Bringing teachers and research closer together:
the GTC's 'Research of the Month'
Philippa Cordingley
Director
Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education
Lesley Saunders
Policy Adviser for Research
General Teaching Council for England
Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, University of Exeter, England, 12-14 September, 2002
Presentation at BERA Annual Conference, University of Exeter, Thursday 12th September (Session 3, 15.30-17.00)
INTRODUCTION: Lesley
How, and why, did the General Teaching Council come to embark on producing what sounds like a pretty ambitious website feature on research when the GTC itself was only three months old? As an idea, it was born in a taxi: it is the abiding passion of Carol Adams, the GTC’s Chief Executive, that one of the core purposes of the GTC is to produce things that are practically useful for teachers. As we made our way across London one afternoon to yet another meeting at the DfES, Carol turned to me and said, ‘What we really need is a ‘best research study of the week’ for teachers, to help them navigate their way through the mountains of research that gets published’… ‘Ye-ees’, I said, agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment but doubting how we could possibly do this in a way that would:
· decide which topics/themes to focus on;
· establish clear, sensible and defensible criteria for the selection of the studies;
· present the research findings in an appealing and accessible way which did not compRomise the complexity and inconclusiveness of much research;
· turn the notion of ‘dissemination of research’ on its head, into one of ‘engagement with’ research.
So then of course it became my task – which has turned into a hugely exciting dimension of my work – to help to turn the idea into a manageable reality; though this would not have been possible without the support and creative input of colleagues in the website team.
What’s really important to understand is that the context for Research of the Month is actually not the research per se, but teachers’ professional learning and development to support and improve their professional practice.
I’ll spell that out a little more clearly. Professional practice needs to be constructed around interrogation and structured reflection, and the continuous learning that derives from that. So professional practice encompasses not just the application, but also the construction and rigorous exploration, of knowledge in different contexts. The GTC is pRomoting teachers’ engagement in and with research – individually and collectively – as part of the entitlement to a wide variety of types and contexts of professional learning to which all teachers should have access. The GTC has recently consulted on a draft Professional Learning Framework, which tries to encapsulate what this means for professional development. The main sections of the Framework cover:
· Evidence-led pedagogy
· Teachers learning from each other
· Teachers participating in/contributing to broader professional community
· Teachers leading on developing/innovating practice
· Teachers informing policy and R & D nationally
For the GTC, research activity comprises hypothesis-testing, concept-building, critical analysis and appraisal, evaluation, synthesis, as well as the gathering of empirical evidence within an explicit ethical framework. One of the jobs of research is to provide an intellectual underpinning for professional standards.
Despite all the talk of teaching being, or becoming, an evidence-based or research-informed profession, however, no-one can be under the illusion that this is easy – least of all teachers. If we are talking about using research which other people have conducted, then questions of the timeliness, relevance, accessibility and quality of research are more acute than ever, as the pressure to be demonstrably acquainted with ‘the evidence base’ grows. Oliver et al. (2001, pp 157-61) argue that practitioners need, but find it hard to get:
· access to relevant and appropriate research;
· skills to judge whether the research is reliable and applicable to current local needs;
· research training when/where they need it, particularly in appraisal techniques.
Cordingley (2001) found that teachers consulted by the Teacher Training Agency most value research evidence when it:
· is collected through genuine partnership between teachers and researchers;
· is collected in authentic classroom contexts;
· derives from rigorous, transparent research methods and is realistically calibrated
· is communicated through vivid and detailed classroom case studies;
· is related to improving aspects of teaching and learning that are relevant to them.
A review of the impact of research in education undertaken in Australia (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs [DETYA], 2000) found that ‘teachers seek out the sources they believe will inform their existing knowledge base and… this is a very individual process.’ An obvious reason why it is an ‘individual’ process is because teachers do not want research findings in some sort of abstract, general way – they want to be able to get and use the right knowledge in the right form at the right time.
Furthermore, the argument that educational research should be done by and with schools and practitioners, rather than to them, has by and large been persuasive: what is happening now is the creation of dynamic, workable models and local/regional efforts to sustain and record a diversity of practice (see, for example, McNamara, 2002). Teachers are becoming increasingly hungry for research, as all the activity in local networks like Cantarnet (supported by Canterbury Christ Church University College) and FLARE (Essex LEA’s Forum for Learning and Research Enquiry) so vividly demonstrate. [Other examples?]
What is new – and potentially very exciting – is the technology which can assist with bringing the processes and outcomes of research closer to teachers’ working lives, and with moving teachers’ professional perspectives closer to the heart of educational research. In this context, the significance of the internet is not so much the distribution of information as the potential for presenting that information in a non-linear way (so that readers can access the bits that interest them in the order they choose) and for making the content and ideas permeable to professional interaction (see, for example, Flecknoe, 2002). The GTC’s Research of the Month is tapping into and developing this potential.
TURNING THE VISION INTO A WEBSITE REALITY: Philippa
Like everyone who has ever written a book or research report I have struggled with the frustration of wanting everyone to know all that I had to offer at once. I have wrestled too with the impossibility of deciding what constitutes the beginning of a research ‘study’ – because it is clear to me that the proper beginning could only ever be what was in the mind of the research user. When the GTC approached the Centre for the use of Research and Evidence (CUREE) about populating a Research of the Month feature on the web site I thought I could see a way of tackling these long standing frustrations about research communication by increasing user-oriented investment in communicating research so that it has more chance of meeting users’ individual needs.
Perhaps a web site conceived from the start from a users’ perspective and providing, as it did, real scope for interactivity and non linear analysis would prove a break through.
As a commissioner of research for the TTA and as detailed commentator upon and editor of research reports from teachers and from academics for the TTA and for journals, I had been aware of readers’ need for ‘the story of the findings rather than the story of the project’. I was aware of the problems researchers had in doing this. As a researcher and author I had first hand experience of how the first writing of research is more an exercise in logic – (‘does my analysis stand up to the linear discipline of prose?’) than in communication. Could CUREE harness and integrate non linearity and provisionality of the Internet, the power of high quality and large scale research and the authenticity of teachers’ own case study research? The answer to this question lies in the hands of the users of the web site. So far the feedback suggests that something useful and new is being achieved.
The next section of this paper sets out some of the theory and analysis underpinning the development of the Research of the Month resource. Before proceeding however, I would like to offer one caveat. No-one at GTC or in CUREE sees RoM as a finished product. Each research report we tackle throws up new challenges. Twenty/twenty hindsight enables us to see also how we can improve on our early efforts. Furthermore, we can see how the method can be further enhanced over time and with greater resources including, for example, a database of teacher case studies. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, formative rather than summative. We are seeking views, ideas and feedback in order that this experimental approach can continue to develop.
A QUESTION OF PEDAGOGY? Philippa
CUREE is a centre for the use of research and evidence and our focus is on understanding and facilitating such use. The central concept on which all of CUREE’s work is built is that use of research in teaching is in itself a pedagogical process. The research content forms, as it were, the curriculum. It must be brought to life and put to work by learners (in this case teachers) and, as with school students, it is teacher learners who have to do the learning. The question then becomes what is the ‘teacher’ role for teachers’ uses of research and who provides it? Teacher research users, like school students, can no doubt learn unaided – but slowly. As Vygotsky points out, learning is at its deepest in the ‘zone of proximal development’ – in the area beyond what a student can achieve alone. To pursue this analogy, the Research of the Month website attempts to provide part of the ‘scaffolding’ needed by teacher practitioners who wish to access and interpret research and adapt its lessons to meet their own and their learners needs.
Most of the scaffolding is in essence very simple (though not so simple to achieve). It involves:
· identifying high quality studies that tackle problems identified by teachers;
· enabling readers to follow the material by building on their own knowledge and usefulness and by developing a conceptual map of the material in the study so that the key ideas can be connected electronically and explored in the direction that each user chooses;
· identifying questions users might want to ask and that the research has the capacity to answer, then organising the material so that it answers these questions;
· identifying teacher case studies that illustrate major findings to show what abstract, theoretical or statistical insights look like in the flesh;
· providing links to the original research report, to other research and to further reading so that once reader users have found their way round the RoM they are able to access, critique and interpret an appropriate range of evidence and materials.
Finding and Appraising Appropriate Studies
The very process of turning a research report inside out for web presentation involves a challenging analysis, just as writing research reports is itself a form of analysis. Not every study lends itself to this level of scrutiny – nor is this the intention of every research project.
Finding studies with enough information and material to support this process which are of high quality and also likely to address the concerns of teachers and be accessible to them is not always as easy as it might seem at a glance. Certainly we need to work with full research reports rather than a series of papers on different aspects of a study. Although gaining access to research via research journals helps to pin point potential material, journal articles never contain enough detail and we are having significant difficulties in obtaining comprehensive reports to back up such articles. Sometimes back up material is only available in the form of working notes or raw data. We wonder whether the pressures to write up research serially and pressures on funding mean that some projects are never distilled comprehensively and in an integrated way?
Our principal tool in deciding whether studies are likely to make a useful RoM is to work systematically to an appraisal framework. This framework was developed iteratively and tested in partnership with GTC on several studies before being finalised. The framework is attached as Appendix A and is available on the website. Once we have decided to complete an appraisal it is carried out by a single officer although all statistical data are checked out with a specialist advisor, Robert Coe from Durham University. A one side of A4 appraisal summary sheet is completed and sent along with the appraisal sheet to GTC and the summary is published on the website. We work with the The GTC who acts as ‘critical friend’ to this process, raising the kinds of questions thus creating a searching dialogue about methods, data analysis, language, tone, etc., that readers might be concerned about.
The key points to highlight about the appraisal are that although it includes traditional approaches to evaluating research its main orientation is towards usability by teachers and for web presentations. It is also worth noting that studies are classified according to the EPPI Centre criteria. Although we use a scoring system to help CUREE colleagues to cross- moderate their assessments for each section between different studies, the scores are only cumulative within a sample section. Different reports have different strengths and weaknesses for this particular purpose and an overall average score would be meaningless.