Connecting educational research and practice
In recent years the call for teachers to become more evidence informed has grown in strength in an attempt to improve school standards and develop a 21st Century workforce equipped with the complex skills to meet the needs of a developing knowledge society.
“Teaching is the knowledge profession and teachers are – and should be – the developers and mobilisers of knowledge” (Harris et al 2017).
There has been a growing international impetus calling for better connections between educational research and practice. (Brown, Schildkamp, Hubers 2017, Coldwell et al 2017) arising from the belief that increased teacher use of research can lead to improvements in teaching and subsequently learning (Goldacre 2013; Rose et al 2017). Alongside this, raising the professionalism of teachers is a hot topic, with the newly formed Chartered College of Teaching in England suggesting that teacher engagement with research is a hallmark of an effective profession. With this in mind, knowledge can be empowering, the moral duty of teachers (Mujis 2018) and socially beneficial (Brown and Rogers 2015).
The idea of better connections between research and practice is not new (Levin 2013). The role of research has been a prominent feature of debate in education in England for the last 50 years; dating back to Lawrence Stenhouse, in the 1970’s and 80’s, who promoted teachers active involvement in research and curriculum development (Mills and Saunders 2019 forthcoming). In recent years the use of research to make the best decisions to inform and improve practice has been regarded as a key driver for school improvement.
Often cited as the evidence-based and latterly the evidence -informed debate, research use has concerned researchers, policy makers and practitioners globally, as they seek to come up with an agreed definition of these terms. There has been much debate about what it means to be evidence based or evidence informed, and despite no definitive terminology this detracts from a far larger and more complex issue; the notion of how to make teachers involvement with research evidence a reality, what type of research might facilitate this, under what conditions this might best take place and how teachers might engage with research at scale. To put it simply, it is about how teachers use, engage and adopt research evidence as professionals, how this knowledge is used and shared and any subsequent impact this might have on pupil outcomes.
Evidence Informed Practice
Evidence Informed Practice (EIP) is an approach that many schools started to adopt to manage the challenges of school improvement. Some suggest that this was given particular momentum as school budgets were cut to manage the global financial crisis (Brown et al 2017; Greany 2015). England’s Department for Education (DfE), define evidence-informed practice as: “ a combination of practitioner expertise and knowledge of the best external research, and evaluation based evidence” (www.education.gov.uk, 2014). This reflects a shift from top down evidence based policies to the development of evidence informed ‘bottom up’ approaches. Rather than being based on research, this entails teachers’ practice being informed by it, coupled with an increased requirement for teachers to engage with and to use research evidence to improve their practice (Cain 2015, Greany 2015).