The ‘Bananarama Principle’ is named after Bananarama and Fun Boy Three’s 1982 hit single ‘It Ain’t What You Do…..’1 The chorus states ‘it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it’—and it’s essential advice for educators acting on the findings of research. This guiding law came to life in 2011 when we launched the Pupil Premium Toolkit.2
Published by the Sutton Trust charity, the toolkit offered an accessible Which? style guide detailing best bets for improving children’s attainment. The Coalition Government had ring-fenced Pupil Premium funds for schools to help improve the results of their poorest pupils, who continued to lag behind their more privileged peers.3 Our point was simple: it wouldn’t be what schools spent, but the way they spent it that would get results. Adopted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)4 it became the Teaching and Learning Toolkit and has been further nurtured and developed into the freely available 34-strand interactive website you see today.5
What Works?
Our aim in our new book What works? Research and evidence for successful teaching is to build on the toolkit and offer some general principles to guide classroom teachers. On one hand, that means providing practical tips for teachers and leaders; on the other hand, it means instilling a healthy dose of scepticism for teachers when scrutinising how approaches are working in their own schools and classrooms.
What works? is a deceptively simple question. The question mark in the book’s title is important! We have used the best evidence we can—over 200 summaries of 8,000 intervention studies assembled together. But research can only tell us what has worked in the past, not what will work in the future. Indeed, it can only offer indications of what may work under certain conditions.
Bananarama
The Bananarama Principle applies to most classroom practice. It underscores the power, as well as the limitations of evidence in helping a teacher decide what to do in a classroom: how an approach is implemented is vital and just as important as its content. Evidence is necessary, but never sufficient. Delivery is difficult.
Feedback in the classroom for example, delivered well, yields on average higher learning gains compared with most interventions. But studies show some efforts at providing feedback can harm learning. The average suggests feedback is a good bet for teachers. But the variation in results raises the risk you could make things worse for your pupils.