Teachers are constantly being bombarded with information on “what works”. But it’s the implementation of the ideas that matters most because it’s teachers who will have to adopt the methods, the textbook or the materials.

Take group work. Although some are passionately against it for rather anecdotal reasons, it absolutely is the case that group work is hard, takes a lot of effort and structure and, if not done well, can fail miserably.

Direct instruction (DI) is another case in point. When you look at the highly scripted lessons designed by Siegfried Engelmann and colleagues, you can see engaging instruction and lots of interaction. I’m not surprised that such an approach seems very effective.

But is it easy to implement in the English education system? A very recent pilot study by the Education Endowment Foundation sought to explore this for the DI-based Connecting Maths Concepts (CMC) programme (Harland et al, 2021).

The programme consists of “sequenced, scripted lessons and assessments designed to provide specific, systematic and structured instruction in fundamental concepts in mathematics”. It is based on “the direct instruction model of teaching and key elements include whole-class mastery, error correction, choral responding, feedback, assessment, and the use of a motivation system”.

Although focused on primary-aged students in the US, the CMC programme was implemented in eight secondary schools in England, with a total of 189 students with low prior attainment in mathematics across Years 7, 8 and 9 taking part in the programme. Schools ran the programme for 15 weeks with small groups of up to 14 students per year group, in most cases replacing regular lessons three to five times a week. Teachers and learning support practitioners received training, coaching and course materials.

Despite the very promising pedigree of the approach, results were mixed: “Over half of surveyed students also reported that the programme helped them do better at mathematics. However, there was no change in students’ self-reported mathematics motivation and, in some cases, students’ perceptions of their own behaviour in mathematics lessons deteriorated over time, and they became less likely to agree that they behaved well in mathematics lessons.”

Some things worked well, like the sequenced structure, the way mathematics concepts were explained, and the focus on mastery, assessment and feedback.

However, there also were more negative perceptions of insufficient challenge, too much repetition, choral responding, a lack of differentiation, onerous monitoring and a lack of alignment to the key stage 3 curriculum content. Of course, many of these are related to implementing a US primary-aged programme in English secondary schools.

Nevertheless, despite such challenges, we would be wrong to dismiss some of the great features of a coherent curriculum approach.

But we also shouldn’t just assume that great ideas are easily adopted. There is always the challenge of implementation, whether it is group work or instruction. Implementation, however great the idea is, can be hard. Maybe we should reword “here’s what works” to “here’s something that might just work if you implement it well, with not too much effort”.

Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies

This article originally appeared in the 7 May 2021 issue under the headline “What’s the big idea? (And will it really work?)”