Teachers and Research

I remember reading something by Lucie Golton about the reason behind her teaching toolkit booklet. She scoured the books looking for the magic bullet and ended up compiling a long list for her own pedagogy strategy booklet. (Unfortunately I can't find a link to it at the moment).

I also spent may career looking for the magic bullet. I like concept cartoons, I love key word card sorts, I like using true/false worksheets and my favourite way to help students learn is by getting them to draw graphs. I have taught CASE, I have taught the Upd8 segue course (http://www.upd8.org.uk/wikid-tick.php), I have taught bonkers courses designed to fit into the timetable more than based on sound pedagogy. I came into teaching during the time of the strategies. I have read books, I have taken advice from ASTs, I have used ideas shared by fellow teachers and I have worked with consultants. In all that time I haven't been able to work out if I am doing the right thing.

Now it seems that we have been doing the wrong things as a profession. If the whole profession has been doing the wrong things then I must have be too.

To solve this teachers need to interact directly with the research.

1. Really?
2. How?

I went to Tim Oates session at the ASE conference about the future of internal assessment in science. I got the gist, don't get me wrong, but as Robin Millar was nodding to the things Tim Oates was saying I was pulling faces in a desperate attempt to understand. The language Tim Oates was using was completely foreign to me, it was specialist.

I can appreciate the need for specific specialist language in education research. I am a scientist, I use specialist terms all the time, and I spend a good proportion of my time trying to get my students to use the language precisely too. The difference seems to me that in educational research there is no common language, like in science.

If I am to interact with research first hand then do I need to learn specialist terminology?

I went to Michael Reiss's session the year before and he said that Piaget style curricula were very effective at promoting learning. (Or something like that, but I did understand what he was saying!) I said this on another teacher's blog in a comment and was shot down because we shouldn't listen to anything we are told, we have to find out for ourselves as respected education researchers can't be trusted.

Do I have to interact directly with the research? Is it enough to interact with the researchers? After reading "Teacher Proof", maybe not is the answer. Someone has to look at the original research because there are some people out there not doing a very god job at carrying out their research and there are others who are simply fibbing as it suits them. Confirmation bias is a big issue in education it seems.

I am going to be honest here, I don't trust other teachers to carry out research (sorry as if you are reading this you are likely to be a teacher). I have seen data for masters projects (and action inquiries) made up. I have seen a school sell ideas to other schools saying it made a difference when there was no causal relationship between the two and months later that school scrapped the curriculum. It makes sense for schools and teachers to be positive about the changes they make. Why make them if they are not going to make a difference to their students?

I am not the only one who felt this. At the ASE January conference I went to a session host by Wellcome and the SLC that was a debate. One of the questions was about research. On our table the SLC employee was determined that the action research she supports through the SLC was valid, I was on the opposite side of that. Another group also mentioned their dubious feelings about research carried out by teachers, although perhaps not so negatively as me!

Perhaps unscrupulous research is just something we have to cope with?

Or perhaps it is enough to interact with the researchers?

I am fortunate in my position to get journals through the post. School Science Review, Physics Education and Science in School.  I am fortunate that my head teacher will allow me to attend ASE conferences. I know some excellent university based educators and researchers. They are very generous with their time. They are happy to share what they know.

I have said this before, Stella Paes said at the ASE summer conference that the UK has world leading expertise in science education. (Granted she may have been talking about assessment of science education as that is what she needs to know about).

Is interacting with researchers through journals and conferences how I should interact with research? What if they are wrong? During my PGCE we were encouraged to look at VAK, it was presented as if it was a good way to differentiate. Should I be put off by this? Trust no one? Or do I have to interact with the research directly? Back to square one.

I do know that there is appetite within the profession to work out what works in the classroom. There are a number of issues with it. Expecting to find something new that will be the magic bullet . Finding the balance between private organisations who have an interest in selling CPD related to research is another. Implementing the pedagogy as the research intended isn't always easy, either.

However, as a profession we have to know that what we are doing and how we are doing it is the best way to get across ideas to young people. Without research and analysis we'll never know. Teaching and research are linked. What that link should look like in practice? Well, it probably needs to be researched.

Research Ed - what I found out

I didn't take many notes yesterday. It is quite hard to take notes and listen, however I will try and recap what I remember and therefore what I take away with me.

John Henry Catholic College looks like a really nice building. Modern, nice corridor spaces and not vast as some West Midlands schools are (the one I worked in was 1400 and only 11-16). The head Jennifer McGuirk welcomed us and I was quietly impressed with what she had to say about the journey of the school. Tom Bennet then made us laugh and implied there was more to come in the Research Ed agenda before sending us off for the day.

I went to see Daisy Christodoulou talk about the "key principles teachers should apply in the classroom". I get the impression memory was a key point in a few talks given during the day (it was certainly in two of the ones I went to) and it took up a good portion of the talk Daisy gave. She started by talking about big data and saying something along the lines of looking at data isn't enough without understanding the underlying theory, and without the theory it is hard to translate into practice. As an avid reader of Glen Gilcrist's blog I would agree that correlation does not mean causation. 

Daisy went on to talk about AfL as an example of something that has struggled to show the impact that research would indicate. She said that there was problems with both the research and implementation. As someone who has been to a session run by Chris Harrison and Sally Howard on AfL I know that she is not the only one who is concerned about the implementation of AfL. 

Then Daisy talked about E.D Hirsch and his principles for good understanding. There were 7 of them. She then did an exercise with us to prove that having our knowledge in our long term memory made things easier to remember. 

I did write down her principles for teaching:
1. Avoid working memory overload
2. Promote long term memory storage
3. Practice to achieve mastery (fluency)

I went in expecting to find out something I didn't know. Although the language was more theoretical than I am used to. I was relieved that I agree with a lot of what Daisy had to say. Not teaching too many new things at once and practising them isn't new to me. 

For the next session I want to the DfE talk about "research priorities: what are the key gaps and questions in education". There was some positivity at the start of the session that the DfE wanted to engage with their own research questions. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/research-priorities-for-education-and-childrens-services The details are here on line. 

We were asked to look at a selection of the research questions and make our own comments about them on post-it notes onto the flip chart boards. I really felt that I couldn't add a lot. In some ways because I feel that the things I could contribute are obvious and I don't have a great deal of expertise to add in a lot of the areas. However, this didn't stop me putting a few post-its onto the boards.

I think that it is important that the DfE use research to help them with policy decisions. However, at the end during a Q&A session concerns were raised about the bias of any research carried out by the DfE. Are the questions being asked genuinely the right ones or are they too politically motivated? However, the DfE are asking for feedback on this and seem to want to engage with teachers. In a way they have to come to terms with this shift as they have scrapped many of the quangos that ran education and LAs are becoming a thing of the past. However, this session didn't do anything to persuade me that the DfE are doing anything other than scrabbling around in the dark taking advice from the wrong place. 

I stayed in the theatre for the next presentation by Louise Stubberfield from Wellcome. I has seen her earlier in the day and wondered why I recognised her, when she was from Wellcome I realised that I will have seen her at the ASE conference. 

She talked about the work Wellcome had been doing with the science learning centres to help with the teaching of primary science.  I know that Wellcome put a lot of money into science education and it was heartening to see that this project had been carried out robustly. It was interesting to hear that those schools not allowed access to the science learning centres courses in order to be the 'control' group were then given access the year after the research programme. I have heard people who talk about RTCs say that it is unfair to restrict schools and their students access to things that might help improve education, but this seems to be a fair compromise to me. 

I was also interested in the comments Louise made about museums and the research they do into the impact of what they do. They measure impact by the number of visitors and not necessarily by the influence it has on the people who visit. 

In January I went to a session at the ASE conference with drinks paid for by Wellcome and also hosted by Science Learning Centres. I can see that Wellcome are interacting with the profession (although not always practising teachers). What was interesting in the ASE session about research was that only three of the attendees were practising teachers. 

I have heard it before, but Louise stated during the talk that those schools who Wellcome have worked with and have not sidelined science to focus on english and maths have had improvements in all three subjects. 

Then it was lunch.

After lunch I went to David Weston's session about "why most dissemination is useless and how we can fix it". I was assaulted again by slides about memory for the first part of the talk. I am not entirely sure why. 

I have to agree with David's assessment of the impact of CPD. I have worked with the science learning centres on a CPD model (when I say 'worked with', I mean I was a 'guinea pig for'). During that time we talked about what made CPD effective and the traditional model of go on a course, come back and share the slides in a meeting isn't it. 

He talked about the inability of CPD to breakdown the current (ineffective?) practices of teachers and replace it with new associations. We don't unlearn the things we do.

David told us the worst ways of transforming practice through CPD are the ways that we use: whole staff lectures, individual day courses and printed guidance.

He asked why is it that the profession most associated with learning is the worst at engaging with it? I still don't understand that.

David then went on to talk about things that do work. Things like lesson study, collaboration with other colleagues, coaching, carefully scripted teacher actions, forms of action research and masters level study. He showed two slides with a list of theoretical principles for good CPD, like evaluating it, it being sustained, aspirational, lead by good leaders, challenging.

David ended with this slide. "Start with the end in mind". Something I hear a lot in education!

Session six was the hardest for me to choose because nothing struck me. I am glad that I went to Joe Hallgarten's session: "if you can't stand the research get out of the classroom?" RSA and BERA are about to publish 10 principles for a 'research-rich, self-improving education systems' and Joe went through the process that lead to these. 

The principles are split into teaching and learning, teachers' practice, school leadership, system-level and research production. 

This session, above all others was of interest to me because I think it got to the crux of the purpose of ResearchEd. Teachers should be engaging with research and researchers should be engaging with teachers. But I do believe there are barrier to this: money, time, expertise, research literacy, bias and the famous SLT mangle. 

I intend to blog again about the issues that spring to mind on the back of this session by Joe, and where I see own practice with respect to research, how I have interacted with it and how I want to interact with it. 

The last session was presented by Michael Slavinsky and Alex Weatherall and started with us all getting a sweet. So far so good. They picked up one of the touch paper questions set by Laura McInerny at the first Research Ed conference. The list is below.

I wish that I had taken a photograph of the axes that Alex and Michael showed to highlight the way they distinguished between difficulty and complexity. It was interesting that they didn't consider the two as the same. On going into the session I has hoped that I would find out something that would help me to understand how we would structure a curriculum with increasing difficulty, but the work these two are doing is more centred on complexity. 

In order to map complexity Alex plans to create concept maps for all the topics in the curriculum, and this would help teaching and help map complexity. http://www.teachmyconcept.net I am interested to see how this goes, happy to help but I am aware of the demands on my time. 

I very much enjoyed the day. Joe's session gave me most to think about and I have come away feeling that the profession can work with researchers more effectively. And that there is a great deal of desire to do that from researchers too. 

Research and Education - from the point of view of a slightly rubbish teacher

Thanks to Mary Whitehouse I was able to go to the first Research Ed conference in September, and due to some encouragement from @Arakwai I have just come back from the regional event in Birmingham.

As a classroom teacher I haven't been able to take anything from the conferences that I can use in the classroom. So why go? And why go a second time if I didn't think that the first time was relevant to me?

I am curious about the link between research and education. To me there seems to be lot of information out there for teachers to use to help them teach better/differently, but is any of it any good? There are a lot of books by teachers, for teachers, but are any of them based on evidence or just anecdote? Does it matter?

After Brain Gym (which I never did in my own classroom) and Learning Styles (which I was always sceptical of) I am never entirely sure if I can trust anything that comes my way. I wonder to myself what good research looks like and how I can find it. I wonder if through the research Ed conferences  I might come across teaching methods that will help me and my students.

On top of being sceptical about research, I also find it unapproachable. "Direct Instruction" is the latest twitter/blogger buzz phrase. Those that use it seem to know what it means, I am not so sure I do. "Progressive Education", "Constructivist", "Meta-Cognition", etc etc. I saw Tim Oates talk about assessment at the ASE conference, I understood very little of what he said, only those used to the academic talk of assessment were able to follow him. As a scientists I understand the necessity of using technical language that describes exactly what you mean, however the in-context interpretation of the uninitiated could lead to misinterpretation.

I was interested in the session by Joe Hallgarten, who was looking at the relationship between teachers and research. Some of the guiding principles for resarch-rich, self-improvng education systems he showed us were that teaching should be informed by the latest research and teachers should be research literate. I agree with all of this, but how do I get 'research literate'? I can't understand the language, I don't know where to look to find reliable research and what if I don't like what I read or can't change my practice enough to take it on board anyway?

I am always wary of research; I have seen some practices that I would consider to be dubious when teachers have been involved in their masters projects. I have carried out deliberate changes to my practice as a result of some external CPD, and I am not sure if what I did had any impact.

I wonder if Research Ed can help with any of this? How can a teacher carry out a research project in their own school? How can teachers get access to sound research? If they do some research, how do they share it? How do we ask for funding to carry out research? How do we motivate ourselves to continue with changes in practice? What research is going on at the moment into teaching and learning and what can we learn from it?

Then again, I think that showing researchers that teachers are interested in what they are doing can only be positive. That having teachers feeling that they should, and in some cases must, engage with research can only be a good thing. That having the DfE engaged could help to move our 'profession' forward. I also got the impression that the word stills needs to be spread that it is important those who work in schools become engaged with research and Research Ed can only help to do that as word spreads.

I don't have an intention to go to Research Ed in September, I will hopefully be newly married and should spend some time with the husband. I will also have done ASE conference, two teachmeets, pedagoo south west, York tweet up, Wellington Festival of Education and ASE west conference as well as Research Ed Midlands and I think that is all I can spare.

In the mean time, I will take my research distilled by the School Science Review Journal, and by books like 'Good Practice in Science Teaching, what research has to say', 'Making Sense of Secondary Science', 'Evidence based teaching'. And luckily for me I have access to people who can help me understand the implementation of the ideas in these books too.

Thanks to Tom, Helene and the staff of John Henry Newman Catholic College for Research Ed Midlands. All of it was interesting and nothing I experienced was not worth it. A very positive day.