This article by Tim Harford should be compulsory reading for every teacher, educational administrator and politician.
He points out that in education today, there’s a lot of talk about methodologies, very little about figuring out what methodologies actually work. He paints a picture of what evidence-based education could be like – with trainee teachers taught by practicing teachers who were also researchers, with classroom teachers feeding back useful research questions to people in a position to conduct experiments, with “best practice”, namely “what is shown by evidence to work” spreading from school to school.
Read the article.