Which Pedagogical Stance Should You Adopt If You Are Working in a Traditional Education System?

The PedTech framework, as set out in From EdTech to PedTech (Aubrey-Smith and Twining, 2024), starts with values and beliefs. Everything else - purpose, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and the role of digital technology - flows from there. One implication of this, which I have explored in earlier posts, is that alignment matters. Your pedagogical stance needs to be consistent with the system you are operating in, otherwise the coherence that makes a PedTech approach powerful breaks down.

However, this raises an uncomfortable question.

What if you are working in a Traditional education system, and you believe the evidence suggests a different pedagogical stance would better serve learners? Should you align your practice with the system, even if you think the system is wrong?

This is not a hypothetical tension. Most teachers in England and many other countries operate in systems that are, in their design, predominantly Traditional. The curriculum specifies content to be delivered. Assessment measures recall and reproduction of that content. Lesson structures, timetabling, grouping practices, and inspection frameworks all presuppose a broadly behaviourist account of learning: that knowledge is transmitted from expert to novice, that performance improves with practice and feedback, and that the teacher's job is to ensure that the right content reaches the learner efficiently. As I argued in 'Analysing learning theories', this account has real strengths - but also serious weaknesses that the evidence makes it difficult to ignore.

So what do you do?

The case for alignment

The argument for aligning with the Traditional system, even under disagreement, is a pragmatic one - and it is stronger than it might first appear.

If your pedagogical stance is not aligned with the system you work in, you face constant friction at every level. The assessment system will reward behaviours that your approach does not prioritise. Parents, shaped by their own schooling, will expect something your approach does not provide. Inspection frameworks will look for practices you are consciously moving away from. Colleagues, senior leaders, and school structures will pull in a different direction. In this situation, you will be fighting the system continuously, and that fight consumes exactly the professional energy and attention that learners need you to direct at them.

There is a more specific version of this problem. An approach works best when it is enacted coherently and consistently. A Social Constructivist teacher in a Traditional school may manage to create collaborative, dialogic learning in their classroom, but the moment pupils sit a standardised test designed to measure recall, or move to a different lesson designed around direct instruction and worked examples, the incoherence becomes visible to the learner too. Partial, inconsistent enactment of a non-aligned pedagogical stance may produce worse outcomes than coherent enactment of an aligned one - not because the aligned stance is better, but because learners need consistency to make sense of what is expected of them.

This is one reason why, in From EdTech to PedTech, we argue that alignment is critically important. It is not just a matter of intellectual tidiness. Misalignment is a practical problem with real costs for learners.

The case against alignment

However, adopting a pedagogical stance you do not actually hold is not alignment. It is pretence.

This matters for a specific reason. A PedTech approach begins with your values and beliefs about how learning works. As I argued in 'PedTech is Not a Thing', this is not a rhetorical commitment - it is structural. Your pedagogical stance is the lens through which every subsequent decision is made. If you adopt a Traditional stance because it is institutionally convenient, while privately believing that learning is fundamentally social and contextual, you have not achieved alignment. You have suppressed the starting point of the framework and replaced it with compliance.

There is an intellectual problem here too. In 'Analysing learning theories', I set out the strengths and weaknesses of the four main theories - Traditional (combining behaviourism and information processing), Individual Constructivist, Social Constructivist, and Sociocultural - and argued that the evidence base is not neutral between them. The Traditional account cannot adequately explain why learning so often fails to transfer across contexts. It cannot account for the role of prior knowledge in shaping how new information is interpreted. It is silent on creativity and novel problem-solving. If you have engaged seriously with this evidence and found it persuasive, adopting a Traditional pedagogical stance because the system requires it is a form of professional dishonesty. It also, over time, reproduces the very system you believe is limiting learners.

Resolving the tension - or being honest that it cannot be resolved

The way through this, I think, requires a distinction that the PedTech framework points towards but does not always make explicit: the distinction between your pedagogical stance and your pedagogical practice.

Your pedagogical stance is your genuine set of beliefs about how learning works. It cannot be negotiated with the system. You cannot hold a Sociocultural pedagogical stance on Monday and a Traditional one on Tuesday because the inspection team is coming in. The stance is the thing you actually believe, based on your engagement with the evidence and your professional experience.

Your pedagogical practice, by contrast, is what you do in the specific institutional context you are in. It is shaped by your stance, but it is also constrained by the system. A teacher with a Sociocultural stance, working in a Traditional school, will make different choices from a teacher with the same stance in a school that genuinely supports enquiry-based, community-embedded learning. This is not hypocrisy. It is professional navigation of real constraints.

The critical question is whether, over time, those constraints are so severe that your practice becomes so distant from your stance that the stance ceases to be operational. If a Sociocultural teacher in a Traditional school can find no meaningful space to act on their beliefs - no room for collaborative learning, no opportunity to connect learning to learners' communities, no flexibility in how assessment is used - then the honest reckoning is not that they should adopt a Traditional stance, but that the system is preventing them from being the professional they believe they should be.

That is a much more uncomfortable conclusion. But it is the honest one. And as I argued in 'Is teaching a profession?', professional autonomy - the right and responsibility to act on your evidence-informed beliefs about what learners need - is precisely what has been progressively eroded from teaching. The answer to that erosion is not to internalise it as a stance. The answer is to name it, challenge it, and advocate for the conditions in which genuine professional practice becomes possible.

What a PedTech approach asks of you

A PedTech approach does not resolve the tension between your pedagogical stance and the system you work in. What it does is make the tension visible and therefore workable.

It asks you to name your pedagogical stance clearly, as I explored in 'Is teaching atheoretical?'. It asks you to understand the system context you are operating in, including its underpinning theory of learning. It asks you to be honest about where your stance and the system align, and where they do not. And it asks you to make deliberate, justifiable decisions about how to navigate that gap - not to paper over it with convenient compliance.

If you are working in a Traditional system and you believe, as the evidence increasingly suggests, that a Sociocultural account of learning better explains how people actually learn, then the intellectually honest position is not to adopt a Traditional stance. It is to hold your Sociocultural stance clearly, to understand the Traditional constraints you are working within, and to find the spaces - however limited - where you can act on what you believe. Simultaneously, it means advocating for the systemic changes that would make those spaces larger.

Education systems are hard to change. That is true, and it is important not to underestimate it. However, the response to a system that is difficult to change is not to conclude that its assumptions are correct. It is to be clear about what you believe, to be honest about the gap between your beliefs and the system you are in, and to keep the question of alignment on the table - not as a reason for compliance, but as a source of professional accountability.

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For a full account of the PedTech framework, see From EdTech to PedTech (Aubrey-Smith and Twining, 2024). For more on the four learning theories discussed in this post, see 'Comparing Pedagogical Stances' and 'Analysing learning theories'. For the argument that teaching is never atheoretical, see 'Is teaching atheoretical?'. For the argument about teaching as a profession, see 'Is teaching a profession?'.