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.