The National Teacher Research Panel was set up about 15 years ago by CUREE supported by a group of national education agencies most of which no longer exist. It had three main goals:
- To ensure that all research in education takes account of the teacher perspective
- To ensure a higher profile for research and evidence informed practice in government, academic and practitioner communities
- To increase the number of teachers engaged in and with the full spectrum of research activity.
Over the several years of its existence, the Panel, supported by its expert advisers in CUREE, has helped and encouraged dozens of teachers and school leaders to do high quality but practical research. The Panel also helped them report their findings succinctly, in plain English and focused on relevance to other practitioners. This is one such example of that work.
Literacy teaching is a hotly debated topic in education. For thisTLA research summary we looked across three separate primary school studies to see what they can collectively tell us about effective literacy teaching.The three studies are:Wharton-McDonald, Ruth, Michael Pressley and Jennifer Mistretta Hampston. 'Literacy Instruction in Nine First- Grade Classrooms: Teacher Characteristics and Student Achievement'. Elementary School Journal 99.2 (1998).Pressley, Michael and Ruth Wharton-McDonald, et al. 'A Study of Effective First Grade Literacy Instruction'. Scientific Studies of Reading 5.1 (2001).Taylor, Barbara M. and P. David Pearson, et al. 'Effective Schools and Accomplished Teachers: Lessons about Primary-Grade Reading Instructions in Low-Income Schools'. Elementary School Journal 101.2 (2000).The studies are from the US, but the issues will be familiar to all teachers of literacy in England. We think that the examples provided in the three studies will help teachers relate the research to their own contexts. The three studies were all included in a recent systematic review of effective literacy teaching in the 4 to14 age range of mainstream schooling. They were selected for this synthesis because they were judged by the review team to provide significant evidence about the characteristics and practices of effective teachers of literacy. They complement each other and they provide evidence about issues and practice in literacy teaching which address the needs and interests of teachers in England. The RfT team has looked across all three studies for evidence about the ways in which teachers who are judged to be highly effective teach, with additional evidence from the third study about school factors which support effective teaching of literacy. We have looked at the three studies as forming a 'sequence' of evidence:
first, a localised study of effective teaching of literacy involving nine teachers from four school districts, ranging from lower-middle to upper-middle class communities, in a single state of the US (Wharton-MacDonald et al)
second, a larger study in five different regions with 30 teachers (Pressley et al)
finally, a study which looked at school factors as well as teacher characteristics (Taylor et al).
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