Good Tool, Wrong Time (Part 1)
Why Great Strategies Sometimes Miss the Mark
🚫The Risk of “Lethal Mutations”
In recent times, education systems around Australia have made big, public statements about the teaching and learning that happens in their schools.
The Victorian Department of Education released their Teaching and Learning Model 2.0.
The NSW Department of Education formally endorsed the importance of explicit teaching.
These moves are encouraging. Clear direction matters—and in many ways, it’s long overdue.
But here’s the catch: without careful implementation, even the best ideas can go wrong. That’s when we start to see what Dylan Wiliam calls lethal mutations—where core ideas are distorted in practice.
What starts as strong guidance can quickly become rigid routines, superficial checklists, or mismatched strategies.
This article is about one of the most common instructional “mutations” I’ve seen: using a good tool—but at the wrong time.
🪤The Problem: When a Little Knowledge Goes a Long (Wrong) Way
As teachers, we’re always growing. We read, listen to podcasts, attend PD—and we start connecting the dots.
But sometimes, a little bit of knowledge leads us to overgeneralise. We over-assimilate. We see a great strategy and apply it to every situation, even when the context doesn’t fit.
We make connections even when they’re not there.
For example:
We hear about retrieval practice, so we add in Ochre Daily Reviews—before students have been taught concepts.
We learn about the importance of collecting data, so we implement the same oral reading fluency screener three times at the start of the year because we think that is what it means to “triangulate” data. Dr. Matt Burns spoke about this common issue when I had him on the Knowledge for Teachers podcast.
It’s not ill-intentioned. It’s just misaligned.
And it’s why so many good tools go wrong.
🧑🍳From Cookbook to Chef
There’s a moment every teacher knows.
You’ve prepped a lesson and stepped into the classroom ready to go. But somewhere between your instruction and your students’ response… it falls flat.
The longer I’ve worked with teachers, the more I’ve seen this pattern. Teachers are using research-backed strategies, but applying them before students are ready, or in the wrong context.
Often, it’s not the strategy itself that’s the issue—it’s the timing.
Teaching is a lot like cooking. You can have the best tools and a solid recipe, but what truly matters is knowing when and how to use them. A recipe gives you the steps, but becoming a chef means going beyond that—using your judgment, understanding your ingredients, and adjusting based on what’s in front of you.
A cookbook gives you the recipe, but a chef knows how to adjust the ingredients.
Let’s walk through some of the most common cases of good tools used at the wrong time, why they backfire, and what we can do differently.
⚠️When Good Tools Miss the Mark
In this article, I will unpack four common strategies:
Checking for Understanding
Novel Problem Types
Timed Practice
Small Group Work
Each of these have real merit—but all prone to flopping when misapplied. In the next post, I’ll unpack another four tools (Decodable Texts, Corrective Feedback, Slides & Visuals and Adapting Instruction) that can be really effective, but only when used correctly.
✅ 1. Checking for Understanding
❌ The Mistake: Using it during the I do phase of instruction.
It’s early in the lesson. You’re introducing a new concept, and before you’ve had a chance to teach it explicitly, you ask:
“Who can tell me what this means?”
Your intention is to activate prior knowledge or gauge readiness. But what actually happens is a kind of classroom fishing expedition—you cast the question out and hope someone can pull the right answer from the depths.
Eventually, a student offers something vaguely connected. You latch onto it—grateful for anything to work with—and try to build your explanation from there. But the explanation is often imprecise, muddled, or half right.
The rest of the class? They’re left confused, unsure whether that was the answer—or just a warm-up act.
In other cases, you might ask students to “explain in their own words” before they’ve had the chance to build understanding through modelling, examples, or guided practice. The result is surface-level responses based more on guessing or memory than deep comprehension.
The real problem here is that we’re checking for understanding before we’ve actually done the teaching.
It’s not fair to the students, and it’s not helpful for the teacher. The check becomes meaningless because we’re measuring something that hasn’t yet had a chance to take root.
🛠️ Do this instead: Reframe your checks for understanding as "feedback loops"
They shouldn’t be about whether students know it yet, but about whether your teaching is working. And that can only happen after students have had meaningful exposure to the content. By the time you ask, “Can you explain this back to me?” students should have seen it, heard it, practised it, and thought about it.
Be specific about what you’re checking. Instead of a general “Any questions?” or “Who gets it?”, check a particular skill or step.
✅ 2. Novel Problem Types
❌ The Mistake: Using novel or open-ended problems before students have mastered the basics.
We often want to engage students in real-world, complex, or open-ended tasks that promote reasoning and problem-solving. And that’s a good goal—eventually. But if students haven’t mastered the foundational knowledge required for the task, these types of problems quickly become a source of frustration rather than learning.
The problem isn’t that students are unwilling—it’s that they’re unprepared.
Without fluency in the core facts, procedures, or concepts underpinning the task, their cognitive load is overwhelmed. Instead of reasoning about the problem, they’re still trying to decode what it’s asking—or remember how to do the basics.
For example:
A student is given a rich multi-step word problem involving proportional reasoning, but they haven’t yet automated their multiplication facts or developed conceptual understanding of ratios. They don’t stand a chance—not because they’re not capable, but because they’re underprepared.
This leads to a false conclusion: that students "aren’t good at problem-solving." In reality, they’re just being asked to do the right task at the wrong time.
🛠️ Do this instead: Use novel problems after students are fluent with foundational knowledge.
When students no longer need to think about the basics, they’ll have the cognitive space to explore, explain, and reason.
Bottom line:
Novel problems should extend thinking—not substitute for teaching.
✅ 3. Timed Practice
❌ The Mistake: Timing students before they’re accurate.
We want students to become fluent readers, writers and mathematicians—able to retrieve facts, decode words and solve problems quickly and effortlessly. And rightly so. Fluency builds confidence, reduces cognitive load and frees students to focus on higher-order thinking.
But there’s a common pitfall: introducing timed tasks before students are ready.
If students are still making frequent errors or haven’t yet developed a clear mental model of the skill, adding speed only adds pressure—not progress.
Instead of rehearsing the correct process, they begin rehearsing errors. Their brain wires the mistake as if it were the skill. Worse, they may start guessing or rushing just to keep up, and the timed environment reinforces the idea that speed matters more than accuracy.
For some students, especially those with processing difficulties or slower working memory, this leads to anxiety and avoidance. Instead of developing fluency, they develop maths dread, reading shame, or test fatigue.
Fluency is not just speed—it’s accuracy + efficiency.
🛠️ Do this instead: Start with accuracy.
Before introducing any form of timing, make sure students can perform the skill correctly and consistently in untimed conditions. Use clear modelling, worked examples, and guided practice to build that foundation.
*Focusing on fluency doesn’t mean that we neglect conceptual understanding. We need both.
✅ 4. Small Group Work
❌ The Mistake: Using small groups because the teacher needs time with targeted groups or to place students in fixed-groups.
Small group work is often seen as a go-to classroom structure: it's visible, it feels differentiated, and it frees up the teacher to work with a few students at a time.
But here's where it goes wrong:
When students are placed in fixed groups based on perceived ability, or when groups are used to rotate through tasks that lack purpose or clarity, small group work becomes little more than busy work. There’s little learning—just movement.
The structure is there, but the substance is missing.
Students in “independent” groups often end up:
Practising misconceptions without feedback
Completing low-value tasks that don’t reinforce core content
Becoming disengaged or off-task because they don’t know why they’re doing the work
And those in the teacher group?
If the activity isn’t targeted, explicit and responsive to their current learning need, that time isn’t much more effective either.
Worse, fixed groupings send an implicit message: "This is your level." That can entrench low expectations—for students and teachers.
🛠️ Do this instead: Make small groups purposeful, flexible, and responsive.
Here’s how:
🎯 1. Start with a clear instructional goal
Every group should exist for a reason linked to current student need.
Ask:
What do these students need more time or support with that they didn’t fully grasp in whole-class instruction?
🔁 2. Keep groupings flexible
Group by need, not label. Regroup frequently. Use data from formative assessment, exit slips, or observation. This avoids tracking and gives every student access to targeted teaching.
🔍 3. Plan meaningful, independent tasks
For groups working away from the teacher, tasks should reinforce what’s already been taught—not introduce new content.
If students haven’t been explicitly taught how to do it, it’s not independent work—it’s guesswork.
👩🏫 4. Maximise teacher-group time
When working with students directly, focus on:
Clarifying misconceptions
Providing guided practice with immediate feedback
Modelling the next step in their learning
Checking in on individual understanding
This is the true advantage of small group work—intimate, precise, and responsive. However, only do group work when the goal can’t be achieved through whole-class instruction.
🧭 Final Thought: Strategy Isn’t the Problem—Timing Is
Each of these practices—checking for understanding, using problem-solving tasks, building fluency and grouping students—can be powerful. But power depends on timing.
When strategies are applied without regard for where students are in their learning, we risk confusing effort with effectiveness.
It’s not about doing more, faster. It’s about doing the right thing at the right time, for the right reason.
When something flops in the classroom (and it will), ask yourself:
Was this the wrong tool—or did I just use it without the right foundations?
Did I match the approach to what my students actually needed?
It’s not about having all the tools—it’s about using them with purpose, not just habit.
In the next post, we’ll look at four more strategies that often go off track—not because they’re bad, but because of how they’re used.
Decodable texts, corrective feedback, slides and visuals, and adapting instruction—all powerful tools, but only when matched with purpose and timing.
🎯 Struggling to know whether to model again or move on?
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