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.
The study featured in this TLA research summary set out to identify and describe the characteristics of effective teachers of numeracy. It took place before and during the introduction of the National Numeracy Strategy.The researchers were asked to feed back their findings into the development work for the strategy. They explored teachers' beliefs, knowledge and understanding as well as their teaching practice. They found that developing a rich network of connections between different mathematical ideas and using pupils' reasoning to help establish these were most likely to result in greater pupil achievement and identified a range of other factors that contributed to effective numeracy teaching. The study helps demonstrate some important links between teacher understandings, teaching and learning that may help teachers to take a fresh look at their own practice in the light of their knowledge and beliefs about numeracy.The case studies, which illustrate teaching and learning in classroom contexts, are not taken from the main study itself, but are independent studies from a number of other schools.
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