Since becoming members of the Teacher Development Trust’s ‘National Teacher Enquiry Network’ a number of opportunities have come the way of Canons High School. The latest of these was a general invitation to NTEN members to meet as a very small (I hesitate to use the word intimate) group with the CEO of the Education Endowment Fund, Kevan Collins. Thankfully, being a member of the ever-connected smartphone generation I was able to respond almost instantaneously to the invitation and secure myself a seat around the table to discuss the relationship between research and education – the archetypal ‘hot potato’ and equally archetypal ‘hot button’ issue du jour.
David Weston democratically framed the terms of the debate through the use of this Google Doc which invited participants to reflect upon the following key questions ahead of the meeting.
How can we encourage schools to engage with evidence when making decisions about teaching and interventions?
How can teachers and schools participate in larger scale research?
How do we help spread the most effective practices around the system so that they are embedded and understood?
What role do the EEF and TDT’s NTEN have to play in these issues? What about other organisations?
The use of this doc (a version of flipped homework, I guess) also allowed us and Kevan to have a flavour of the upcoming debate that helped us – I think – make best use of the short time we had available.
And so to the meeting. Kevan Collins kicked us off by explaining the remit of the EEF, which he said was threefold: the synthesis of evidence, giving money away and finding out how to mobilise evidence from research. All of these, he explained, were overarched by the key moral question of how to ‘close the gap’ between advantaged and disadvantaged students.
The following discussion revealed a lot about the problems the system (including the EEF) faces in achieving both that overarching goal and the three levers with which we might achieve that goal in a research-informed way. We challenged him on a range of issues from teacher workload to closing the different gap between schools and universities (and consequently theory and practice) to the problems with research-uninformed leadership and improvement planning mechanisms.
On the first of these he advocated that schools and government need to change the rhetoric about evidence: “It’s about doing less, not more” he said. Although I suspect that I won’t be the only one giving a hollow laugh at the ever-present notion of temporal ‘efficiency savings’ in education, he did make us think about how we might rid ourselves of over-elaborate marking policies, SLT-driven initiative overloading and such things. The question of “what are we going to get rid of, even if it might be working but not working as well as something new?” has never been more necessary.
With regard to the gap between the worlds of Academia and Scholastia (I’m claiming that as another neologism, but if it isn’t then I’m equally happy to have found a word I didn’t know existed!), he indicated that the EEF are looking at this through the use of a large trial that will look at the “communication of evidence” by measuring awareness, understanding and changed behaviours with impact. Alongside this they will be conducting another piece of research into how groups of schools can build capacity to become research-informed alliances. I really hope that we get to work with him on this one.
By far the most interesting (and challenging) things he had to say were with regard to leadership and improvement planning. He articulated more clearly than I have heard before, a concern that school improvement planning is rooted in a compliant, managerial paradigm and that this is a world away from the ideal of research-informed school improvement planning. If we are to empower our school staff working at the frontline to be “discerning consumers of research” (as Stuart Lock paraphrased from someone really clever) then we need to place all of their efforts within the context of discerning leadership.
There were a few areas of personal interest where I felt Kevan had less to say to us about the EEF’s work. He was a good advocate of Big Research in the form of large-scale Randomised Control Trials in education (in fact, a far better advocate for RCTs than Ben Goldacre at ResearchED last year), but didn’t offer much hope that the EEF will do more to back the growing momentum behind lesson study to help us ensure that Little Research can be better connected to effective methodologies.
He also ardently gave the case for having a key focus on pupil outcomes for ‘closing the gaps’, when I would rather see a focus on developing the professional research practice of teachers and other school staff so that they can be empowered in their equally (perhaps greater) ardent focus on closing those gaps.
And finally, in this section where I felt I left with more questions than answers, I come back to the lack of connectedness in the systems of research in the UK. Although he listened intently to concerns that we have move from a university-dominated schism between theory and practice into a potentially school-dominated schism between theory and practice, there wasn’t any suggestion that the EEF seem poised to step in and prioritise funding for genuinely collaborative partnerships between universities and schools.
All of that said, this was a very interesting meeting for a whole host of reasons, not least of which was the fact that Kevan is a man who clearly understands the concerns of the profession, is still very much connected with it and wants to hear how we think his organisation can help those of us who do it day in and day out be better at adapting our teaching from an evidence base. A couple of points that he made struck a chord: that “nowhere has our accountability anywhere in the world” and that he was “wrestling with” how to enhance knowledge creation from the classroom.
Most intriguingly of all, though, he seemed to give a hint that an ‘anti-toolkit’ (of classroom practices which have been clearly proven not to work) might be on the way. I’m sure he’ll win the hearts and minds of many a teacher and school leader if that does happen.
My big ‘take away’ from the meeting was that the professionals around that table had a huge amount to offer this debate and were completely at ease in constructively challenging and offering ideas to the man who has within his hands the control of vast sums of money to make the dream of a research-informed education system a reality. Coupled with the work of organisations such as the Teacher Development Trust and teacher-driven events such as ResearchED, we need more of these confident leaders (using the autonomy that Kevan completely supported) to ensure that we don’t let this opportunity pass us by.
And in that spirit of confident school leadership, I would like to add a ‘take away’ that I hope Kevan Collins left the meeting with. By all means, value the Big Research to answer the Big Questions that the system urgently needs addressing, but don’t let the EEF become dominated by them. Teachers don’t merely want to become “discerning consumers of research”; they also want to become “discerning producers of research”. Many of them already are.
Our classrooms are dripping with contextual significance and to engage us the EEF needs to tap into this: by making available the funding that will help us to find the time to be researchers; by prioritising the links with universities so that we gain the knowledge needed to become informed researchers; and by promoting the outcomes of such collaborations (even the Little Research ones) so that we become respected researchers with impact beyond our own classrooms.
kevenbartle's Blog 
mrlock
April 2, 2014
I’m going to try and find time to blog on this Keven, partly because I took away different things to you.
I also came away with more questions than answers, but I expected too. I also found Keven Collins to understand and be connected with the real experience of schools. He is an impressive man.
I guess my main area of contention is that I don’t think we enable teachers and schools to access research that already exists, practice that research already says is great. I think that the focus of your argument, exemplified in the penultimate paragraph, that teachers should be researchers carries great opportunity cost. I think the role of teachers in an efficient research-led system should be to challenge and question the outcomes of research as it shapes and forms their practice, led by outcomes. I welcome a move towards teaching becoming more of a profession (it seems Labour are intent on this and I welcome that cautiously, as I’m not sure what baggage will come with it) as one that could move us towards being more effective evaluators.
In becoming more effective evaluators, I think that teachers and hence schools will become more discerning about research and its application. I really welcome your thoughts about universities and schools working closer together and one of my take-aways from the meeting was to be more open to the potential of teaching schools – something I have no direct experience of yet.
So I think understanding what research already tells us is the most important step for the profession in order to become a research-led one. This is because this is where I think we are most deficient. I am not sure I can effectively answer Kevan’s implicit challenge today about whether we can do that without some level of a compliance model moving forward. That requires more thought as I think we correctly recognised the high demands of compliance already counterproductively present in the system.
On another point, I was really taken with our near debate where you expressed that “everything works, as long as you think about it enough” and my reply that I think that might be true but some things work better than others if all things are thought about enough. I think this is really important. I think you come from a position of wanting autonomy of the teacher or school, and I come from a position of challenging the teacher or school (not that these are mutually exclusive). I note you didn’t write about this, but it interested me enough to think about it on the way home.
Good blog for stimulating thought – thanks.
kevenbartle
April 2, 2014
I would counter argue that there is very little research that actually says anything works in all contexts at all times (if any) and there is very little research that proves any causation, only correlation. This is not surprising given the complex nature of our work with far too many variables for any to be isolated and yet give us results that are meaningful in any way.
Given that, what is research for?
To move away from the nihilistic implications of that statement though, I would add that the site of research needs to be the classroom and therefore the lead agents in research need to be teachers (properly trained by researchers) or researchers-in-residence as per the teaching hospital model. Without that we have seen a research profession that has become disconnected from the practitioners (even to the extent of language use) and a teaching profession that has become ever more deferential to the academic. If we don’t bridge the gap soon we will move into a system where empowered, autonomous school leaders just opt out of research completely.
That’s me fear and I see it being realised all over the place with School Direct and outstanding teacher programmes and so much more CPD that doesn’t even try to come close to evidence but relies almost wholly on confident assertion based on craft practices. In doing so we are in danger of losing what little legitimacy we have as a ‘profession’.
And I don’t think the limited outcomes of being solely consumers of research (we already do that through masters progs and the like) are enough to make the difference.
But, as ever, loved the interaction. I guess it takes both arguments to make a rich, diverse profession as much as it does the research itself.
mrlock
April 2, 2014
Couldn’t your first paragraph be interpreted as an anti-research argument? It’s certainly the nature of the argument of those from whom I’ve read anti-research positions. The reason I say this is that I think what you call “little research” is something that teachers do already – inexpertly.
I don’t see huge changes coming from that alone. I’m optimistic that if we allow big research to challenge our biases of our context (because I do think we can get stuck in a ‘it doesn’t work with our kids/ our school/ our level of deprivation without really allowing ourselves to be challenged on that) we may be able to develop a discerning attitude towards big research (what Kevan said about it not telling you what will work, but what has worked is important here).
On ‘little research’, I would claim this is exactly what masters programmes in schools linked to universities encourage – ‘action research’ projects applicable to one class, one cohort, and hence barely ‘research’ at all; more anecdote.
How would you hence counter the claim that increasing focus on ‘little research’ is not research at all? I mean, I just googled a definition of research and it said: “the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions”.
I would say that improving the work of practitioners requires us to use systematically gathered evidence to challenge the biases that we all have from working exclusively in our context, with all the baggage and history of our individual institutions. The reason it’s so badly used is we aren’t good enough at evaluating and applying what works.
Of course, the divide between ‘little’ and ‘big’ research is not a real one, but it’s useful for how we see a research-led teaching profession emerging.
kevenbartle
April 2, 2014
I’m working on something at the minute that I hope may change your mind. Looking to blog about it tomorrow. I take all your points. My thought is to systematise small research.
mrlock
April 2, 2014
Look forward to it – blogging machine!
kevenbartle
April 2, 2014
I’ve been quite unmachinelike for a while now. But this is very much linked to my work in school at the moment and is intended to synthesise my own research findings in order to persuade a university to change what they currently do.
mrlock
April 2, 2014
I can’t edit that awful typo!
kevenbartle
April 2, 2014
Sod it. Nowt wrong with typos.
markquinn1968
April 3, 2014
I share your frustration at the lack of interest in Little Research. Just think of all those internal reviews, learning walks and lesson observation that takes place every week in every school. With some help to apply research rigour to these, this could produce a vast research base.
mrlock
April 3, 2014
That is optimistic – though of course desirable. I’m not convinced that ‘internal reviews, learning walks and lesson observation’ could be adapted to be great, rather we’d need to rip it all up and start again.
Of course, if it produced a vast research base by being somewhat consistent (and dare I say it, getting towards RCT scale and design) then it’s no longer little research, is it?
@TeacherToolkit
April 5, 2014
The final paragraph says it all for me…