College of Teaching , which is ‘ dedicated to bridging the gap between practice and research ’ ( CCoT , 2022 ); and the new National Institute of Teaching , which aims to ‘ boost the quality of teacher and leader development nationally by generating and interpreting research , applying the insights to the design and delivery of high-quality teacher and school leader development programmes , and sharing it all with the sector ’ ( NIot , 2022 ).
This is not a passing fad . It is a sea change .
School-based research centres : an insider ’ s perspective
Jonnie Noakes , Director of Teaching & Learning , Eton College , and Director of the Tony Little Centre for Innovation and Research in Learning
Ben Goldacre in his influential 2013 DfE paper spoke of ‘ a huge prize waiting to be claimed by teachers . 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 ’ ( Goldacre , 2013 ). Goldacre ’ s rallying cry to teachers to emulate medics in embracing evidence-based practice provoked the reasonable objection from educators that teaching is very unlike medicine ; and that conducting research in schools is generally very different from conducting gold-standard Randomised Control Trials across huge sample sizes in medicine .
Nevertheless , recent years have seen a remarkable growth of interest among teachers in evidence-based practice . It is now ubiquitous . It can be seen emerging from grassroots , ResearchEd being the most visible example . It is evident in numerous organisations that seek to bring research expertise to practitioners , such as Evidence Based Education ( EBE ). It drives the huge appetite among teachers for texts and papers that interpret evidence for teachers , such the Education Endowment Foundation ’ s Teaching and Learning Toolkit or EBE ’ s The Great Teaching Toolkit . It is a main focus of leading national institutions such as The Chartered
To a degree , the optimism about the value of using evidence in teaching practice and teacher development that drives this movement is itself supported by the evidence . A BERA RSA report ( 2014 ) found a research literate and research engaged teaching body has a clear positive impact on outcomes ( BERA and RSA , 2014 ); and Churches and McAleavy ( 2016 ) found that evidence-informed practice leads to improved teaching techniques , the creation of more powerful professional development by connecting training to teaching practice , to better whole-school decision making and to improved outcomes for students . The evidence remains , patchy , however , and more robust evaluations need to be done on the ‘ benefits for students and teachers of using research evidence in education , or of how best to get research evidence into use ’ ( BERA , 2022 ).
Evaluating the effects of pedagogy is not straightforward . If the research is set up to minimise the many confounding factors that a school presents , the conditions bear little resemblance to those of a real classroom : the intervention is delivered by computers or scripts , not by teachers ; students and teachers do not interact ; the time scale is tight , perhaps a single session and no longer than two weeks ; for clear comparisons , there will be distinct conditions and single ability groups … and so on . This raises significant problems in how we interpret and apply the research findings in real classrooms , as was noted in the 2021 EEF Cognitive Science Approaches in the Classroom review ( Perry , 2021 ).
It is not enough to know what the research says : teachers also need to know how to evaluate it for validity and reliability , how to interpret it accurately , and how to mobilise it in their classrooms without distorting it . Each of these is a significant barrier . Evidence-informed ( as distinct from evidence-based ) practice seeks to find a congruence between research findings and professional expertise : it means ‘ integrating professional expertise with the best external evidence from research to improve the quality of practice ’ ( Sharples , 2013 ). As Kirschner and Hendrick succinctly put it in How Learning Happens , ‘ good teaching is an art informed by science ’ ( Kirschner and Hendrick , 2020 ).
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