A trend of “ruthless simplicity” has spread across schools in England, driven by the idea that coordination is a burden.

It’s said that “Coordination cost is a killer in schools … When every teacher runs their own behaviour system, their own lesson structure, their own feedback approach, each may be perfectly reasonable in isolation. But collectively, the variety multiplies coordination cost.”¹ (emphasis added).

According to this, variety should be vastly reduced in schools, in the pursuit of “ruthless simplicity”. But this commits a fundamental mistake.

Most teachers will likely agree that a school should have a behaviour policy to foster common social norms. It’s true that when different teachers employ distinct social norms, students can get confused. They may say, “But Mr Z let us”. There is a need for consistency in our social norms.

The mistake consists of confusing clarity in social norms with learning, as if they were brought about in the same way.

The original quote suggests that coordination is a burden to be removed. But in the context of actual learning, coordination isn’t a cost at all. It’s the essence of learning. To see why, let me introduce a distinction between the content students learn, and how we act with that content.

When people insist that feedback and lesson structure look the same in Art as in Physics, they suggest that “content” exists beyond people and their methods of approaching it and teaching it.

The error assumes that content in itself is all that there is. The how of the content is separable from the content. As if you could separate the artist from the art, or the chemist from the chemistry.

In arguing for reduced cognitive load, this “how” of the content should be standardised. It should be kept constant across teachers to ensure that the content is all that varies.

This view makes sense if you see the brain as a computer.² A computer just needs a channel to download and store data. It doesn’t matter what that channel looks like, all that matters is the data delivery.

Yet, modern cognitive science wouldn’t see learning this way.³ Content is seen as inseparable from a person and what they do. Knowledge isn’t something stored in a location in the brain that must be somehow transmitted to another brain. Knowing is doing:

• A biologist does biology through building causal diagrams.
• A historian does history through interrogation and triangulation.
• A language student does language through mapping meaning and conversing.
• A physicist does physics through exploring mathematical formulas.

Enactive cognitive science sees this variety as crucial to education. Helping students align with a variety of styles and genres is exactly what schooling is about. And, part of this variety is expressed in how teachers structure their lessons and give feedback.

There’s never just content; there’s always a way of approaching it, of seeing it, living and experiencing it, doing it. This is a metacontent. Learning content alone just gives the facts. Learning it with metacontent changes what a student can do. And therefore, the conversations they can participate in, the communities they can enter, and the worlds they can inhabit.

Enforcing similar pedagogy across teachers and classrooms, therefore, makes the mistake of assuming that the metacontent is similar across teachers and subjects.

Coordination between teachers and students isn’t a cost. Coordination of different ways of doing subjects or stages is precisely the essence of learning. Each teacher brings their own way of being in the world, a way of doing what we study.

So when policies insist that teachers use the same methods for things like starters, feedback, lesson structure and marking, they’re attempting to remove the teacher from the teaching. Then, lessons drift towards content delivery rather than a coordination of meanings and ways of doing.

If we want to preserve the essence of teaching, we need to protect this variety. To explore how to keep the “how” alive in your classroom, read more in my book, Teaching Meaning.

References

1. https://snacks.pepsmccrea.com/p/collective-alignment [Accessed 18.02.2026] ↩︎
2. As in classical cognitivism. ↩︎
3. As in enactive cognitive science. For example, see Di Paolo, E. 2023. “F/acts: Ways of Enactive Worldmaking.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (11–12): 159–89. ↩︎