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.
In this anthology we start with the fundamental issue of teacher beliefs: what do effective teachers believe? We then go on to look at what effective teachers actually do. Based on their beliefs, what do effective teachers do to promote learning?We have examined the evidence to find answers to each of these questions. and you will find that several important themes keep cropping up throughout the anthology. Keep an eye open for them, because they are important.The focus on teacher beliefs and classroom strategies was drawn from a theoretical framework underpinning research into effective teachers of numeracy that is summarised in one of our monthly RoM features. The selection of classroom strategies was based on sound evidence about links between the ways in which teachers behave and pupil behaviour which is closely linked to learning.Each page of this anthology finishes with a brief note that tells you where the evidence synthesis is taken from. These will mostly list the titles of the relevant RoM summaries. You can find full references for the studies on which each RoM is based, links to the summaries themselves and any other references at the end of this anthology. You can also find out more about how we used the evidence base for this anthology in the section on ‘How do we know this?’.
