy makers come together for a day of information-sharing and myth-busting.
We aim to bring together as many parties affected by educational research – e.g. teachers, academics, researchers, policy makers, teacher-trainers – in order to establish healthy relationships where field-specific expertise is pooled usefully.
https://researched.org.uk/about/about-researched/
In no way do I object to teachers sharing practice. In reality much of my work as an academic running a Practice-Based Inquiry MA course, was doing exactly that. My objection is not that Pritesh talks about his own teaching. My objection is that the surrounding institutional frame – researchED, “evidence-informed teaching”, “myth-busting”, “research literacy” – attempts to give that testimony a particular authority.
Nor do I want to suggest that every researchED session must itself be “research-based”, even though that is required by the researchED website:
We ask that all speakers be prepared to discuss their evidence bases with their audiences if asked to do so. How do you know what you claim? Obviously, the definition of evidence bases will vary from session to session, but we do not solicit sessions that represent the speaker’s opinion alone without sufficient substantiation.
(https://researched.org.uk/submissions-to-present-at-researched/
It is after all a conference for teachers, not an academic research symposium. Which is why the interesting question is how teacher testimony, common sense, personal repertoire and selective evidence are being rhetorically rebranded as research-informed practice.
I am not claiming that this session is representative of all researchED work; rather, I am treating it as an illustrative case of how evidence-talk can operate within a particular professional setting. researchED claims to value research, but this session does not show much research, indeed it might be argued that it was never intended to. Yet it makes claims about effective practice that is research informed which it seeks to disseminate through professional networks.
A question I would ask is what ideological work the session performs. For example: it constructs the authoritative teacher as rational, efficient, explicit, accountable and serious; and it constructs the “other” student-led teacher as naïve, relevance-seeking, poster-making, and insufficiently concerned with knowledge, but what model of pupil, knowledge and classroom authority is being normalised here?
This session is not objectionable because a teacher shares his practice. On the contrary, such accounts are valuable as windows into teacher repertoire and professional judgement. The problem is that, within the institutional framing of researchED, this account acquires the aura of evidence-informed practice while offering little explicit evidential warrant. The contrast between “student-led” and “teacher-led” teaching is asserted rather than researched; the former is represented through a weak novice lesson, while the latter is represented through the speaker’s mature repertoire. Furthermore, Pritesh’s version of “teacher-led” is positioned as superior to other repertoires.
What is being produced, therefore, is not simply a practical account of teaching but an ideological distinction between two kinds of teacher: the naïve progressive and the authoritative traditionalist.
What I would argue for is exactly what was in the researchED mission statement – the need for much clearer links between research and practice in a way that helps teachers understand the nature and limitations of research and helps researchers understand the limitations and opportunities of classroom practice. What we see instead is the uncritical acceptance of teacher testimony as evidence. What is needed are more rigorous, research-based approaches within professional discourse than is in evidence here – though I accept it is indeed possible this is in evidence in other sessions. Indeed, I would hope that was not the case since it is stated on the researchED website that substantiation of claims at sessions is required.
The question then becomes, at researchED what research is used, how and why was it selected, how is it used. Given a strong orientation toward knowledge, explicit instruction within researchED, in what way is research that critiques those techniques used and legitimated.
In this piece I am treating a single researchED presentations as a primary ideological text rather than as formal research literature. If I were to move forward to looking at researchED more generally, in order to identify the role that research plays in the organisation, this would require an analysis of at least the following seven points:
- titles and abstracts from programmes;
- keynote speakers repeatedly invited;
- recurring phrases: “what works”, “myths”, “fads”, “pseudoscience”, “evidence-informed”, “common sense”;
- which kinds of research are validated;
- which kinds of research are mocked or positioned as ideological or pseudo-science;
- how “teacher voice” is invoked;
- whether some notion of “common sense” is invoked;
- how the “real classroom” is compared to education research.
Those would be questions for a future piece.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3uPEgDH3pAhQe06533Zebw/)
[2] https://steplab.co/watch/great-teaching-unpacked-episode-3-securing-success
[3] Thompson, John (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication, Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 65.
[4] https://bunsenblue.com/2025/02/08/choral-response-and-i-say-you-say/
