Professional Inheritance

The assumptions we were trained into

When I trained in 2005, there was little debate about how teaching should look. The progressive approach dominated the conversation, and engagement was treated as the hallmark of strong practice. Marketplace lessons, role play, thematic projects and collaboration by default were not presented as options but as expectations. If you were being observed, this was a ‘go-to’ lesson you planned. Direct instruction was considered something the old, dusty teachers did and they likely needed to improve. The polarity was clear enough: “sage on the stage” was old school, while “guide on the side” signalled professional enlightenment. I absorbed that framing without much reason to put up resistance.

Progressive education had long elevated experience and student activity as the primary drivers of learning, privileging inquiry over instruction, skills over content and self-expression over transmission. It was not introduced as one tradition among many, open to scrutiny or comparison. It was presented to me as professional maturity. The implication was subtle but powerful: to question it was to reveal yourself as out of step.

It was only later, through CPD, through reading and conversations online, that I encountered dissenting voices. What I had accepted as settled truth actually turned out to be well-contested ground. In Progressively Worse, Robert Peal argues that progressive ideology became so embedded in British education that it ceased to be recognised as ideology at all. It was simply how teaching was done. That observation closely matches my own experience. My training made little reference to disagreement and I honestly do not remember any positive reference to direct instruction. Child-centred orthodoxy was framed as moral progress. Direct instruction was portrayed as harmful. Knowledge was described as inert and authority treated with suspicion. The alternative was barely articulated, let alone defended.

Whether one agrees with Peal’s conclusions or not, the historical sweep invites reflection. Many of us inherited a position before we realised there was one. What I had taken to be professional consensus may simply have been (un)professional inheritance. Looking back, the recognition is not especially comfortable. It is easier to inherit than to interrogate and easier to repeat than to examine. Once routines settle and classrooms run smoothly, questioning your own rhythm can feel unnecessary.

Younger teachers entering the profession today may find some of this difficult to imagine. The idea that teachers were actively encouraged to minimise explanation, avoid direct instruction and build lessons primarily around activity can sound almost absurd when described plainly. Yet for many of us it was simply the professional climate we entered. It was the norm.

Even thoughtful educators were working within that framework. David Didau once wrote a blog post titled The Ultimate Teaching Technique advocating approaches that now sit firmly within that progressive tradition. Back in 2016, he revisited the post adding an update at the top that reads:

“I no longer agree with any of the following. It remains on my blog as a warning against hubris.”

This is admirable; rather than removing it, he left it visible as a record of how professional certainty can age badly. It is a reminder that teaching, like any profession, evolves, and that many of us held positions with great confidence before we fully understood the mechanisms of learning.

I cannot remember whether it was Dylan Wiliam who first phrased it this way, but the warning will be familiar. Many teachers improve rapidly in their first few years and then plateau for much of the rest of their career. Practice stabilises and confidence grows. Without deliberate reflection the questioning slows. The danger is rarely incompetence. It is comfort.

Professional growth begins when assumptions are surfaced, orthodoxies examined and we distinguish between what works and what merely looks as though it does. None of this requires ideological warfare. It requires intellectual humility. The question is less about whether progressive education was right or wrong in absolute terms and more about whether we are willing to scrutinise the inheritance we have received.

I like to think that nowadays I am a more discerning and reflective practitioner, someone more willing to question practices and look for evidence that supports or challenges the claims behind them.

Teaching has moved on in the years since I entered the profession. Cognitive science and the science of learning have helped clarify some of the processes involved in learning and have brought greater coherence to discussions about effective practice. The profession does not possess complete certainty, but our understanding of how learning happens has become clearer.

For example, we now understand reasonably well that:

• Memory is what remains after thinking, and what we think about strongly influences what we later remember.

• Working memory is extremely limited and can only attend to a small number of ideas at once.

• Long-term memory stores the knowledge accumulated over time and forms the foundation for understanding new ideas.

• New learning depends heavily on prior knowledge because new information attaches to what is already understood.

• Forgetting is natural and inevitable, which means knowledge must be revisited and retrieved if it is to remain accessible.

• Retrieval strengthens memory more effectively than simply re-exposing pupils to information.

• Fluency during a lesson can create an illusion of understanding even when learning remains fragile.

History provides many examples of professional confidence preceding understanding. Doctors once appeared in cigarette advertisements recommending particular brands with the authority of medical expertise. A century earlier, surgeons moved between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies without washing their hands, puzzled by the deaths of new mothers in maternity wards. In both cases the practices of the time seemed entirely normal to those living within them. Only later did they come to look not merely mistaken but extraordinary.

We may be living through similar turning points elsewhere. The role of smartphones in children’s lives is only now beginning to be questioned after years of largely uncritical acceptance. Future generations may look back at some of our dietary habits, or the strange reality that parts of New York can be classified as food deserts, despite the abundance of food surrounding them. They may look at our technology use and other everyday assumptions and wonder how we failed to see what to them may appear obvious.

Education is not immune to that pattern. Ideas that once carried the authority of professional consensus can later come to look more like inherited habits than carefully tested principles. Some of the teaching approaches many of us were trained into may eventually be viewed in that way: not as malicious decisions, but as confident mistakes made before the evidence was fully understood.

Professional maturity may therefore have less to do with choosing a camp and more to do with remaining unsettled. Once you recognise that what feels like consensus might simply be inheritance, it becomes difficult to stop asking harder questions. In a profession built on learning, it would be strange if teachers themselves ever stopped doing it.