This paper explores evidence from thirteen years of support for research and evidence informed practice as a change lever in England. It starts from the proposition that empirical evidence about teacher development has an important role to play in helping understand how the use of research and evidence can support teacher change. There has been extensive development of models for promoting engagement of policy makers and teachers with research based on evidence from knowledge transfer (Oakley 2007) and analysis through the lens of the co-construction of knowledge (Edwards et al 2005). There has also been modest investment in empirical investigation of the use of research and evidence (Sharp et al 2006). But public exploration of these issues from the perspective of what is known about teacher learning, development and change is limited. In arguing that reflecting on teacher change and use of research and evidence as continuing professional development and learning helps to clarify key components within the change process, the paper attempts to fill this gap.
Over the last 13 years many English government agencies have gradually increased and aligned their interests in and support for the use of evidence and research as tools for change management (OECD 2002, CUREE 2007). A series of international, systematic reviews of the impact of CPD (eg Cordingley et al 2007) have also identified consistent characteristics for effective CPD. The paper highlights the role research evidence can play in brokering coherence building between national agencies, and the role research based tools, protocols and resources can play in taking learning from research to scale as a change support mechanism. The paper then uses evidence from the reviews to illustrate and explore a case study of a national initiative supporting teacher change. This involved the creation of a national framework to support and shape mentoring and coaching that was directly rooted in the research evidence. The case study highlights key features of the transition from research review to policy tool and also the ways in which the framework explicitly attempts to embed use of research evidence about teaching and learning within CPD.
It concludes with reflections on the extent to which transforming knowledge from research into classroom change involves a mix of complex processes some of which require specialist mediation.
Introduction
Successive governments have sought to enhance national social and economic development in England by investing in education, learning and skills. For the past thirteen years, the English Government and its various National Agencies, have increasingly supported research and evidence informed practice in education. The Teacher Training Agency started to promote teaching as a research based profession as long ago as 1996 through the work of its Research Committee. Its commission of Professor David Hargreaves to provide its Annual Lecture in 1996, marked a turning point in public debate on this topic in England (Hargreaves 1996). Hargreaves’ clarion call to improve the quality and range of education research and its relevance to policy and practice was taken up energetically by the incoming Labour Government in 1997 and was debated energetically by the Academy where it was both contested and considered. The new Government unveiled three parallel strategic policy initiatives to improve the supply – and to a lesser extent, the use of research: it instigated a National Review, established a National Education Research Forum and funded a National Centre for conducting systematic reviews of research. It also set up a policy unit to underpin these initiatives, to support the development of high quality education research and to increase the accessibility and use of research as a means of improving practice and raising standards.
The landscape in 2009 looks very different from that which Hargreaves surveyed. Amongst the changed contours a (not exhaustive) list would include the very substantial multi million pound investment in the recently concluded Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). This both focused on practice and included practitioner involvement in the research processes. The emphasis has been on striving for excellence to be achieved through a wide range of mechanisms including:
- fierce competition for large scale and funding supported by extensive peer review of proposals;
- investment in read across individual projects through the collaborative creation of commentaries;
- the creation of a large scale web repository of data;
- funded seminar series to conceptualise and test emerging theories and understandings; and
- a range of different forms of text and web based outputs.
Other initiatives to support the use of research as a change mechanism have started from a policy as opposed to a knowledge creation perspective. For example, Early Years practice has been extensively influenced by the findings of the large-scale, longitudinal EPPE project (Sylva et al 2004). National agencies are gearing funding to research informed specifications: the Training and Development Agency, for example, is building its continuing professional development programme around both systematic reviews of research about CPD and a range of specifically commissioned studies to explore the state of current practice. The outputs of systematic research reviews have contributed – amongst many other things - to the evidence base for ongoing national curriculum development (Bell et al, 2008). Importantly, for the purposes of this paper, diverse research outputs are also becoming increasingly accessible to practitioners. The Government hosts The Research Informed Practice Site (TRIPS) , for example, where digests of practice-relevant research offer a menu of evidence-based ideas for teachers, parents, governors and others. The General Teaching Council for England produces regular summaries of robust empirical research with illustrative case studies in its Research of the Month (RoM) site.
More recently attention has moved on from communicating research findings effectively to mediation and brokering designed to embed their use in practice. For example, CUREE has supported the development of GTC research of the month summaries with the presentation of accompanying research tools, tasters and CPD protocols . All of these linked resources are freely available to all practitioners via the web but also diffused through GTC’s professional networks and mediated via its own Teacher Learning Academy.
The aim, for this and similar initiatives is an ambitious one. It is to ensure that research findings are increasingly accompanied by tools, protocols and activities designed to engage practitioners in identifying implications for their own context and embed new practices in day to day learning exchanges with their pupils.
What follows is an exploration of some of these and other developments which have accompanied this sustained policy drive. It examines the nature of the connections between the creation of knowledge through research on the one hand and the use of such knowledge by teachers to facilitate pupil learning and raise achievements on the other.
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