It was the mid-2000s and I was just starting out on my teaching journey. My headteacher encouraged freedom of expression, teacher creativity, teaching “from the heart.” I trusted instinct. Pedagogy felt like an art form.
A colleague once told me I was the “Heston Blumenthal of teaching” the chef famous for creating bacon ice cream. I wore it as a badge of honour. My mission became clear: make lessons more creative, more innovative, more different. If no one else was doing it, even better. If it raised an eyebrow, better still. I could teach exactly how I wanted. And, if I am honest, I sometimes mistook novelty for quality.
Those heady days feel distant now. My lessons today are more structured. Routines are embedded. Codified practice sits front and centre. And while part of me occasionally misses the improvisation, another part recognises that something important has been gained.
What is codified practice?
Across my career, I have seen thousands of lessons. Some forgettable, some chaotic, and some genuinely breath-taking. The best ones tend to share certain features: clarity, intent, strong routines and an almost invisible level of precision. Instructions land cleanly. Students respond without fuss. Complex ideas are broken down, then rebuilt step by step with the meticulousness of an engineer. Codification is, at its core, an attempt to bottle that brilliance and share it.
The problem it tries to solve is deceptively simple. Great teaching is often invisible and highly individual. It lives in the habits, decisions and instincts of a particular teacher. When it is not made explicit, it cannot easily be taught to others. When that teacher leaves, the practice often goes with them.
We are now in something like a golden age of pedagogical sharing. Research circulates widely. Teachers swap ideas through books, blogs and social media. The “best bets” are no longer guarded secrets whispered in staffrooms. Instinct is being supplemented and sometimes challenged by evidence.
Codified practice is the deliberate translation of expert teaching into shared routines, protocols and habits. It takes what works and makes it visible, teachable and repeatable. In short, it moves pedagogy from the individual to the collective.
How did it take hold?
Part of the answer lies with the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). As accountability tightened from the late 1990s onwards, schools sought consistency. Variation between classrooms became harder to justify. If one lesson was excellent and the next less so, leaders needed a way to close that gap.
Reducing variation offered a solution. If classrooms shared common routines and expectations, quality became easier to see, support and improve. What began as a pragmatic response to inspection pressure gradually evolved into a broader philosophy about how teaching and CPD should work.
The growth of academy trusts accelerated the trend. Trusts developed shared teaching frameworks across multiple schools. Codifying practice, down to how teachers greet students, ask questions, or check understanding, allowed successful approaches to be replicated at scale. Teaching, in some respects, became systematised.
Training routes reinforced this shift. Programmes like ‘Teach First’ emphasised clear, repeatable techniques. Teaching was presented less as an improvised performance and more as a set of learnable moves that could be practised and refined.
At the same time, the Education Endowment Foundation gave schools a shared language of “what works.” Add Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction into the mix and pedagogy suddenly looked far more codifiable than it once did. Strategies such as retrieval practice and explicit instruction were not only widely discussed but increasingly embedded into daily classroom routines.
There were practical reasons, too. Codified systems can reduce workload by providing teachers with clear structures and expectations. For early career teachers, this clarity can be invaluable. Instead of facing the blank page of “plan a great lesson,” they begin with a framework that works.
Behaviour, too, plays a role. Predictable routines help create calm, orderly classrooms. In a post pandemic context, where many schools report shifts in student behaviour and attention, the appeal of clarity and consistency has only grown stronger.
The pushback
Critics are not against structure. Few teachers would argue for chaos. The concern is not with codification itself, but with how far it can go.
The central issue is autonomy. Teaching is a profession that depends on judgement. Teachers constantly adapt, adjusting explanations, pacing and questioning in response to the students in front of them. When every aspect of a lesson is prescribed, there is a risk that teachers become technicians delivering a script rather than professionals making informed decisions.
There is also the danger of oversimplification. Research tends to offer principles, not teaching methods. For example, Cognitive Load Theory is a theory about the architecture of the brain. It is however often misrepresented as a pedagogical framework. When these ideas are wrongly codified, they can become tick box exercises, where the rationale is simply a ‘word soup’ of pointless rhetoric.
Context matters as well. What works beautifully in one school may falter in another. Differences in students, subjects and communities all shape what good teaching looks like. A one size fits all model risks ignoring that complexity.
Morale is another concern. In highly codified environments, teachers can feel monitored for compliance rather than trusted for expertise. The focus shifts from “Are students learning?” to “Are you doing it the right way?” For experienced teachers in particular, this can feel constraining.
And then there is innovation. If everyone is expected to teach in broadly the same way, opportunities for experimentation shrink. New ideas have less room to emerge. Over time, a system designed to spread best practice can inadvertently slow its evolution.
Does codified pedagogy destroy autonomy?
That depends on how it is done, and perhaps more importantly, why it is done.
In some schools, codification has tipped into over scripted, performative teaching. Lessons can feel polished and consistent, but also oddly lifeless, with both teachers and students playing their assigned roles.
In others, codification provides a strong foundation. It removes unnecessary variability, supports behaviour and frees teachers to focus on the substance of learning rather than the mechanics of the classroom.
Perhaps the most useful way to think about it is this: codified practice should be a stage, not a cage.
A stage gives structure. It provides a platform, a shared space where something meaningful can happen. What happens on that stage still depends on the people using it.
At its best, codification offers clarity without rigidity. It supports teachers, particularly those early in their careers, while still leaving room for professional judgement, subject expertise and yes, the occasional flash of creativity.
Teaching is complex. Learning even more so. And while a well-designed scaffold can help manage that complexity, no checklist, however elegant, can replace the craft at the heart of the classroom.
The trick, as ever in education, is balance.
