Becoming a Research-Informed School

Why? What? How?

Tim Cain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351389884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Becoming a Research-Informed School examines the reasons why teachers and leaders use research to improve their schools, and explores how teachers select, understand and use research to enhance learning experiences in fast-moving classroom environments. It analyses what teachers and school leaders actually do, to use research in their schools, and how they build a research-informed culture.

Based firmly in data from real schools and considering the experiences of over 150 education professionals, it shows how research and evidence can be used to:

• Improve decision-making processes
• Develop schools as intellectual communities
• Address priorities for improvement
• Implement research-informed teaching
• Respond to policy imperative for informed practice
• Guide future research

It considers key topics including Teacher Research, Lesson Study, the use of data to effect improvements, navigating social media and blogs, and how to overcome common obstacles to research use in schools.

Becoming a Research-Informed School is full of rich, detailed examples of research and research utilisation. It is an indispensable resource for teachers and leaders who wish to take an informed approach to creating a professional learning community.

Part I

Why?

1 Can research improve schools?

Tim Cain

In 2013, the Secretary of State for education in England did something pretty extraordinary: he publicly asked for advice. This particular Secretary of State was not known for his humility; indeed, when he left this post, his removal was widely believed to be hastened by his confrontational attitude to teachers. But on this occasion he seemed to have swallowed his pride in order to request help.

He did so because he wanted to know if educational research could improve teaching in schools. He didn’t ask a teacher, a school leader or indeed, an educational researcher; he asked Ben Goldacre, a medical doctor who wrote the ‘Bad Science’ column in The Guardian newspaper. And what the good doctor told him was that educational research certainly could improve teaching in schools because:

By collecting better evidence about what works best, and establishing a culture where this evidence is used as a matter of routine, we can improve outcomes for children, and increase professional independence … research can help find out which interventions will work best overall, and which strategies should be tried first, second or third, to help everyone achieve the best outcome.

(Goldacre 2013, p. 7)

The idea that research could, ‘help everyone achieve the best outcome’ was attractive; it was positive and optimistic, and it came with the credibility of a nationally known medical doctor who is a scourge of ‘Bad Science’. Ben Goldacre’s Report caught the national mood; the Secretary of State acted on his advice, and allocated £135 million for a series of research studies, overseen by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF). Subsequently, schools in England have come under some pressure to demonstrate that they use research to inform their activities.

Policy pressures are not new. In England as elsewhere, education has often been a victim of multiple directives from local and national government. Some of these have a long life and can even become institutionalised – the use of systematic, synthetic phonics, for example. Others can come and go quite quickly – the ‘three-part lesson’ is an example. One question worth asking is, ‘will research utilisation be short-term or long-term?’ Without venturing into the realm of fortune-telling, we think that research utilisation is likely to stay around. There are several reasons for this. First, the UK government has invested heavily in research utilisation in education. The award of £135 million to the EEF has had a considerable impact on schools; by 2018, these involved 970,000 children and young people in 9,400 schools (EEF 2018). The national survey of newly-qualified teachers requires teachers to evaluate how well their training has prepared them, ‘to access educational research … to assess the robustness of educational research [and] … to understand and apply the findings from educational research’ (Gov.uk 2014). Teaching Schools have been required to demonstrate involvement with research and development as one of their priorities, and the ‘Carter Review’ (2015) of initial teacher training described the need for teachers to understand, ‘how to access, interpret and use research to inform classroom practice’ (p. 8). Research utilisation is not an individual policy, standing apart from the rest of educational policy; it is part of a drive towards a ‘self-improving school system’ in which centrally-managed change, seen in the National Strategies, is replaced by schools taking responsibility for their own improvement (DfE 2010; Hargreaves 2010; Godfrey 2017). In this self-improving system, as Brown and Zhang (2014) note, ‘evidence use is positioned as being front and centre’ and the core characteristics of ‘self-improvement’ include:

1) teachers and schools being responsible for their own improvement; and

2) teachers and schools being required to learn from each other and from research so that effective practice spreads.

(Greany 2014; Brown and Zhang 2014, p. 782)

Second, there are moves to push research into practice across several government departments, not only education. The EEF is one of seven ‘What Works Centres’, each of which has a remit to ensure that professional practice becomes better informed by research. The other What Works Centres include:

• Health and social care: National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

• Crime reduction: The College of Policing’s What Works Centre for Crime Reduction

• Early intervention: The Early Intervention Foundation

• Local economic growth: What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth

• Improved quality of life for older people: The Centre for Ageing Better

• Wellbeing: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing

Scotland has a What Works Centre and Wales has the Public Policy Institute for Wales. Each is funded by a combination of government and non-government sources, and the work of the English Centres is centrally coordinated by the Cabinet Office. Taken together, these represent a very substantial commitment to finding out what works (in education, crime reduction, early intervention etc.) and getting this into practice.

Third, the UK government’s commitment to research utilisation is part of a broader, international movement. Within Europe, ‘Optimal circulation, access to and transfer of scientific knowledge’ is recognised in European educational policy (Commission of the European Communities 2013). France, Norway and Denmark have established national clearinghouses for educational research, and the USA’s ‘What Works Clearinghouse’ was established back in 2002, in order to provide teachers, policymakers, researchers, and the public with ‘a central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education’ (Institute of Educational Sciences 2002). Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have national educational research centres that aim to foster transfer from educational research to practice in one form or another. Efforts to ‘mobilise’ educational knowledge are also apparent in states beyond Europe, including USA, Canada, Latin and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa (for example see Earl & Timperley 2008; Levin, Qi & Edelstein 2013; Briscoe et al., 2015; Farley-Ripple, et al., 2017; EEF 2017; Malin et al., 2018).

Fourth, the current enthusiasm for educational research use is by no means unique: research utilisation has a history. As long ago as 1929, John Dewey started a debate about research utilisation, noting that teachers read research in the hope of finding ‘recipes’ for teaching, and argued that research would be unlikely to provide such ‘recipes’. This idea has been vigorously debated over the years by authors such as Fleming (1946); Clifford (1973); Nisbet & Broadfoot (1980); Hargreaves (1996); Hammersley (2002); Thomas & Pring (2004); Biesta (2010) and Winch, Oancea & Orchard (2015). One of the most hotly-debated contributions to the discussion was that of David Hargreaves who, in a speech to the Teacher Training Agency in 1996, made many of the same points as Ben Goldacre. Like Goldacre, Hargreaves compared the relatively low impact of educational research on education, to the high impact of medical research on medical practice and concluded that education would be much better if it were more research informed. We will return to these ideas and some of these authors, below. For now, it is sufficient to note that research utilisation is not a new idea; it has frequently surfaced in policy and practice, and has been subject to much debate.

Fifth, the concept of research utilisation is extremely broad. Unlike, say, synthetic phonics or the three-part lesson, it has the potential to suggest answers to many kinds of educational problems, from overarching matters such as recruiting and retaining teachers, to matters of fine detail, such as teaching spelling to children with reading difficulties.

Finally, there is some evidence that many teachers are enthusiastic about the idea that research could improve their practice. Meta-analyses of educational research (e.g. Hattie 2008) are growing in sales and influence, whilst a teacher-led movement called ‘researchEd’, coordinated by the teacher and journalist Tom Bennett, is acting as a powerful forum for online and face-to-face debate between teachers and researchers. Since its formation in 2013, researchEd has developed a series of national and regional conferences not only in the UK but in countries including Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands. It also has a considerable presence on social media, with many thousands of followers on Twitter, partly due to its members’ sharing links to research and research-informed articles.

Universities have also formed networks of schools engaged in research. At the time of writing, Manchester University, Sheffield Hallam University, University College, London (UCL) and Edge Hill University all have research networks for schools. Cambridge University has two such networks: Cambridge School Teachers and Research (CAMSTAR) and the School-University Partnership for Educational Research (SUPER). Harvard University has an international network of schools engaged in research; there is also a Research Schools Network, funded by the EEF and the Institute for Effective Education (IEE). Beyond universities, organisations including the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE) and the Teacher Development Trust provide strongly research-based CPD for teachers.

At the same time, access to research is becoming easier. Open access policies ensure that more research papers appear on the internet and that these are accessed by more people than previously (Antelman 2004). For some years, the British government has been working with publishers to make all publicly-funded research available to everyone with an internet connection and it seems that this is a realistic ambition. In the meantime, the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre), based at UCL, undertakes and publishes systematic reviews of research for educational policymakers and practitioners, whilst the Chartered College of Teaching provides its members with free access to research databases and publishes its own research journal, Impact.

There is also pressure on universities to pay attention to how their research is used; in the UK, university departments are required to submit accounts of the ‘impact’ of their research, defined as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services … beyond academia’ (HEFCE 2011, p. 48). The ‘impact’ agenda has led to more practitioner-friendly presentations of educational research. In England, these include BERA’s Insights and briefings, the EEF’s Toolkit, the Institute of Education’s Evidence Library, and York University’s Best Evidence in Brief. Each of these is freely available on the internet and can be located with common search engines.

Also, there is limited but growing evidence, that engaging with research improves schools. Brown (2018) summarises this evidence: research-engaged schools can shift approaches to CPD from ‘superficial “hints and tips” model of improvement to a learning culture in which staff work together to understand what appears to work, when and why’; it can lead to improvements in pedagogic knowledge and skills as well as greater teacher confidence; it can be associated with students’ results and with ‘higher teacher, school and system performance’ (Brown 2018, p. 7). These results should be treated with caution because, in all the studies reviewed, improvements could be explained by factors other than research and in any case, how you engage with research is at least as important as whether you engage in research. But there are grounds for cautious optimism.

In summary, research utilisation is a powerful idea: it has government backing in many countries, a considerable intellectual history, support from teachers and networks of teachers and researchers, some evidence of positive impact, and a technological capability, via the internet and Open Access, to make it feasible. As this book testifies, many schools in the UK are already using research to improve the education of their students. The policy imperative is for all schools to use research critically, to make genuine and long-lasting improvements.

Arguments and counter-arguments

Nevertheless, there are arguments against research utilisation, both from within the educational research community and from those on its periphery. From the periphery, it is argued that educational research is not of sufficiently high quality to be of practical value: it is too small-scale, unscientific and is out of touch with the concerns of teachers. For example, David Hargreaves described educational research as, ‘irrelevant to practice … uncoordinated with any preceding or follow up research … virtually nobody reads’ (Hargreaves 1996). Since then, there has been some evidence to support this assertion. Gore & Gitlin (2004) found that pre-service and in-service teachers from Australia and the USA ‘overwhelmingly dismissed academic research on the grounds that it is not practi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Why?
• PART II: What?
• PART III: How?
• Appendix
• Index