Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education (2016) by Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher. It is reprinted with permission of the authors.
Teachers are researchers. They collect enormous amounts of data each day, and they rapidly evaluate and make decisions based on this data. Some of this work is numerical, but much is qualitative. Teachers may be second only to doctors in doing this. What teachers are not good at is doing anything formal with this data. Like a cup sitting under a running tap, more and more information is constantly flowing in, too much to hold. All this data could, however, be used as evidence to inform practice.
Teachers have long been involved in the field of education research. Ironically, however, it is almost always as the subject —a fish inside a bowl — and rarely as, or in collaboration with, the researcher. Again, this is a missed opportunity to inform practice.
Teaching as a profession is also notoriously bad at embedding professional development in the core of how it operates. A review by the Teacher Development Trust found that only 1 percent of continuing professional development delivered to teachers was high quality. Our students spend more than 1,000 hours a year learning to get better at their core knowledge and skills; it is rare that a teacher will get above 30 hours a year.
Problems of quality and allotted time exist. A comparison to the medical world is interesting, and so here is a story of a radiation oncologist we know at a major New York City hospital. It is a high-paced, high-stakes department with time pressure to see patients and give them high-quality time and care. Given this time pressure, how do you think they start each day? With a one-hour professional development talk or workshop.
The importance of being current with research, the importance of all people on the team at all points in their professional careers feeling as if they are keeping at the cutting edge of a dynamic field, means that precious time is put aside to do this. This is important time, and it needs to be scheduled in. So a schedule is created that gives value to having up-to-date research, and best practices informed by this research, at the core of what you do. This is what it means to be a professional. By this standard, teaching does not do well. At a workshop we gave, we heard the phrase, “schedule what you value,” which may be an interesting starting point to evaluate your own school.
Imagine a school that put some regular time aside for high-quality professional development and made it a core part of who they were and what they did. Lucy Crehan,1 who has studied, worked with, and lived with teachers in countries that are widely considered to have great education systems, notes that time put aside for collaborative professional development is a common feature of these schools. It does not have to be every day, but it does have to be frequent and regular.
Let us think about the role of teachers here. The most important factor is not their being a consumer of information on up-to-date, research-informed methodology, good though this is. Rather, their role is being the providers of this information, based on collaborative work with their colleagues. It encourages reflective, iterative practice, informed by research and done in collaborative fashion. This is high on the list of “most important things to do” for teaching as a profession that needs to professionalize itself.
To aid this shift, there is a need to create routine, low-threat, easily doable opportunities for teachers to present research-informed methodology. Some teachers occasionally present at conferences, and while this is good, it is not good enough; it is the wrong type of scale for widespread use. Presenting at a conference of 5,000 people with 30 concurrent sessions, you may well have only 50 people in the room — an audience size that most schools themselves could exceed. Reflective, iterative, collaborative, research-informed practice that is then disseminated is one of the factors that characterizes professional professions. It is time we found ways to put it at the heart of teaching.
The research could be a classroom translation or application of methodologies outlined in, preferably peer-reviewed, literature, or it could be novel research conducted by the teacher or cohorts of teachers in a school, or a combination of both. This is a little different from the standard teacher-conference presentation, which tends to be “this is very cool/effective/both, let me show you what I do.” It needs to go further: this is the research behind why this works; or this is the qualitative and/or quantitative data I got from my class that illustrate how it is working.
One reason for doing so is that academic research only takes a teacher so far — it gives good avenues and good strategies to explore, but exactly what these look like in the context of any particular classroom is work for teachers, individually or in small groups, to figure out. Doing so and sharing what you find is good work.
Another reason for doing so is that teaching needs to be more research-informed — especially at this time when research exists on how learning might best occur. One of our favorite riffs comes from Carl Hendrick, head of research at Wellington College, an independent eighth- to twelfth-grade school in the United Kingdom. Hendrick uses the analogy of a doctor who still uses leeches to treat patients, and when questioned on it, hold up his or her hands and says, “Works for me.” This is not good enough.
As Professor Rob Coe at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, an important advocate for finding and using evidence to help inform decisions in education, said, “The problem with what’s obvious is that it is often wrong.” There are many leeches in the standard teaching canon, many preconceptions that do not hold up to evidence. Let us build a profession on something more solid than leeches.
Oral presentations, research poster sessions, written publications, online media — the format of the research presentation does not matter as much as the transformative nature of the process. Teachers doing research — or, if you prefer, reflective iterative practice— is the key principle. Three elements elevate this:
• cohorts of research teachers in school to collaborate together, support each other, and help provide a corner of creative buzz;
• access to scheduled, regular opportunities to disseminate their findings to a wider audience to aid motivation; and
• access to a mentor, either in person, online, or both, to play the professor-to-grad-student role, aiding with both the research process and content knowledge.
All these factors help embed research as a routine part of the profession of being a teacher, getting us closer to the medical model of what it means to be a professional in a dynamic field where being at the cutting edge of what is known makes a critical difference.
Who organizes this? Who helps teachers find relevant research literature to bring into their work? Who helps teachers create research processes that are both workable and will provide meaningful results? Who helps teachers to find the meaning of the results they gather? Who helps bridge the worlds of academic research and classroom practice? This work creates an interesting role in a school: “Head of Research,” a title first introduced to us by Hendrick. “Research Lead” is another title that is starting to emerge, predominantly in secondary schools.
What a great role to which a teacher can aspire! Think of the skills and knowledge a teacher needs to build to fulfill this role and the things he or she could do. Think of the possibilities for this role in a school district where you have the opportunity to create networks of educators, spanning disciples, grade levels, and schools, who want to be at the cutting edge of a dynamic field.
Who supports this work? There is a potential here to build two-way relationships between schools and universities and other foundations or trusts engaged in education research. These institutions gain from an increased opportunity to discover real-world research questions worthy of investigation, as well as having access to schools in which to conduct research. Schools benefit from expertise, gateways into the research literature, and the possibility of having expert research conducted on questions that matter to the schools’ missions.
The education world gains from having new ideas and the latest research brought into the realm of classroom teaching, rather than the current pattern that mostly just sees a recirculation of existing ideas. One great example is Research Schools International, a program run by individual faculty from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, with whom we at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (Maryland) partner. Research partnerships also have the potential for helping schools develop their own protocols for conducting a level of research-informed iterative practice that lies somewhere between peer-reviewed-journal-level research and “reflective practice” that is done in some schools.
Bringing new ideas in education is vital, especially as there are disciplines with ideas that need to be brought in, ideas that will lead to better teaching and better learning for all students.
The Focus of Teacher Research
What could this research focus on? We suggest two strands: (1) teaching strategies informed by mind, brain, and education (MBE) science, to which our book Neuroteach is devoted; and (2) curriculum understanding.
The idea fits with another beacon of education theory, the “instructional core” proposed by Harvard’s Richard Elmore and his cowriters in their 2009 book, Instructional Rounds in Education. In it, they outline how the quality of instruction depends on the relationships among teachers, content, and students, as shown in the sidebar on page 105. But focus on the lines, not the circles. The really important, and perhaps counterintuitive, point to note is that it is the relationship between pairs that is the most important element — the lines — rather than the quality of each individual component part — the circles.
The critical relationship that all teachers are trying to impact is the one between the student and the content— this is learning. In order to do this, our teacher research model works to strengthen the two relationships that the teacher can directly control:
- teaching strategies informed by MBE science: strengthens the teacher-student relationship; and
- curriculum understanding: strengthens the teacher-content relationship.
To improve learning, professional development must focus on both. The goal — here and in our book— is to start you on your journey. In addition, the teacher-student relationship stresses the importance of teachers really knowing each of the students— their current strengths, their current weaknesses, their developing voice, and the stories that each of them brings to the class. Growing these skills should be a focus of professional development, too.
Research tells us that teachers having knowledge of MBE science leads to increased differentiation of teaching and better learning. But there is an important second step. As Coe at Durham University made stick in our minds, that strategy might seem effective at improving learning, “but where is the evidence?” We can make both these steps happen by creating a model where being a teacher researcher is a normal, everyday thing, and where there are avenues and supports that make this work. We demand this of medical practitioners. We do not demand it of the people in charge of the environments that have a great effect on how our children’s brains rewire and develop. This is wrong. Learning would be improved for all students if we did.
Note
1. Lucy Crehan. Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World’s Education Superpowers (2016).