Gerald Ajam

“Best practice transfers across contexts”

A practice travels when the conditions that made it work travel with it.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All counterpositionsImplementation

Usually said

“Best practice transfers across contexts”

The shift

From: It worked there

To: Why did it work, and is that here?

More precisely

A practice transfers when its mechanism is understood and the conditions it depends on are present, or rebuilt, in the new setting.

In short

Some practices work almost everywhere, and reinventing them wastes time. Others worked because of something local that nobody wrote down. Copying the visible routine without that support copies the shape and loses the effect. The precise version asks why it worked, and whether that reason exists here.

The argument

From the claim to a better one

  1. The strongest formulation

    Some practices work across a wide range of settings, and reinventing them locally wastes time. Retrieval practice and worked examples for novices are not culturally specific.

  2. Why it is attractive

    It saves the cost of working things out. It also carries authority: it worked there, so resisting it here looks like stubbornness.

  3. Where it holds

    It holds for practices whose mechanism is well understood and robust, where the new setting shares the conditions that mechanism depends on.

    Where it breaks

    It breaks when the practice was carried by something local: a leader, a timetable, a staff culture, a particular group of learners. Copying the visible routine without those supports reproduces the form and loses the effect.

  4. What evidence matters

    Cartwright and Hardie (2012) on why "it worked there" is not evidence that it will work here without knowing the support factors. Bryk et al. (2015) reframe the question as what works, for whom, under what conditions. Brown and Duguid on practice as situated in the communities that do it. What matters is the mechanism, and whether its conditions hold here.

  5. So, more precisely

    A practice transfers when its mechanism is understood and the conditions it depends on are present, or rebuilt, in the new setting.

Reading it

The precise version, word by word

A practice transfers when its mechanism1 is understood and the conditions it depends on2 are present, or rebuilt3, in the new setting.

  1. Mechanism

    The reason the practice produces its effect. Retrieval practice works because recalling something strengthens the memory of it, which holds for most learners in most places.

  2. The conditions it depends on

    The support factors the mechanism needs: time in the timetable, a skilled leader, learners with enough prior knowledge, a habit of observing each other’s lessons.

  3. Present, or rebuilt

    If a condition is missing, the choice is to build it first, or to adapt the practice so it no longer needs it.

What it changes in practice

  • When adopting a practice, write down its mechanism and the conditions it relied on where it came from.
  • Check each of those conditions locally before launch.
  • Ask the original site what else was going on at the time.

A case, in general terms

A department copies another school’s successful weekly meeting on student data. The format transfers perfectly and achieves nothing, because the original school also had a timetable that freed staff to act on what they found. The meeting was the visible part. The free time was what made it work.

Singapore