Evidence-informed practice: The importance of professional judgement

The late, great Ted Wragg once calculated that a teacher typically makes upwards of a thousand 'on-the-spot, evaluative decisions' on any given day (MacBeath, 2012). When I first came across this, I thought: 'That sounds like a lot… you'd be exhausted!' However, when you consider how busy a school is - how busy a classroom is - and how many instances might trigger a response from a teacher in the course of a day, it soon starts to look like a reasonable figure. If you accept this to be true, a number of questions arise. First - what are all these decisions? What factors influence the decisions that teachers make when planning and teaching lessons? How many of these decisions are made consciously and how many are predetermined by past experience, habits or beliefs? To what extent are these decisions informed by research evidence? Perhaps most importantly, can we get better at making these decisions and, if so, how? Here we arrive at a methodological question - how can we know wh