Key points
- Principles and practices are not the same; confusing the two creates problems for schools and systems.
- The same instructional principle can be realised through many different practices.
- Mandating specific practices often undermines teacher judgment; we can hold tight to principles while invite important decision-making from teachers.
- Schools and systems should hold firm to evidence-informed principles while allowing flexibility in how teachers enact them.
Principles and practices: What’s the difference?
In education, we are generally quite bad at distinguishing between principles and practices. They are not the same and if we’re unclear on the distinction, we run into all kinds of problems down the line.
In this edition, I outline the difference between principles and practices, and propose implications for schools and system leaders.
What is a principle?
A principle is a broad idea (derived from research evidence) that informs teachers’ decision-making. There are principles of learning, teaching, behaviour, assessment and so on — but for the sake of this article, let’s explore principles of teaching.
Examples of principles:
- It is helpful to show students what success looks like in their learning
- We should regularly check all students’ understanding
- Activating prior knowledge supports students to make sense of new related ideas
What is a practice?
A practice is a specific strategy or technique; if principles offer us the why, practices are the how. They allow us to operationalise the things we care about in principle.
Unlike principles, practices are directly observable in action. They can be named, codified, modelled, practised and refined. It is important to note that most practices can serve multiple purposes.
Examples of practices:
- Choral response: The teacher prompts all students to repeat target vocabulary
- Live modelling: The teacher live models the use of a persuasive language technique
- True/False response: Students respond to a True/False statement using a gesture
What’s the relationship, and what matters most?
To explore the relationship between principles and practices, let’s take one principle, and then see how different teachers enact it.
Principle: Show students what success looks like
In the Year 7 pottery class, Mr Varghese demonstrates exactly how to apply glaze to a pot. He narrates his thinking as he applies the glaze, highlighting common missteps along the way.
Practice A: Physical demonstration with a think-aloud
In Miss Clarke’s Year 9 Mathematics class, shows success a different way. She solves a linear equation on the whiteboard, slowly and methodically, one step at a time, fully explaining her thinking and recording key procedural steps as she goes.
Practice B: Fully worked example
In the Foundation Music classroom, Mrs Gort chunks a rhythm into bars, clapping one at a time and prompting students to clap the rhythm back.
Practice C: Live model with an echo response
Same principle, different practices
These teachers are teaching with the same principle in mind, yet their practices look different. This is a good thing. How teachers engage in evidence-informed practice must necessarily reflect the nature of the curriculum, the kinds of practice required for success, the developmental stage of the learner, and myriad other factors.
Once we can tell a principle from a practice, we can hold firm on principles while embracing flexibility in practice.
Hold tight to the principle, embrace flex in practice
The best school leaders I know are bullish about the instructional principles that matter to them. They can say, for example, that they want teaching in their school to be explicit, lively, interactive, rich in student dialogue, and so on. But they understand that there is no one set of practices that brings this vision to life. Great leaders zoom in and out – unafraid to be precise at the level of technique – but always leading with principles first. They methodically build staff knowledge to the extent that everyone is deeply informed about why they are doing what they are doing.
On this foundation of knowledge, professional improvement is sustainable over time.
What I find painful (sometimes bordering on disrespectful of teachers) is the tendency to seek “consistency” by mandating certain practices as part of whole-school instructional models or broad teaching frameworks. By way of example, I see plenty of instructional models that start with “Learning Intentions & Success Criteria”. This is well meaning, but do we really want every teacher to start every lesson in the same way? In every subject? Every day of the week? Why? To what end?
Teachers resist, because they know better.
“Success criteria” is one practice, one strategy we might use to meet a particular aim. In some cases, this technique might be helpful. In other contexts, sharing “success criteria” may well result in a net reduction in teaching quality. This can be said of almost all practices.
Rather than “doing success criteria”, we should charge teams of teachers with the responsibility of considering:
- What will success look like for students in this lesson?
- Is there one unambiguously correct route to success, or are there multiple avenues?
- How will we deconstruct success, and show that to students?
- Which techniques are best fit-for-purpose here?
These questions engage teachers at the level of judgment, in line with the principles that matter to us. They rightly position teachers as masters of their subjects, their students. Ask these questions, and teachers may well have a lot to say.
When should we hold firm to specific practices?
In some areas of the curriculum, we have a very good idea about the specific instructional practices that are most likely to pay off for student learning, so options will of course be constrained. This is probably true in teaching decoding skills, implementing number fluency practice, and teaching subject-specific vocabulary. Of course teachers should be well-informed about the highest-yield practices where we have good enough evidence.
This doesn’t change the fact that in every single lesson being planned and taught across Australia every day, teachers need to lean on principles to make hundreds of decisions about what to do, in what order, and under what conditions. Selecting just the right strategy for the moment is an imperfect art: there are trade-offs in all we do.
In support of teachers, let’s at least be sure to know the difference between principles and practices so that we attend to the most important thing.
Teaching in line with our principles should always matter most.
Staffroom reflections
- What are the fundamental differences between principles and practices? Why does the distinction matter?
- What are the instructional principles we care about at our school?
- How do we methodically build staff knowledge of these underlying principles?
- Take any one of those principles: how many different practices might teachers use to achieve this aim?
