What are parents saying about you on Facebook?

Jon Brunskill has some suggestions how you can get the vast array of studies into teaching and learning to make a difference to what happens in your classroom day to day

Teaching is constantly flooded with groovy ideas that promise to solve education’s ills once and for all. One of the most recent is the suggestion that our practice should be better informed by research, in the same way that the medical profession is evidence-based.

This idea, however, isn’t that new. Back in 1999, Professor Rob Coe launched his Manifesto for Evidence-Based Education, in which he declared “Education may not be an exact science, but it is too important to allow it to be determined by unfounded opinion, whether of politicians, teachers, researchers or anyone else.”

This is a rousing sentiment. As professionals, we should be able to point to something more than whim or habit for why we do what we do in the classroom. But educational research is not without its problems. One of the most challenging is that, in education, everything works – that is to say whenever an intervention is tested, it has a positive effect. This means we’re faced with a conundrum of choosing which option will benefit our children more, or to paraphrase Emeritus Professor Dylan Wiliam: to do good things in education, you have to not do other good things.

I was enthusiastically explaining all of this to an experienced colleague who politely listened to me rattle on before sighing, “That’s all very well. But how does this really help in the classroom? I mean, what can I do on Monday with all this?”

The objection is not unfair. With astronomical workloads, time is an ever-present elephant in the staffroom, shuffling uncomfortably whenever ‘a great new idea’ is announced. Ultimately, research should empower teachers to make well-informed judgements and decisions in their classrooms.

With that in mind, here is a list of five things that you can do on Monday to help make your teaching more evidence-informed (without demolishing any work-life balance you’ve managed to cling on to).

1. Visit ResearchEd

After becoming increasingly frustrated with foolish ideas and nonsense claims in education, teacher and writer Tom Bennett launched ResearchEd ( workingoutwhatworks.com). This grass-roots organisation brings together teachers and academics at conferences across the country. Give up one Saturday and you can choose from a myriad of sessions exploring what works in the classroom, helping you to build your own ‘evidence toolkit’. Since classroom teachers often lead the sessions, the focus is on how to easily implement the findings from the latest research.

2. Try action research

After your next observation, why not identify a specific area of weakness and pose yourself a research question? So instead of an arbitrary ‘Use more videos in literacy,’ try ‘Does the use of videos in literacy lessons improve narrative writing with low attainers?’ This approach forces you to consider what you are trying to achieve, how you will try and achieve it, and how you will know if you’ve been successful. If you have a year partner, he or she could become your ‘research twin’, trialling a different approach so that you can compare which worked better. There’s even a website where you can publish your action research and have it reviewed by other teachers and academics ( praxis-education.com ).

3. Set up a book club

Focusing on a single book or journal paper (many are available free online) can be a great way to expose staff to new ideas. I’d suggest you start with Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham or Make it Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark Mcdaniel. Both of these books are written by highly-respected academics, and they changed the way that I think about teaching and learning.

4. Explore the EEF

Governments are often criticised for making policy based on ideology instead of evidence. Aware of this, the coalition government founded the Educational Endowment Foundation, an independent organisation tasked with finding out what works in education. It has published a ‘teaching and learning toolkit’ on its website (eef.org.uk) that ranks the impact of interventions based on available research.

5. See who’s on Twitter

Perhaps the best way to introduce yourself to the world of educational research is by joining Twitter and establishing a ‘personal learning network’. Thousands of teachers produce high-quality blogs exploring recent research, and a growing number of academics are also joining the popular social network. I’d recommend following @AlisonMPeacock @DiLeed @informed_edu and @researchEd1 as a great starting point. They all regularly share educational research that helps primary teachers be better informed of ‘what works’ and why.

About the author

Jon is head of year two at Reach Academy Feltham in London. You can follow him on Twitter @jon_brunskill