Teaching techniques, fidelity, and the illusion of “best bets”
Recently, a claim has emerged: if leaders are frustrated with teaching outcomes, the fault isn’t the teacher, but the specific techniques (like turn and talk) they’ve been trained to use. And the proposed solution? Swap it for a different technique (like mini-whiteboards) that is, supposedly, easier for teachers to do “well”.1
This suggestion, I argue, is actually the cause of the problem it claims to address. The problem is something very different from deciding which techniques have the highest “return on investment” or are easiest to implement. It’s the vision that teaching is simply a set of techniques whose success comes from collecting the right ones.
Surely some techniques are better than others
Well-developed teaching techniques are necessary, but alone, they’re not enough. Consider this example. When we ask a question to our class, we have a choice: should we wait for students to volunteer, maybe by raising their hands, or should we select the student we want to hear from?
The consequences of the first scenario are generally foreseeable. If we only ever accept answers from volunteers, then they’re the only students we’ll ever hear from; the only ones to participate. The rest will quickly note that their participation is optional.
At the surface, then, the choice appears to be about techniques, and the answer is clear: don’t take volunteers. People can then promote this technique as the key to successful teaching. It reaches fad status and given a catchy name, like “turn and talk” or “cold call”. Leaders claim it “best practice”, prioritise its training, call for its inclusion in lessons, and then become frustrated when observing the results.
But surely, some techniques are better than others. For example, I doubt biology will be learnt well through teachers explaining through poem improvisations. Nor would I expect students to discover the consequences of natural selection through an unguided discussion between students. There are extremes that we’ll all readily agree on; what happens between those extremes is less easy to discern. Why is that?
The problem with techniques discourse
The answer is that there’s more to teaching than techniques. What else? A key distinction. Underlying any technique is something more consequential: a stance, a way of seeing.
The distinction stems from two fundamental ways of seeing and acting in teaching. Andrew Pickering refers to these as “acting-on” and “acting-with” the world.2 In Teaching Meaning, I refer to these as “teaching-to” and “teaching-with” students. So what’s the difference?
Teaching-to students begins with an ideal of the student: how their brain works and, therefore, how they ought to learn. Pickering refers to this as forcing the situation into a particular frame that we desire.
As the hallmark of modernity, it’s driven by the idea that we can engineer and precisely control our world. Even if we never quite succeed at this, the view is that if we just studied the situation a bit more, and gained a bit more evidence, it would be possible.
The discourse on the right techniques takes the same tone. Leaders consider how to engineer learning by engineering the techniques their teachers use: If they just had the right training, then they’d employ the tricks with fidelity, and the desired outcomes would result.
The situation is framed as it ought to be. Evidence is sought to create the idealisation, hypotheses are drawn to develop a mechanism, and the mechanism is set to produce the results. It’s something done to teachers, and then, in turn, done to students.
Acting-on teachers and students
The stance of teaching-to is ultimately about control. There’s already a political and social discussion about this. The idea of control I’m discussing is different. It’s about the very nature of our world. In other words, it’s a philosophical belief about whether the world is engineerable or not.
We begin with the world’s complexity (classrooms and schools are clearly very complex places). Acting-on and acting-with the world differ in how they address that complexity.
- Acting-on the world: we assume we can make moves that pin the world down and have it act as we wish. When we seek this, it often involves stripping the world of its complexity and variety. And yet, as Pickering shows, the world still surprises us.
- Acting-with the world: we assume others and the world act in their own way, which isn’t fully controllable. The viable way forward is to continue adapting and acting-with how the world responds.
Teaching-with students, then, doesn’t begin with an ideal of what a lesson ought to be like. Instead, it begins with our teacher’s and students’ agency to perceive and act in unforeseeable ways. We expect to be surprised.
Frowning in frustration at teachers who don’t enact techniques with fidelity reveals the stance of acting-on. Telling leaders their frustration stems from training teachers on the wrong technique reveals the same stance. Just, the claimant is now acting-on leaders; framing how leadership ought to act. Which, according to “best bets”, would yield premeditated outcomes in how teachers ought to act, and students ought to learn. And yet, these “best bets” are just another framing.
Acting-with teachers and students
Mini-whiteboards are easier than having students talk in pairs, if your goal is to engineer a controllable response (acting-on). If the messy nature of teaching-with students is your goal, then peer-talk is a great tool. It’s as hard to do as anything else: the difficulty isn’t in the technique but in asking great questions.
Also, if classroom behaviour is an issue, then all techniques are difficult. But that doesn’t logically lead to the decision that teachers should only be trained on a select few techniques deemed easy. To be adaptable to a range of classroom responses, teachers need to develop a repertoire of actions.3
In other words, rather than beginning with a premeditated ideal and attempting to engineer its production, acting-with begins with the interaction.
For example, when asking students questions, it’s a good idea to hear from as many students as possible. We want all our students to participate actively and join the conversation. But acting-on students prescribes how they ought to respond. This is seen in many popular teaching moves: “all hands up” and “no opt out”. In many cases, students are trained in how they ought to respond. The teacher, then, attempts to engineer the classroom so it yields their vision.
In teaching-with students, we ask questions to find out how students will respond. It’s in the different ways students respond that we find valuable information: who doesn’t raise their hand, who decides to opt out, and who answers in a surprising format. We actively seek it by, for example, including “not sure” as a possible response.
When teaching-to students and our questions produce silence, or off-task chat, then we’ve failed. Yet, when teaching-with students, we find out something about our students. While the silence of off-task chat is undesirable, we use it as information for our next move.
Of course, many techniques are promoted as part of responsive teaching, such as “checking for understanding”. But many times, these interactions are parasitic on teaching-to students: their purpose is to correct errors that deviate from how students ought to respond.
In acting-with teachers, we may present fundamental ideas and listen to what teachers say about them, how they think they fit into their context, their students, their subjects, and observe what emerges. And then respond to that, not with frustration, but interest, as we have found out how our system naturally responds; valuable information for acting together.
In acting-with teachers we don’t declare “You ought to have enacted ‘turn-and-talk’ this way”. Or in teaching-with we don’t claim, “You ought to have participated in such and such way”.
Instead, it begins with an interaction: a move is made, not to engineer, but to find out. To find out how the system naturally responds. And then reacts to that, to steer a school or class towards a (not the) desirable outcome. An outcome that is always in the making through mutual interactions.
Why do some leaders get frustrated when they impose their fad techniques on teachers? Maybe because the world doesn’t respond how it ought to: their “best bets” didn’t work out. Unfortunately, rather than questioning the stance, this often leads to a search for the next fad. All in the belief that they can engineer a system as complex as a school, even if they never fully succeed. Learn about teaching-with students in Teaching Meaning.
Notes
- Adam Boxer: https://carouselteachlearnlead.substack.com/p/when-done-well-why-schools-dont-improve [accessed 20.03.2026] ↩︎
- Pickering, A. 2025. Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene. USA: Duke University Press Books. ↩︎
- This is an application of the law of requisite variety, which I wrote about in Difference Maker, and more recently in Teaching Meaning. ↩︎