In the Research Mobilities project, we spoke to primary school teachers in England about their varied encounters with literacy research. They shared how and why they look for research, the different kinds of ideas and formats they come across, how they share and engage with research, and the opportunities and challenges they face along the way.
These excerpts highlight a range of experiences and challenges with literacy research. You can use these quotes to get into conversation with teachers’ different viewpoints and prompt your own questions and reflections.
“I think in terms of schools and day-to-day life, unless you actively go out and look for different research or a different opinion it is very much, I don’t know the right word. It’s agenda-ed research that you’re given almost in that it’s what Ofsted, it’s what the government want you to read and want you to see and I think there are favoured researchers, depending on what their agenda is with a particular curriculum, or what the Ofsted agenda is with their particular outcomes that they’re looking for, particularly with reading. We’ve just been Ofsted-ed and it was a massive thing about early reading and we had to have such a thing in place. It was very much agenda-ed and any other research or anything else we’d read isn’t necessarily considered. So I think as a general teacher in day-to-day life you don’t always encounter a wide range of research, unless you actively go out and look for it.”
I think what would be helpful is maybe to have, like you said, a focus group but a live focus group, so people in a room having a discussion about research, because I think a lot of people, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, a lot of people will read research and take it as read. ‘Well that’s what’s there so that’s the way it is’ and I don’t think that teachers read research critically. I think that they just read it, I mean I could be generalising and I’m sure that a lot of teachers do, but on the whole from my own experience I think that people read the research and say ‘Oh, that looks like a good thing, let’s implement it’.
And that is the thing that is going wrong in a lot of schools is that like there is loads of things […] that’s been trialled in lots of schools and failed because it was something that wasn’t right for the – is demographic the right word I’m using? – for your school. So it was like because ‘Oh this is amazing, it’s really brilliant, there is a 100% success rate’ but then it was implemented in a couple of schools and it didn’t work at all, because it wasn’t the right thing for our children. And so that is why I think it needs to be almost engage with the research but almost modelled how to look at research critically, and not just jump on board straight away and implement something that you’ve read is amazing.
An interesting thing was that last week I went on an HMI English lead, just like a short half an hour on what to expect during inspection and a number of teachers there all said we really miss the idea of meeting as a consortium, so meeting together with local schools and I thought back to reflecting what we had said last time, that it is a thing of the old days almost isn’t it, and yet really that is the perfect forum to discuss bits of research that have been useful and I think that is lacking a little bit. We were all talking about, the HMI said where do you get your information from, and various schools said ‘Oh EEF documents and we research bits and pieces’ and it became apparent that really, if you had that sort of forum of a consortium that I think you would get a lot of information out of that as well […]
And really the thing that I think, and I think I’ve said before that’s really missing, is the idea of having a sort of consortium group, so I think back to 10-15 years ago, not even probably that long ago, where you would have the local area English leads would all meet together. You know, you would moderate together but it would end up being much more than that. You would discuss what is the largest in your school and does this work, have you tried this, and that is the best method, hands down.
“I think that as teachers we are very social, and therefore I am the same. I will reflect on it better in a two-way conversation and I think when you’re just starting at a screen or a piece of paper you don’t always fully expand on it and I think that you do need outside prompts to do that […]
This is kind of what I hoped like, listening to [T2] talking about the reading pleasure and then her recommending something for [T11], this is kind of beneficial to me because I think that I’ve found I’m quite tunnel visioned on what I can find, and therefore doing something like the Mural will introduce new research, and I might go and look at that Reading for Pleasure course now that [T2] suggested, so I really hope that is what we can get out of it. And like [T11] said, actually bouncing ideas off of each other with similar minded people. Yeah, I think that is going to be what I get personally most out of this group. I know you guys are doing research on us, but I feel like we’re kind of making links and kind of introducing new things to us via you guys setting this up, if you see what I mean.”
“I saw back at the end of May the Ofsted English research review that was released, so I read that, and then interestingly I read some critique of that and different people’s I guess opinions, but research informed and looking at Ofsted’s use of evidence within their review, which was interesting in itself […]
And I guess reflecting upon what I just said about the English review of Ofsted, I didn’t feel like I had the substantive knowledge to critique that myself, so I was kind of reading that more at face value, because I didn’t have the expertise to critique that, even my own reading for that. I guess it’s interesting. I kind of went in to the English review ready to like to see what the contentious things were.”
