Inclusion

How are teachers and school leaders using research?

The push for more and better school-led research to improve practice and children’s learning has never been stronger. But many are skeptical about its value.Tim Cain investigates its current role and reception at the coal face.
Colleagues at meeting

In many countries throughout the world, schools are turning to research in order to improve what they are doing. In England, there have been concerted efforts to push headteachers and teachers to justify what they are doing with reference to research. For example, schools are expected to consult research to justify their use of Pupil Premium money. However, various academics are skeptical about the ‘use’ of research in schools. Among other issues, they fear that research will be chosen for its utilitarian value rather than its quality; that it will be sensationalised and over-simplified, that it will be used inappropriately, perhaps as a management tool to control teaching and learning (e.g. Hammersley 2013; James 2013; Whitty 2013). This has led me to ask, what is actually happening in schools? How are teachers and school leaders using research?

This article describes findings from several research projects in both Primary and Secondary schools. Most of these projects followed roughly the same design:

  • The schools chose an aspect of their practice that they wanted to improve, often something that had been highlighted on their school development plan
  • I sourced, read and selected three or four articles that described good research in the topic. Often, these were literature reviews (summaries of various studies); if no literature reviews were available, I chose single studies. (I sometimes used the EEF’s Toolkit or Hattie’s Visible Learning as a starting point to source articles.)
  • I presented the articles to one of the school’s senior staff and we discussed ways in which they might be disseminated to other staff
  • Volunteer teachers in the school read the articles and worked with them, either individually or collectively, usually over the course of one academic year
  • I interviewed the volunteers who had worked with the research, asking them what they thought of it and how they had used it
  • I analysed the interview data and published articles about my findings (e.g. Cain; 2015b).

This work is continuing, but there are several findings which seem to be consistent across different types of schools. They can be summarised as follows.

Using research is challenging but rewarding 

Using research is hugely challenging. Schools are high-pressured places, teachers have continual calls on their attention, accountability measures are constant and punishing, there is never enough time. The realities of school life are summed up by this teacher:

Our curriculum, right from Year 1, is knowledge-based. The children need to learn this, this and this, and there’s not really room for open-ended things … When I was reading it [the research] I was thinking, ‘If I was home-schooling my child, this is the way I’d do it, this is absolutely fantastic’; but in a classroom where you’re charged with delivering this number of children to these standards, it’s very hard to take it [the research] on and run with it. (Y6 teacher)

Various teachers remarked on what they saw as a gap between the apparently problem-free world of research studies and the everyday reality of school classrooms, where there is always too little time and too much to do. I understood this (I was a classroom teacher for 19 years) and I was always impressed, as I arrived at each school to carry out interviews, to find that almost all the teachers, despite the difficulties, had somehow managed, in the hurly-burly of their professional lives, to read the research, think about it, criticise it intelligently and often adapt their practice in response to it. I suspect that the reason for this was because these teachers were particularly conscientious: they had volunteered for the project and did not want to let me down by opting out. 

In addition, many teachers found the language of the research tough to understand and I think some of the statistical information in some of the articles was genuinely too complex; research reports are written primarily for other researchers, not practitioners! However, by strategically ignoring some of the information they were given, and critically reading the information with a focus on the implications for their practice, the teachers found that their efforts paid off. As one Assistant Principal commented:

I think that staff like, for want of a better word, the intellectualisation of it. That what we’re doing is not simply a craft that you can learn by copying somebody else, but it’s actually quite an intellectual pursuit. And having the chance to think deeply about what we do in the classroom, staff have really appreciated that. (Assistant Principal, Secondary School)

Coupled with this, there was an understanding, expressed by several interviewees, that research is ‘not about gimmicks’. Several had been involved in gimmicks previously, and referred to ideas such as ‘Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic Learning Styles’, and ‘Brain Gym’ as among the gimmicks that had, until recently, influenced thinking in schools. They saw academic research as an essential antidote to such gimmicks. Research was also seen as a necessary complement to experience: some interviewees explained that experienced staff can become stuck in a rut, and research can help to challenge them. As one teacher put it, ‘experience is a valuable thing in teaching but if you have been teaching the same thing for the last ten years what value is that?’  

teacher at desk with digital tablet and colleauges

Research influences what teachers think about

As might be expected, research influenced the content of teachers’ thinking. It did this through some fairly specific means: it provided focuses for inquiry, challenged existing thinking and practice, provided concepts and suggested possible actions. 

Providing focuses
Research provided focuses for the teachers to think about their own practice, in the light of the papers they read. This is important, because, in teaching, many aspects of practice are very closely interwoven: the subject matter that is taught is linked to the whole curriculum; to the teaching resources that the teacher has access to; to the school’s assessment practices; to the particular children with all their various needs and abilities; to the relationships between them; to their classroom behaviour and so on. In practice, it is often difficult to disentangle one aspect from another. However, research papers, with a strong focus on one specific aspect (such as the teaching of spelling or vocabulary or Fundamental British Values, gifted and talented students, etc.) enabled teachers to learn about one thing, whereas other means of learning (e.g. through coaching, mentoring or lesson observations) might involve many different aspects of practice.

Challenging existing thinking and practice
Often the research papers challenged thinking and practice. For example, the published research about teaching spelling had revealed that spelling was more effectively taught when teachers taught the spellings of words alongside their meanings, rather than in isolated spelling lists. Discussing this, the teachers in one school had agreed that their practice was somewhat patchy. Sometimes teachers taught the meanings of words alongside spellings, combining these by looking at the etymology of words. But this wasn’t consistent across the school and sometimes, children were given lists of words to learn as an isolated activity. Additionally, not all teachers taught children to use specific strategies for learning the spellings of new words. The teachers discussed this:

We’ve talked about having maybe five words, introducing them to the children, spending that week working around those words, picking out the tricky parts of those words, which bits make it difficult to spell, talking about the meaning of those words and then giving them to the children to take home, rather than it being a set of ‘cold’ words that the children haven’t interacted with … With the children that we get here, they might not necessarily have those words in their vocabulary. It’s a vocabulary issue as well. (Y3 teacher)

The challenge, as they expressed it, was to ‘make words exciting’ so that children would develop a love of words that would carry into their reading and writing.

Providing concepts
Sometimes research articles helped teachers develop their concepts.  In one of the primary schools I had worked, two teachers had attended a day’s course about Lesson Study, and reported back enthusiastically; consequently, school was about to introduce Lesson Study for the whole staff. This was a major development for the school and not every teacher was happy about it. However, the research papers helped to convince some them of its value:

I misunderstood what Lesson Study was; it [the research] helped me to see that it was a way of examining your teaching, seeing how effective it is. I read that and thought, ‘ok – it’s about teachers reflecting on their own practice and discussing it with a colleague’. That clarified for me, what it was meant to be.

In particular, the research papers helped the teachers to see that, the purpose of observing lessons was not as a tool for performance management as they had originally thought, but a means for focusing on learning as a means to support teacher development. 

Suggesting possibilities for action
New thinking sometimes led to new action. In the Lesson Study project, the teachers agreed to focus their attention on three particular students, chosen at an early stage of the project. They discussed the advantages of predicting, at the planning stage, how these particular students would respond to the lesson, and then comparing their predictions with their observations of what actually happened. In another project, based around gifted and talented children, the teachers realised that more able children tend to finish their work earlier than others and, hence, are given even more work to do. As the research pointed out, this is not necessarily appropriate because, 

… once they’ve got it [i.e. understood it], they’ve got it, they don’t need any more practice in it … what they need is for that time to be filled up with something that is more demanding and then increasingly more demanding. What I’ve been interested in recently is the link between that and higher order questioning. And levels of demand not being, “this question is harder than that one”, but more deep learning into areas of philosophy and so they are beginning to generate their own deeper thinking. (Secondary Science teacher)

Inspired by the research, this teacher created boxes of files containing “ not ‘some quite philosophical articles and higher order questions on laminated sheets`, so that the gifted and talented children would have more interesting activities to do, once they had finished their classwork.

Research influences how teachers think 

What is often missed out of discussions around evidence-informed teaching is that research influences how teachers think, as well as what they think about. This happened in at least three different ways; through engaging with research, the teachers became more willing to experiment, they became more critical of the research, and they developed their understanding of evidence. 

Willing to experiment
Several teachers described how their engagement with research had given them permission to experiment, despite pressures of inspection and observations that encouraged them to be risk-averse. Usually, as one secondary teacher said, ‘you don’t really want to experiment … What if it goes wrong? What if I’m on my own? Am I silly in thinking that this is a good idea?” 

One example of experimentation came from a teacher who was carrying out an action research project about Fundamental British Values. She could see that much of the research was about knowledge of the values, and what was meant by each of the Fundamental British Values, but that knowledge alone was not sufficient:

Some of the observations we made, we could see children could answer a question: ‘What’s respect?’ and they could spiel something off, but could they actually live respectfully? Could they act upon that? 

In order to bring children to a ‘lived experience’ of the Fundamental British Values, the teacher used a dance approach in which the children could express, physically and in relation to each other, the values they were learning. In this way, they moved from learning about values to experiencing these values and understanding them from the inside.

children seated on floor in class with teacher on stool

Being more critical
Engagement with research also prompted the teachers to be critical of the research. A recurrent phrase was ‘I don’t agree with that’, as teachers interrogated claims in the papers that failed to match their own experiences or ways of thinking. In some instances, teachers accurately identified contradictions and flaws in the reasoning within the papers. Sometimes they questioned the research (e.g. querying methods or sampling) and decided that it was not sufficiently robust to inform change. In one instance, in the Gifted and Talented project, a teacher decided that the values of the research were not her values: whereas the research tended to assume that Gifted and Talented students should be ‘stretched’ academically, she believed differently. Her own experiences had taught her that academically clever children could become anxious and even depressed if they were pushed too hard; her involvement with the research gave her a space to take a principled stand against the prevailing ethos.

Understanding evidence better
Perhaps as a consequence of increased criticality, the teachers appeared to develop their means of evaluating their work. In general, the teachers become more aware of what might count as ‘evidence’ (e.g. of improvement). They discussed differences between what they called ‘hard’ evidence (such as test data) and ‘soft’ evidence (such as observation data) and sometimes became more critical of ‘hard’ data, arguing that it needed to be considered alongside ‘soft’ data to be truly informative. To evaluate their own practice, some teachers also canvassed students’ perceptions, either through interviews or surveys. Some were also inspired to carry out action research projects of their own, which led to greater understanding of the complexity of educational situations. 

Conclusions

For many writers on the subject, teachers are expected to use research in order to inform their decision-making. These writers see research as showing, for example, which reading scheme is the most effective in helping children to read. However, it seems that teachers also use research in a different way – to think about their own practice. Particularly when the research comes into discussions with colleagues, it enables teachers to talk about their own practice and how it might be different. In these discussions, research acted as what I have called the ‘third voice’, in conversation with the teacher’s self (the ‘first voice’) and colleagues (the ‘second voice’). When the teachers brought research into the conversation, it allowed them to see their own practice in a different light. This did not always lead to change because, sometimes, the research confirmed the rightness of their existing practice. But even when no practical changes were evident, the research allowed the teachers to think beyond their existing institutions and experience and to consider and re-consider their practice alongside others.

Tim Cain is Professor in Education at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk.

References

  1. Cain, T. (2015a). Teachers' engagement with published research: addressing the knowledge problem. The Curriculum Journal, 26(3), 488-509.
  2. Cain, T. (2015b). Teachers' engagement with research texts: beyond instrumental, conceptual or strategic use. Journal of Education for Teaching, 41(5), 478-492.
  3. Cain, T. (2016). Denial, opposition, rejection or dissent: why do teachers contest research evidence?. Research Papers in Education, 32(5), 611-625.
  4. Hammersley, M. (2013). The myth of research-based policy and practice. London: Sage.
  5. James, M. 2013. New (or not new) directions in evidence-based practice in education. Online: www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Mary-james-New-or-not-new-directions-in-evidence-based-policy.-Response-to-Ben-Goldacre.pdf 
  6. Whitty, G. 2013. Evidence-informed policy and practice - we should welcome it, but also be realistic! Online: https://cerp.aqa.org.uk/perspectives/evidence-informed-policy-practice