Educational Research

Over the past few years I have heard one phrase a lot   It is a phrase that although not unexpected, it causes me concern.  This phrase is:

"Teacher's don't read research"

  The obvious question then becomes "If they are not reading research, what are they reading?".  For most teachers I have come across it is books of resources, articles about their content or maybe blogs such as this one that might describe activities that a teacher has done.  They tend to read stuff that they can pick up and take into their class the very next day and use it.

So why is reading research important?

My simple answer to this is that reading resource books changes might change a lesson, reading research can change your outlook on education in general and can transform your classroom over a much longer period of time.  Educational research is not about finding a great lesson on area of a square, it is about the big questions in education

• What works best in education?
• How do you foster strong and productive classrooms?
• What are the skills and characteristics of highly effective teachers?
• How do you overcome educational disadvantage?
• How do we best prepare our students for an increasingly unknown future?
• What does effective school leadership look like?
• What effect do our interactions with students have on their learning?
• How can what we know about the brain lead to better outcomes?

This is only a small fraction of the questions that researchers are attempting to answer.  They spend years investigating even investigating a small part of one of these questions with the aim of shedding some further light on the rest of the story.  The answers they come up with are important, they describe how the outcomes changed not just for a few, but for hundreds or thousands of kids.  The answers are important as they force us to examine what is currently happening in our schools, and in our classroom.  They get us to judge our own day to day practice against the research piece we are looking at and look for commonalities or differences.  It forces us to fundamentally examine what we believe about our profession and the way we approach it. It has the potential to change every part of our day to day practice.  This same level of scrutiny is not put on individual lessons.

Research is also incredibly important as there are a lot of practices that are prevalent in many schools that have been disproven strongly by research.  This means that there are a number of practices occuring in schools around the world that have been shown to have a negative impact on student outcomes.  Some examples of this  that I hear a lot when talking to teachers are:

• Streaming or ability grouping
  This has been a practice that has been widely practiced in a lot of schools for a long time.  The idea of grouping students in relation to their ability might seem logical in order to best direct the teaching in an effective manner. However the research over many years has strongly shown the negative effects of streaming on student achievement and disposition towards learning.  
  
  
• Learning Styles
  The idea of learning styles is the idea that students can be physical learners, visual learners, auditory learners etc.  That if we don't teach kids according to their learning style then we will be limiting their achievement.  However the research is very clear that there is no such thing as purely visual learners etc, people generally have a preference for learning in a specific way, but it is not a trait that they hold.  In fact it can be said that teaching kids outside of their learning preferences is also going to be very beneficial as it will get them thinking in ways different to how they may have thought about it previously,  It gets us thinking in flexible ways about what we are learning.

Why don't teachers read research?

I think there are a number of reasons don't read research, I think some of the reason are based on the teachers and some are based on the researchers.

1. Implementation and Feedback
   The reason teachers read resource books and potentially blogs is that it gives them an idea for a task that they can try the very next day there is that immediate implementation and relatively immediate feedback,it works for them or it doesn't.  However this is not the case with reading research, you can't necessarily apply it right away.  You need to think about it in the context of your school, your class and your practice as a teacher, you have to figure out a way to try and implement it within that  framework.  The changes in the class are much more gradual, sometimes it gets worse before it gets better and therefore the feedback is also much more gradual.  
   
   
2. The Degree of Change
   If you are going to take on research in your own teaching practice, then more often than not it is a big change to what you do, the bulk of research in education out there is not about answering the small questions, it is about answering the big ones.  These big changes to your own practice can put you a long way out of your comfort zone.  Although this discomfort is not a bad thing it can be hard to get through, especially if you are not seeing the gains right away.  Trying once off lessons really doesn't require a change to how you teach over the longer term, it just might require a temporary change in that lesson.
   
   
3. Teachers feel that it won't work for their learners
   As teachers we get to know our students well, we get to know a lot about them as learners.  However often I hear teachers say "despite what the research says.....".  This is their way of saying that they are aware of the research but it just doesn't fit our students, it may work for others but our students are different.  It seems that they feel they don't need the research because they know what works best for their classes.  In many ways I can understand this, they do spend a lot of time with their students, but sometimes the wrong question is "Is there something that needs to be fixed?" sometimes the right question is "how can my class be even better?" as this necessitates the need to do something differently, to chase a new idea down.
   
   
4. Research is Often Very Hard to Digest
   Having spoke to a number of researchers in education they concede that much of the research written about education is not specifically written for teachers, it is written for other academics, this means that reading research can often be very hard and very confusing , it does not make it easy to digest the essence of the research and how it may be implemented into practice. One of the most successful bits of research to make it's way though the teaching profession in recent years has been Carol Dweck's work on fixed and growth mindsets.  Her work has been heavily based in the world of research, however what has set this research apart in my opinion is that they seem to have worked very hard at making sure they have presented the research in a way that makes it easy for teachers and for the general public to understand.. They have really worked at distilling down the message into some meaningful actions teachers can take.  This same level work in making the research easy to digest is not done with many research papers.
   
   
5. Some of the research just doesn't help
   I often keep an eye on the AAMT twitter feed and at times get very frustrated by some of the most recent research they put up  Some of the recent ones that have frustrated me include

           
​          - What hand you write with might influence how good you are at maths
          - Maths ability is 75% genetic

I am not disputing the results of their research, I haven't read it.  I haven't read it because as a teacher this research doesn't help me.  If I start making instruction decisions in my class based on their genetics and what hand they write with then I feel I would have to answer some pretty serious questions. The findings might be statistically valid but they don't help me to be a better teacher it is not within my realm of influence.  I think it is dangerous to start making judgements and instructional decisions based on what hand someone writes with.
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In conclusion if we are going to continue to grow as a teacher as we expect our students to continue to grow then looking for lessons just won't do it, we need to really pay close attention to the research so that evidence-informed practices can better influence our teaching.  I see it as my role as an instructional coach and a faculty leader to digest this research for and with teacher so that it may better inform our practice.