LAVISH praise for students is among popular teaching practices not supported by evidence, according to a new report which reviews research on how to develop great teachers.

What Makes Great Teaching, by Professor Rob Coe and colleagues at Durham University, warns that many common practices can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research.

Examples include using praise lavishly, allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves and by grouping students by ability.

On the other hand, some other teaching approaches are supported by good evidence of their effectiveness.

Examples include: challenging students to identify the reason why an activity is taking place in the lesson; asking a large number of questions and checking the responses of all students; spacing-out study or practice on a given topic, with gaps in between for forgetting; and making students take tests or generate answers, even before they have been taught the material.

Previous Sutton Trust research shows that the quality of teaching is by far the biggest factor that impacts on the achievement of children from poorer backgrounds. It found that over a school year, poorer pupils gain 1.5 years’ worth of learning with very effective teachers, compared with 0.5 years with poorly performing teachers.

The two factors with the strongest evidence in improving student outcomes are content knowledge and quality of instruction. Teachers with a strong understanding of their subject have a greater impact on students’ learning.

Good quality instruction includes effective questioning and the use of assessment by teachers.

Professor Coe said: “Great teaching cannot be achieved by following a recipe, but there are some clear pointers in the research to approaches that are most likely to be effective, and to others, sometimes quite popular, that are not.”