Research School Network: A day in the life the Aspirer Research School – Megan Dixon, Director of Research School

My day started with a quick review of emails and I was delighted to see the most recent edition of Best Evidence in Brief in my Inbox. I find this fortnightly email is so helpful, in keeping up to date with newly published evidence.

I always have a book on the go – I am currently reading Mobilising Teacher Researchers, edited by Ann Childs and Ian Menter (Routledge, 2017). This book shares the the findings from the Closing the Gap Test and Learn Studies. I am thoroughly enjoying the chapter by Prof Steve Higgins on the role randomised controlled trials (rct) in educational research.

We are excited to be involved in another project with Richard Churches from the Education Development Trust, designing and running an RCT exploring the impact of distributed practice on learning maths in the Early Years.

In the morning, I worked directly with other members of the Research School team. We have lots of new CPD opportunities planned for the Spring term, 2018 and we got down to some serious planning and preparation. Using the Teacher CPD standards, What Makes Great Teaching and some other materials, we are always looking to underpin our training with practices, principles and protocols about what makes effective training. The courses we are planning at the moment all provide multiple, recursive opportunities to revisit key ideas and core themes. All face to face training days are interspersed with less formal coaching opportunities, either in small groups or individually. Although this seems to take more time, the impact is evident. In the light of the newly published reports from the EEF, showing no impact on pupil outcomes for lighter touch approaches to

Later on, we started working on the webinar series we are developing. We hope to be able to run regular short webinars, around themes of interest, with the teachers across our trust to exemplify what these ideas look like in practice. Watch this space!

My afternoon was spent with a group of fantastic Early Years teachers, exploring the evidence around the teaching of reading. Together we looked at the newly updated EEF Year Early Toolkit, and then used this excellent summary of research from the What Works Clearinghouse in the US. We explored what it might look like in the classroom when we use this evidence to underpin our teaching. The highlight for me was being able to facilitate the observation of the evidence in practice, as a colleague taught for us. It is such an amazing experience to be able to observe live teaching in a training situation. Of course, with so much of the evidence, as Prof Steve Higgins says, ​‘it ain’t what you do, it is the way that you do it’ and there is nothing better than being able to consider this in a live teaching situation.

I finished the day attending the launch of the new Research School in Stoke-on-Trent, It was wonderful to see so many teachers, leaders and other members of the community there. It is exciting to be able to work with this new Research School, helping them to get established. We have learnt so much from our first year as a Research School and it is great to be able to share and help them avoid some of the pitfalls we fell into!