About the evidence

Pedagogy First draws on a wide body of educational research, theory and professional practice. Its purpose isn't to attach a citation to every classroom technique. It's to translate established thinking about teaching and learning into practical approaches teachers can consider in their own contexts.

Several kinds of knowledge sit behind the guides, and they do different jobs. Original research studies establish mechanisms, like the testing effect or the limits of working memory. Theories of learning and instruction organise those mechanisms into something a teacher can plan with. Reviews and syntheses weigh the evidence across many studies. And professional knowledge, mine and that of the hundreds of schools I've worked with, shapes how any of it survives contact with a real classroom. A strategy earns a place on a card when those lines of evidence and experience point the same way.

Each card names the thinking it draws on: Rooted in the work of, or the researcher named in the strategy itself. That attribution identifies an important intellectual influence on the strategy. It doesn't mean the named researcher personally proposed that exact classroom routine, and it doesn't mean every precise strategy has been independently tested as a standalone intervention in the form written here.

Individual strategies may draw on several overlapping evidence bases. Where the research is nuanced or contested, the further reading on each guide page says so plainly.

The six infographics and 144 strategies form the core published resource. They've been downloaded, shared, printed and used in real schools, and they don't shift underneath the people using them.

This microsite is the living companion around them: it helps you explore, connect and apply the ideas, and it gives the wider evidence and supporting thinking space to keep developing. The strategies stay put. The support around them grows.