In the Research Conversations podcast series, researchers and teachers come together in conversation to collectively explore different aspects of engaging with literacy research. They draw on their diverse priorities, interests and concerns as they reflect on what their encounters with research are and reimagine what they could be.
You can listen to the episode or read the transcript below to consider their different perspectives when it comes to engaging with research.
“Collaboration is the key”: Embracing researcher/teacher partnerships in literacy research
In this episode, head teacher Emily Edwards and researcher David Shannon discuss some of the barriers and opportunities for teachers engaging with literacy research.
Since teachers have to juggle multiple roles, priorities and pressures in schools, they are rarely able to spend time critically reflecting on/with research. Decreasing opportunities for social interactions with colleagues also means informal opportunities to share new research ideas are lost. Collaborative relationships between universities and schools can offer a way to not only increase teachers’ involvement in research but also enable researchers to embed their work in these communities. Such collaborations can provide both with opportunities to learn from each other.
Listen to the episode here
David Shannon (DS): Hello, my name is David Shannon. I’m a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Emily Edwards (EE): Hi, I’m Emily Edwards. I’m a head teacher of a small one-form-entry primary school currently working in Barnsley.
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DS: I suppose I should probably say at the start that I was a primary school teacher previously. I worked in years 1 and 2 and then in specialist for a bit. So I guess I’m interested in this conversation not just as a scholar, but also as a teacher as well.
EE: We’re going to be talking today about the availability of research for educators and then the directions that research can take us on.
DS: I suppose it might be nice to start to trace some of the barriers that we think are currently in place in terms of teachers accessing or using, making research happen. I suppose Emily, as you’re in practice at the moment, it might be nice to start with you thinking through some of these things.
EE: Absolutely. One of the big barriers that we find in primary schools particularly is the amount of research that is available and the fact that there are so many places that research can be found. However, we tend to be steered to certain published pieces of research and we often find that local authorities pick up research that may be relevant and create courses and encourage attendance on those courses. But what actually happens then is the research can be diluted. And in terms of it being a balanced approach to research, it’s not always celebrated for the positives but also the negatives that can be highlighted from research. So there’s not always a fully accurate picture that’s painted from the research that’s out there. So we have to be really critical because obviously the complexity of research means that you have to be that critical reader, critical thinker and take your own conclusion from it sometimes.
In terms of time, that is a massive barrier in school. And I think that’s why key bits of evidence are then utilised more than others. Because I know personally, I’m drawn to things that have a quick summary that I can read and digest quite easily. And I’m thinking of certain documents – an example will be the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) that produce nice summaries on posters – those are easy to digest and understand. And that is for anybody coming across those – so from ECTs (early career teachers) right through to senior leadership teams and beyond and governors. Whereas some of the other research requires a bit more legwork. And in terms of allocating time to allow staff to choose their own research or to be critical thinkers, I think the curriculums are so jam-packed that any CPD (continuing professional development) time we get, we have to tailor to our school priorities and we go for well-known published research.
DS: It’s interesting what you were saying about the digested version of what the research is and does. As a teacher who was interested in research, I always found those kind of patronising in some ways sometimes. There’s a sense that teachers couldn’t possibly understand the complexity of what this particular study is or does. So here’s the “three easy steps to saving the universe” or whatever it happens to be research about. I remember an example from practice where lesson study became very popular. It was for about 6 weeks in probably 2015, everyone was talking about it and then it vanished. But the version of lesson study that ended up kind of like dribbling through to on the ground stuff was really very different to how I understood lesson study as this kind of like slow, involved, deeply reflective practice. It was more sort of “go and visit someone’s lesson for 10 minutes and then you’ve done lesson study.” And I think that that kind of time, particularly not just in terms of teachers’ workload, but also in terms of giving the research time to ferment or proliferate or whatever it is.
EE: In terms of that though, David, do you think that’s related to people’s training experience? Because again if you’ve already engaged with research as part of teacher training, teacher development, you’ve got an understanding of how that works. Like yourself, you could read and fully understand the full document whereas I feel like some of our ECTs or some teachers that have trained totally differently … Well I qualified in 2002 and the way that I was taught how to teach and the research that was around then is very different to the research that’s available now. And knowing what I now know, I would have taught some lessons, some year groups very differently. And all the new information particularly around cognitive overload and things, it was always there but not maybe as clear as it now currently is.
So in terms of interpretation, I think we might have maybe diverted into a bit of a – as I’m chatting now, it’s making me think of sort of a fast-food culture. That actually something’s been created, like you said, to speed up that process, but actually do we need to look back and think – do we need to make sure that teachers have that fundamental understanding of how to find research, how to engage with research? Because I’m not sure I would have been confident prior to the study group that I’ve been part of with Sheffield Hallam University that I would have felt as comfortable looking at research. And again, the quality and difference in the types of research that is available, that can be a barrier in itself to some people because the more academic looking research papers do put some people off straightaway, whereas the bright, colourful, shiny, “do this in three steps and you’ve got it” can be quite enticing.
DS: I suppose another barrier, thinking back, I remember buying at some random second-hand bookshop a collection of essays around plurilingualism and the early childhood classroom, being excited about these essays and then sort of getting back into the classroom on the Monday or whatever it was, and thinking, “oh, that was nice. How on earth do I find the time or the space to fit this in amongst the statutory obligations and amongst the broader strokes kind of stuff, right?” I suppose the big broad strokes that we have to engage with, the things that we have to do in the classroom often seem to make finding space for the other things that we want to do difficult as well.
EE: Absolutely. I think in primary schools particularly because teachers have to be experts in so many subjects, that it does take away any sort of additional desire maybe to go and research something that they feel passionate about. So, for example, a particular type of SEND (special educational needs or disability) or perhaps something to do with diversity.
Because again, for a school like ours that is predominantly white British, whilst that might be of interest to somebody, it might not actually impact on their work in the classroom because that’s not something they’re necessarily coming across. Now, there is an argument where you could say that actually because we are white British, then we should be doing more research around how to build that in. But because teachers are spending so much time preparing lessons, the assessment, the pastoral implications that we currently have for the children that we need to support that have social, emotional and mental health issues, that takes up a whole chunk of time that perhaps previously we would have used to discuss research or talk about things in the staff room.
I was saying to a colleague just the other day that actually, gone are the days where at lunchtime you go and sit and have a conversation in the staffroom. And that hour is now spent either doing some kind of duty supporting children or it’s marking so that you don’t have as much work to take home or it’s preparing for your next lessons, getting the afternoon ready. So that social engagement where you might have said, “oh I saw this about research in English last night and what do you think about it?”, I think we have lost an element of that. And I know after school as well, people tend to stay in their own classrooms and don’t go and get a drink.
DS: CPOMS logs.
EE: Yeah, absolutely updating all the CPOMS logs, I 100% agree. But that’s taken away the social element where actually bits of research might have been shared more informally. So again, that whole premise of engaging with research is now a big thing. So it takes a lot of thought and then I know for me as head, when I was planning out my sort of staff meeting agendas and CPD, I very much wanted to include research on my calendar, on my monitoring calendar. However, the pressure that it then put on for me to make sure I’ve got the right pieces of research, the right thing we were talking about, that I was selecting from a breadth of evidence available – a bit like you mentioned earlier David the fact that I’m not making assumptions of what other people are bringing to that research. Because again if it’s just me selecting that research to share, then I’ve got my own biases that I then bring to that.
So yeah, it feels like as a profession, we’ve lost some natural curiosity because of the amount of other things we’re having to do. And I think that is such a shame at the moment because there are so many wonderful pieces of evidence and research out there that could impact quite positively. But we need to think of a way to make sure that we’re accessing that and we’re engaging with it properly. And like you said, not just taking sort of a pocketed version of it that is then stopping us getting the full message. Because I totally agree with what you said about lesson study that actually you read something, you try it, and then when you re-engage with the information afterwards you think, “well actually it’s not had the impact. Why hasn’t it?” And actually, it’s because the version I’ve done is a massively watered-down version that I’ve not quite understood.
DS: Yeah. I suppose in thinking about this conversation before, I was thinking about the pressures on time and the pressures on curriculum and the statutory stuff, you know. So I’m reading this study that’s about alternative methods of early decoding, for instance. It’s probably not going to be something you can apply in the classroom – something that says “stop teaching maths” it’s probably not something you can apply in the classroom, right? Those kind of broad strokes things are off the table in some ways. But I was kind of thinking about the potential for the smaller stuff, more the nuances of how than the specificities of what I guess.
I was thinking back to probably the last piece of research I took into the classroom – which would have been about 2022 I suppose – was about computer fonts, and accessibility of computer fonts. And so I did a big trawl through – and again, relying on my privilege of time as somebody who’s working at the university part-time, the privilege of other kinds of space to do that kind of thinking – but yeah, it wasn’t so much about what we’re doing, but the how-ness.
EE: Yeah, it’s a good point. I think though to get the how, you still have to have that time to know the research and to get there. And I think if we presented people with the research and sort of said, “so how can you implement this and what can you change in the classroom?”, I think the fact that you still need to have that piece of research initially in order to do that – I think that’s the biggest barrier. Because again, I think you mentioned it earlier, it seems to be very cyclical and something comes into fashion. I’m thinking of research around things like brain gym and like you said, lesson study that came in and everybody was saying, “oh, it’s the new thing, it’s the new craze!” And then everybody gets on board with it and starts doing it and then it’s not until further research comes out or a different piece of research is unveiled that suddenly we realise that: why did we do that? And again if we implement little things as the how, are we in danger of implementing the wrong thing?
DS: If there were next steps or positives that we might find around kind of the specificity of individual classrooms or the specificity of individual contexts … I suppose one of the things that we’ve been talking about on the ReMPLE project (Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education) is the possibilities for universities working in closer partnerships or with individual settings. The big things are what they are. They’re there, we can’t change them. We probably aren’t going to rewrite the national curriculum anytime soon, for better or worse. So if that stuff’s not movable, then what are the local things that schools do want to work on, want to build solidarity around?
And there’s a book that I’ve very much appreciated by two scholars – the book by Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly, it’s called Anti-racist scholar-activism. And they’re very much interested in well, advocating for researchers kind of embedding themselves in communities and identifying research priorities in a community, not like having an idea and then descending. And that kind of collaborative work is something that I think is very possible. Universities want to contribute to what schools do; schools want new ideas, want new things to think about and do alongside the things that have to be done.
EE: No, I think that is the way in to be honest. I think again in terms of schools contributing to research and research being formed in and alongside, I think whenever there’s collaboration, it always results in a better outcome than if something is “done to”. And I think that “authority, power over” type of structure, it will always have some people engaging, some people not. Whereas if we can get that collaboration between universities and schools or local areas, that will definitely have a better impact.
Like you said, it possibly would be more relevant, it possibly would enable a freedom of what is relevant for that area or for that school. There are certain things that I think nationally would likely flag as things that need developing. But in terms of the suggestion that you’ve just mentioned, it is something that I now want to go and buy the book.
DS: Lovely, it’s lovely.
EE: Because, again in terms of having time to go away and look at that, and then being able to work alongside somebody else that’s also shared that same piece, and a collaboration of what are the next steps and putting that in … like I said, I think that would be received much more positively as well by everybody in the setting.
DS: I guess I’ve been thinking about that a little bit in my own research I mentioned before, about special education. And so we’re having an event in a few weeks, it’s bringing researchers together with a few colleagues from special schools, a few colleagues from mainstream schools, some speech and language therapists, some artist activists. And we’re having a conversation about what it should be, what should we be doing, what can university be providing, what do schools want rather than it being that extractive kind of research that is something that Anti-racist scholar-activist speaks back to or against.
EE: I think collaboration is the key. And I think it needs to be built in so that it becomes a natural process amongst education that actually we work together with research. It shouldn’t be an either/or situation. It should be forming policy and it should be forming what we do in schools, whether that is the stuff that we can’t change or whether it is things that we do in addition. Because it is so valuable and everybody having that commitment for the research to have the impact and knowing what that looks like.
DS: I don’t think we’ve also thought very much as a profession – well as either profession really – but the classrooms are also complex and the research might very well say … yeah, I’m thinking, what’s an example … displays, for instance. So you know, we have all this different research that said different kinds of displays work really well for children with different capacities and different abilities. And so as somebody who was doing specialist for instance, I was always kind of into less stuff on the walls, less stimulating stuff, less of the sort of neon plastic wrap stuff – that’s really important though for other kinds of settings.
For other groups of children, it says, actually no, we need more displays, we need more of these kinds of displays, we need handwritten displays. And I think while we talked a lot about the research being complex and saying different things, we haven’t really thought through the ways in which classrooms are complex and need different things that often are in conflict with each other. Displays being one very, very silly example of that. [laughs] But I’m sure there’s an unlimited number of other better examples that we could think about.
EE: It’s not a silly example at all. It’s absolutely a perfect indicator of the complexity to be honest. And this is where doing something like this is really helpful because actually that is what I talk about on a daily basis. So those are the kind of conversations about what your classroom environment looks like, about how you’re supporting specific children, about resourcing for specific children and how that might change given certain needs. Those are the things that when I come to the table and discuss things like this, I kind of forget because I’m just doing them all the time and they are always thoughts that I’m having – so in terms of adaptive strategies, thinking about how we adapt everything for everyone we come across. You fall into the habit of assuming that everybody knows your norm and everybody knows what thought processes you go through every day.
And again this is possibly my insecurities but because I wasn’t necessarily an academic when I studied to be a teacher, like I said, I am that person that some of the research might put me off. I want to go away and research things, I want our policy, our improvement plan to be based on that. And even things like display policies and classroom environment policies and lesson structure policies – I want all of those things to be based in evidence and research. It’s making sure that – again, coming back to that collaboration – that it’s not just us going out on a limb saying, “this is one piece of research I’ve found that I’m going to hang my hat on and I’m going to by hook or by crook make sure everybody in my school is doing this.” Because actually that might not be the right thing to do.
And it’s having that flexibility I think to make sure that you’re constantly keeping abreast of new research, new evidence that’s coming out, making sure that collaborations continue to happen so you can have critical friends, so that we can have conversations like this that actually make you go away and think, “oh, that’s something else I should be looking into” rather than just thinking, “no, I’ve got it! It’s sussed, it’s on a document, it’s in policy now. This is what happens in my school.”
I think it’s really important that people engage with things like this and have the time to consider things and make the time to consider changing things. Because we can always say time is a barrier. However, I feel like we have a golden opportunity here to learn from each other. And fundamentally, that’s what we tell our children in our class to do as a support mechanism. So we’re missing a trick if we don’t also do that as educators.
DS: I think it’s interesting what you said that you didn’t think of yourself as being an academic kind of person. Because I didn’t either right. My PGCE I was like, I cannot wait for this to be over so I can get back to normal life like normal life was somehow waiting for me post. And something seems to have stuck. And I know what it was – I was thinking when you were speaking and I know what it was that stuck. I had this little boy in my first school and I loved that school but this one young man, it simply wasn’t working there was something that wasn’t working out for him. And you know, we did all of the things that are supposed to work when you’ve got challenging behaviour and it wasn’t working. There was something that was amiss somewhere.
And that was where I first got into research was because of this young person. I was like, there’s something happening here that’s very, very specific, but there must be a more generalised something; someone somewhere must have had these kinds of things happen in the classroom and they didn’t just give out more stickers as the solution to it. And yeah, that’s kind of what started my research journey.
EE: Did you identify that at the time then that’s what you were doing that you were delving into research? Or did you think, “I’m just trying to help this young man and I’m just doing everything in my power”? Because I think that if you framed it as research and framed it as, “I’m going to go down a certain path” that might detract from actually, what we’re trying to do is find solutions to problems as they arise.
DS: Yeah. We had this EP, this educational psychologist, who was wonderful – and terrifying too, but you know sometimes that’s a good quality to have in an educational psychologist – and she recommended a book to me. And I was like, “oh, people write books!” That was literally my thought like, “people write books about what happens in schools, who’d have thought?” And then there’s a references list and I was like – god knows how I got through my PGCE if that was the thing that I thought when I read, that people write books!
EE: I was going to say, did your lecturers not promote their books? [laughs]
DS: Yeah, we wrote essays, I’m sure I referenced something at some point. Yeah, they definitely always talked about their own book. I don’t know. I just kind of thought it was separate somehow to what schools were about. And I was like, oh someone has written a book. I got really excited that there was other stuff that happened elsewhere in the world that might be relevant if I kind of reflected and applied it.
EE: But if you were forced to do that –
DS: [laughs]
EE: If your headteacher said, “right, this staff meeting you are going to look at this research”, like you said, you did it to solve the problem, which I think is what sparked your passion for it. And I feel like we do have a slight danger of – knowing that research is the way we should be headed, us crowbarring it.
DS: Yeah.
EE: And it’s like reading for pleasure, isn’t it? The minute you say, “right, we’re going to teach reading for pleasure. Everybody get out your book and everybody you shall read in this environment, at this time, in this style, sat on that chair – and that’s how you read for pleasure.” Actually, that’s quite the opposite. I’d go to the example of when we teach reading, we talk about reading for pleasure. But then after every text, we absolutely grill the children on their understanding of the text. So actually, are they enjoying it? Or are they thinking, “I’m going to be asking questions or answering questions on this text so I’d better understand it!” And actually, when you read for pleasure, nobody comes and then says, “right on chapter 3, find me a word that means …” And that’s what we do!
And actually, in terms of engaging with research, like I said, it really resonated that you used research to go and find the solution to improve your classroom practice and that was organic and it sparked a passion and it will have had a massive impact I’m sure. Whereas I think sometimes the forced nature of it could have the opposite impact. So again it’s something else to just be mindful of.
In terms of going back to the collaboration, which I think is an amazing suggestion of how to utilise it and how to really promote the use of the fact that if we collaborated to identify the problems first, and then found that shared research that’s available and then have a discussion like this. Because again, we’ve already mentioned, people bring different things from that research and interpret it differently.
DS: I remember actually every 12 months, there’d be a new maths intervention that was based on really, really solid research. And we’d do it once and it was amazing and then like someone would lose the book or something. Or then “oh we’ve got some researcher coming in” and I was like, “Oh! Another one?” Because there was that many. It was like another messiah to come and save us rather than just being another gizmo. And that was forced though, right. So again, without the impetus to want to do it yourself.
EE: I think it’s like everything, isn’t it? You can’t force somebody to engage with somebody and implement it fully if they’re not passionate about it and if they’ve not got that desire to want to do that. So it is something that we maybe need to consider as school leaders; that actually just because we’re interested in research … and again I’m very mindful when I bring in new things like interventions – it’s not a maths one every week, don’t worry – [laughter]. But when we bring in new interventions and things that actually, we do know the research behind it and we can justify why.
And I suppose that does circle us back around to the fact that we do utilise things like the EEF implementation toolkit so that we are constantly doing those Plan, Do, Review cycles and making sure that when we do introduce something new – be it research, be it an intervention, be it a way to communicate with staff around things like this – that we just think about maintaining and sustaining it. And it’s not just a flash in the pan that then actually gets forgotten about and it becomes a bit of a fad that people hook into for a certain period of time but then step away from. Should we see it more as a scaffold like we do for learning? We dip into it when we need it to answer a problem but we’re not over reliant on it all the time. And actually if things are working well, can we leave them and look to the bigger picture like you’ve said in terms of other research that’s out there?
DS: It’s interesting that you mentioned the Plan, Do, Review part of the EEF toolkit because I think one of the things – when I was a SENDCO (special educational needs and/or disabilities coordinator) that directed other colleagues perhaps to doing their own research project for those who were interested in research – was the graduated approach. That we’d kind of sit, we’d look at something that happened, we’d think about it – not so much when there was like, I’ll get down Toe By Toe (well-known dyslexia intervention) or something like that kind of thing – but there’s some kind of nuance in the classroom that’s not gelling quite right at the moment. And in those moments sort of sitting and discussing and reflecting on that kind of thinking and then thinking, “well, somebody else has probably had this problem, right? So how can we go about …?” That sort of space for reflection is another possible avenue for research to make its way into schools.
If you happen to be listening to this as a teacher or as a teacher educator or as a university person, then, you know, reach out to each other, right? If you’re working in a school and you’re interested in research, reach out to a university. I can’t imagine a university on the planet that wouldn’t be excited about the possibility of some collaboration. So, don’t feel you have to wait for some kind of thing to descend. Just email some random person at the university and see what they say. Because I guarantee they’ll be interested in partnership.
EE: And similarly schools would be absolutely interested in partnerships. And my final parting shot would be don’t give up. If you don’t get a reply, try someone else. Because again, the power of the conversation that you have is what does spark those additional thoughts that then can have a massive impact.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me this afternoon, David. It’s been really, really helpful. And it’s definitely made me start to think about some of the things as well. So I know that I will be going away from this and looking at some of the research that I can get involved with. So thank you.
DS: No, likewise. I feel energised about the possibilities about doing research even when the environment seems less research-friendly. So yeah, thank you for your time.
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