Considering doing some research? Here is how it will help your teaching

By Caroline Dunstan, Lead Learning and Development Practitioner at Riverside College and Research Further Scholar. 

I teach on the PGCE and Cert Ed. in an FE college and my students are now coming to the end of their two-year, part-time course. They recently delivered a final presentation on their teaching journey and within this, they talked about the impact that the practitioner research project they had carried out had on their teaching, their departments and their own identities as teachers. Their comments highlighted to me the power of practitioner research for trainee teachers.

The recent curriculum content guidance from the Department for Education for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in FE has five pillars, one of which is evidence informed practice and highlights that students need to “deliver informed teaching practice” and “recognise that academic research is part of an iterative evolving process”. The guidance recommends the use of retrieval practice, spaced learning, interleaving, dual coding, modelling and collaboration. All current, proven strategies to use, and backed up by evidence. It would be easy to ‘teach’ these strategies and then expect our trainee teachers to use them successfully but, as the guidance itself states, academic research is an “iterative and evolving process”. This is what the research says now but, for example, I was taught learning styles and Blooms Taxonomy on my teacher education course only 10 years ago and the validity of these is now questioned. 

This a good thing, we shouldn’t accept theories or teaching strategies blindly, even when backed up by evidence. As educators, we know that what works for one class might not work for another, what works for one teacher might not work for another, what works in a Monday morning class might not work on a Friday afternoon. Biesta calls this the efficacy deficit of evidence-based practice and suggests that interventions in social situations such as teaching are not mechanistic but non-linear and probabilistic.  Making space in a teacher education course to complete practitioner research allows our trainee teachers to grapple with these problems and to recognise that research is messy and should be challenged, debated and deliberated on. It is easy to provide the ‘recipe’ of successful teaching in the classroom, but we need to “avoid rendering trainees dependent on these recipes”, as Christoforatou puts it, if we want them to continue to question and grow as teachers.

I was so impressed with their explanations of the impact of their research within the presentations that I wanted to share them to highlight its value. I asked my students (a class of six working in engineering, joinery, beauty, ESOL, alternative provision and foundation studies) to complete a quick questionnaire about their practitioner research which included the following questions:

1.    What impact do you think doing your research project had on your teaching practice and on you as a teacher?
2.    Would you recommend taking part in research to other teachers?
3.    If you answered yes, what would you tell them about it?

Some extracts from their answers are below:

"As a new teacher, the research project helped wider thinking, thinking outside the box of the research associated in education, especially when something isn't working, it’s about looking how things can be done differently and what research is already been done to support your project."

"Yes, I would definitely recommend taking part in research to other teachers. It helps you understand your learners more deeply, challenges your assumptions, and gives you evidence to improve your practice. Research makes you more reflective, more confident and more intentional in your teaching. It also strengthens your professional identity because you’re not just delivering lessons — you’re actively improving them based on observation."

"I would recommend other teachers taking part in an action research project with their classes as it allows you to take the time to look into different theorists and reasoning behind why we do things the way we do. It allowed me to make myself slow down within a week and reflect on sessions I taught."

"I would tell them that its interesting, completing my research project had a significant and lasting impact on the way I approach teaching in alternative provision. The process required me to look closely at my own assumptions, routines, and decision making, which made my practice more intentional and evidence informed. Engaging with research helped me to identify what was genuinely effective for my learners rather than relying on habit or intuition."

One of the benefits of teacher education in FE is a group of teachers from a wide range of subjects who have time (and when do teachers ever have time!) to share their experiences of teaching in a safe space. There is much written about the lack of subject specificity in FE teacher education but the rich and deep learning that has come from my student’s conversations around their research projects in completely different subjects is inspiring.  

If we want our teachers in FE to examine and contest the status quo, to challenge current thinking and to be brave enough to try out evidence-based strategies and accept both their value and their limitations then practitioner research for both trainee and qualified teachers should be embraced.