Video · Teachers Media
Pedagogy
Pedagogy is the study of how teaching works — not just what to teach but why the choices you make about explanation, practice, questioning and feedback have the effects they do. It's the professional knowledge that separates a teacher from someone who happens to know a subject.
About this video
The word "pedagogy" has often been used loosely in UK education, sometimes just as a synonym for "teaching methods". Its more useful meaning is the deliberate, evidence-informed choices a teacher makes about how to make learning happen — the sequencing of content, the use of examples and non-examples, the balance of explanation and practice, the design of questions, the response to what pupils say. Pedagogy is what turns subject knowledge into pupil learning.
The last twenty years have seen a large body of research consolidate around a set of pedagogical principles that most subjects and phases can benefit from. Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction — daily review, presenting new material in small steps, asking many questions, providing models, guiding practice, checking for understanding, weekly and monthly review — offer a widely-used synthesis. Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory adds a physiological reason why: pupils can only hold so much in working memory at once, and good pedagogy respects that limit.
Where teachers differ genuinely is in how they marry generic pedagogical principles with subject-specific pedagogy — the particular ways of thinking that make a good history teacher different from a good maths teacher. Pedagogy is not one-size-fits-all; the deep skill is knowing when a principle applies and how to adapt it to your subject, your pupils, and this specific lesson.
Pedagogical principles that appear across the evidence
- Review before you extend. Retrieval practice at the start of a lesson strengthens memory of prior learning and builds a foundation for what's new.
- Small steps with checking. Break new material into chunks, model each, check pupils have understood before moving on.
- Worked examples before independent practice. Show how to do it, then guide, then release to independence.
- Ask many questions. Not just of the hand-raisers. Get evidence of thinking from everyone.
- Distributed practice. Revisit concepts across weeks and months, not just in the lesson they're taught.
Discussion prompts
- Which pedagogical principle do you consciously plan for, and which do you rely on instinct?
- How does your subject shape your pedagogy — what do maths teachers know that English teachers don't, and vice versa?
- When you watch a colleague teach well, what specifically are you seeing that makes it work?
Try this in your classroom
- Read Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction (a short paper). Pick one principle you don't consistently use. Try it for a week.
- Plan a lesson using an "I do, we do, you do" structure and notice where pupils genuinely need the "we do" stage before they can do it independently.
- Observe a colleague and try to name three specific pedagogical moves they made that you could steal.