How research and development connects school and academic research

Today Mark Quinn of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education tells us about his journey to connect school and academic research.

Where it began

In 2017 I drew my 22 year school teaching career to a close and started my new one, working on research and development (R&D) for the London Centre for Leadership in Learning (LCLL) at the UCL Institute of Education. The chasm between the classroom and the world of academia did not seem so large as, for the last few years, I had been thinking hard about how one connects to the other.

Schools routinely collect all sorts of data, either because they think Ofsted will want it or because they expect that measuring a thing will magically increase the size of it. Teachers track their students’ progress through marking and assessments, and they record this centrally so that senior leaders can compare where students actually are with where they are meant to be. Leaders observe lessons, whether to check compliance with the school’s approved model or to gather examples of good practice to share with others. Learning walks, teacher rounds, subject reviews, book looks, mocksteds: the sheer ingenuity the profession has for monitoring itself is impressive.

As an assistant headteacher I was doing much of this monitoring myself. I had some niggling concerns. Was all this data we were collecting reliably and validly telling us anything? Were our review systems making a positive difference to our students’ outcomes? Did our teachers learn anything from being monitored, so that they could say they were getting any better at their jobs? It occurred to me that an educational researcher – someone trained in the science of asking the right questions in the right way in order to find answers that could be understood – someone like that would love to get their hands on data like ours. I realised early on that I wasn’t going to find such a person hanging around a university; I was going to have to build one myself.

Build your own researcher

What was a hunch back then grew into my job now. I realised that the best way to learn the science of ‘asking the right questions in the right way’ was to practise it through practitioner enquiry, or action research. Collaborating with our local university, I started tutoring fellow teachers in research methods so that they could acquire their Masters. From that cohort I recruited two as ‘research co-ordinators’, who could assist the leadership team in designing our quality reviews, so that we were more careful about the questions we wanted to find answers to, and smarter about the evidence we would gather. We conducted a wide range of enquiries, from better ways to revise to methods to increase engagement, the impact of labelling the ‘gifted’ to approaches to improve literacy. Along the way, we built capacity in the school to better access and interpret the academic research that has recently become more available through the likes of the Education Endowment Foundation.

‘Building capacity’ may stand as my job description in the LCLL now. Sometimes we are commissioned by nationwide training providers, sometimes by groups of schools in trusts or local authorities, and sometimes by individual schools. In every case, the teacher we work with ‘in the room’ is only the start of the process: our aim is for them to acquire the research and development skills and confidence to lead their colleagues, so that the whole staffroom becomes research savvy, and so that all of their students may benefit from research-informed teachers.

Biography

Mark Quinn taught history in London schools from 1995 to 2017. He is currently collaborating with the UCL Access and Widening Participation Office on two research and development programmes: a Teacher Action Research Project, and a Verbal Feedback project. He tweets @MarkQuinn1968 and blogs at markquinn1968.wordpress.com