Evidence based teaching – Who has time for education research?
Your schedule may be packed, but enrolling in research trials is a worthy and highly rewarding use of any school’s time, says the EEF…
Teachers are the ultimate multitaskers. Over the course of a week, day or even the same lesson they’ll wear many different hats – from subject specialist to behaviour management expert.
This ensures the children in their care receive the best chance of success.
With so many competing priorities and only finite resources, teachers need ready access to information that can help them maximise the impact of their practice and the time they have with their pupils.
How research helps with evidence based teaching
Education research puts popular teaching and learning approaches and programmes under the microscope and evaluates their impact on pupil outcomes.
This allows school leaders to identify initiatives that have been successful in previous lessons. They can gain insights that can bolster their professional expertise and guide their decision making around what might be effective in their setting.
It also helps us weed out those initiatives that show little to no evidence of impact. This means that you can direct resources towards those strategies most likely to succeed.
Communal library
Over time, the broader evidence based teaching pool will grow with every new piece of research, creating a communal library that documents what works and what doesn’t. Under what circumstances might a given approach work best? For whom? And what are the costs likely to involve?
Education research is complicated. It can be challenging to conduct robust studies amid the everyday realities of a typical classroom. However, that shouldn’t put us off.
The more research we gather, the more we learn. And not just about which approaches are effective, but how those initiatives should be best implemented.
At the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a core part of our work involves testing the effectiveness of teaching and learning approaches. We commission independent research teams to undertake robust evaluations, so that teachers and school leaders know their options when considering if and how to implement a new approach.
We’re always looking for schools to take part in our trials. We conduct most of our evaluations through randomised controlled trials. This means we randomly assign schools to one of two groups – a ‘delivery’ group that will implement the approach being tested, or a control group that continues teaching as normal.
We will also scale up programmes that have previously shown a positive impact on pupil progress. This means that more schools can benefit from them. This gives schools opportunities to deliver programmes with proven track records of having had a positive impact on pupil learning, at a subsidised rate.
Why take part?
Schools that take part in research projects and trials make a valuable contribution to the education evidence based teaching pool. They help support the profession as a whole improve standards of teaching and learning.
Most EEF-funded projects involve high-quality professional development and support resources. We contribute towards the delivery costs of all our projects, letting you access high-potential programmes at a heavily subsidised rate.
Even schools assigned to control groups can benefit in the form of incentive payments for taking part. By building up the evidence based teaching pool together, we can drive improvements in practice right across the sector.
Now testing
• Your school could take part in Embedding Formative Assessment. This programme improves outcomes by embedding school-wide formative assessment strategies.
• Alternatively, you could consider signing up for our forthcoming trial of English Mastery. Test the impact of a knowledge-rich KS3 English curriculum.
Find out which trials you could join, and which subsidised programmes are on offer where you are, by visiting educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk or following @EducEndowFoundn; you can also sign up to our EEF News Alerts for details of other projects we’ll be launching over the next few months.
