In the current educational discourse, modesty is a forgotten virtue. We are inundated with calls for innovation, rigour, and evidence-based practice, yet we rarely hear a plea for the one thing that should underpin them all: a healthy sense of our own limitations. By epistemological modesty, I mean the unfashionable idea that we should not be more confident in our educational claims than our knowledge actually allows. It is the recognition that what we know about human learning is partial, provisional, and highly contingent.
This isn’t an anti-intellectual argument against research or theory. Rather, it is an argument against the quiet slide or that subtle transition from, this appears to work under certain conditions, to this is how learning works, period. In a field as complex and inherently human as education, that slide happens far more easily than we care to admit, often fuelled by a desire for the kind of silver bullet certainty that makes for good policy but poor practice.
In many disciplines, reality has a way of enforcing modesty. If an engineer ignores the laws of physics, the bridge collapses. If a surgeon operates based on a hunch rather than anatomy, the patient dies. In these fields, feedback is immediate, visceral, and unforgiving. The splat factor keeps arrogance in check because the consequences of overconfidence are undeniable.
Education, however, lacks these immediate guardrails. Our feedback loops are slow, diffuse, and deeply entangled with a student’s biography, their culture, and their home life. If a pedagogical theory is flawed, the failure is rarely spectacular; instead, it is quietly absorbed by the students or blamed on poor implementation by the staff. Because there is no immediate collapse, the temptation toward certainty becomes much stronger and far less likely to be punished by the system.
We have become obsessed with the phrase what works. It carries an intuitive appeal, promising a shortcut through the messiness of the classroom. But its apparent clarity masks a significant epistemic problem. Works for whom? In what specific context? Over what timeframe? And crucially, at what cost to other forms of learning?
Too often, we treat these questions as secondary noise rather than the central signal. Epistemological modesty would require us to place these variables at the heart of our claims, even when they complicate the clean, causal narratives that departments and thought leaders crave. Within educational research, we see this played out when limitations sections acknowledge complexity, while the executive summaries quietly flatten it. We note variability, then average it away until the unique human being in the front row becomes nothing more than a data point on a bell curve.
A Case Study in Orthodoxy: Explicit Instruction
The current enthusiasm for Explicit Instruction (EI) (see last post for more) provides a perfect case study in how modesty disappears. To be clear, the evidence is substantial; EI is a powerhouse for novice learners and well-defined content. But the issue arises when EI is elevated from a useful tool in the kit to a mandatory orthodoxy. When it is positioned not just as a method, but as a all-encompassing truth that renders all other pedagogies obsolete, we have moved beyond science and into the realm of the secular religion.
From the standpoint of epistemological modesty, these assumptions should make us uneasy. This absolute pursuit signals a form of intellectual closure. It assumes we now know enough about the human brain to justify narrowing teachers’ pedagogical options to a single frequency. Such definitiveness rests on the arrogant assumption that uncertainty is a defect to be purged through fidelity, rather than a permanent condition of working with human beings. It treats the classroom like a laboratory where adaptation is viewed as contamination, rather than the heartbeat of expert practice.
What is at stake here is more than just a debate over teaching methods; it is a matter of professional ethics. Epistemological modesty is not indecision, nor is it a post-modern retreat into relativism. It does not require us to treat a TikTok learning style video as equal to a meta-analysis. Rather, it demands proportionality: that the volume of our claims doesn’t exceed the strength of our evidence.
When we lose this modesty, we don’t just lose our intellectual integrity; we lose the teacher. We begin to recast teacher intuition as deviation and professional expertise as non-compliance. We build pedagogical monocultures that are as fragile as they are arrogant. It turns an educator into a battlefield medic who is forbidden from stopping the bleeding because the manual didn’t authorize the bandage.
The most dangerous person in a school isn’t the teacher who doesn’t know, it’s the one with a hundred percent certainty. These are the architects of the pendulum swings that have exhausted our profession for decades. They leave a trail of discarded silver bullets in their wake while the rest of us explain the mess to parents and stakeholders.
The most radical thing you can say in education is not this works. That is the language of programs and consultants. The honest version is simpler. You look at the evidence, you look at the thirty actual humans in the class, and you admit the truth: this holds up often, in these conditions, for these kids, right now. Because classrooms are not laboratories. They are not controlled environments with neat variables and compliant participants. The variables have names. They have bad mornings, interrupted sleep, learning gaps, anxiety, hunger, bravado, silence. So yes, I will use the strategy. I will respect the research. I will plan like a professional. But I am not going to outsource my judgment to a study or let a student become collateral damage in someone else’s certainty.
This posture won’t get you a book deal or a keynote slot at a EdPsych conference. It is a quiet, difficult virtue. It requires us to admit that despite all our data and all our rigour, the act of teaching remains a stubbornly beautiful and frustratingly opaque mystery. In a field defined by uncertainty, modesty is our only shield against becoming the very snake oil salespeople we claim to despise. It’s time to say enough with the neat narratives and the instructional purity. We are not technicians operating a machine; we are in the middle of a human mess that ignores our tidy little theories. If you’re a hundred percent certain your method is the only way, you’ve stopped being an educator and started being the problem. In a field shaped by uncertainty, epistemological modesty is not a weakness. It is a professional and scholarly virtue.
Maximising Student Potential 