Research Says...

28 January, 2022 —
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Research Says…

Presenting information from a credible source in CPD.

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by Bradford Research School
on the 28th January 2022

Where information is derived from impacts how motivated teachers are to use it. The more credible the source, the more likely they are to change their practice.
Albert Einstein

This quotation isn’t from Einstein, I’m afraid. It actually comes from the EEF’s Improving Professional Development guidance report. And it’s part of Mechanism 4: Presenting information from a credible source, which recommends that If we want teachers to be motivated enough to benefit from our professional development, we need to think carefully about how we make the case for our desired change. Using credible sources to back up our messages can help.

What constitutes a credible source? According to the guidance:

supporting a suggestion with published and robust research;
featuring a prominent education academic to advocate for a change;
using an expert teacher to promote a particular practice.

How do we do this in a way that isn’t tokenistic or even manipulative?

Research Says…

Beware this phrase. Or even ‘The Research says…’. The truth is that research says a lot of things, and it isn’t even that difficult to cherry pick evidence that will back up a claim. You want to advocate for Knowledge Organisers? No problem, here’s an article from the Head of Bradford Research School no less in the Chartered College’s Impact Journal. Now you want to dismiss Knowledge Organisers? Well, the Institute for Effective Education published some research in 2019 that showed a negative impact on attainment.

If our goal is to simply find the evidence only to support what we were doing anyway, that’s not in the spirit of this mechanism. Better that we explore the evidence beforehand to help give us a steer as to the best approach. And even when we are fairly committed to a course of action and exploring the evidence retrospectively, we can look for the evidence around effective implementation, possible lethal mutations etc. We can move from blanket phrases like “Research says” to, “It’s likely that…”, “To give this the best chance of success, we should…”.

And we can also be honest about what research doesn’t say and what we don’t know.

The EEF says…

If we want to add credibility to our PD, we might also cite a trusted source, such as the EEF. A school looking to review its parental engagement work can refer to evidence from the Working With Parents to Support Children’s Learning guidance report for example. Again, it should never be an add-on. We shouldn’t be searching through the website after we’ve designed our whole package of interventions for the cherry of research on top.

The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit could be abused in this way. If I wanted to add credibility to a ‘learning to learn’ lesson being added to the timetable, I could claim claim that the EEF endorse the approach as the impact is +7 months progress. The reality: “Metacognition and self-regulation strategies are most effective when embedded in a school’s curriculum and a specific subject lesson. For example, teaching metacognitive strategies to self-evaluate an essay in history will prove different to a pupil evaluating their methods for mathematical problem solving.” This is not to say we are disingenuous on purpose, just to be careful before grasping for a bit of research to add to our slides.

And we also need to keep up to date with the latest evidence. You have only to look at some of the recent changes to the EEF toolkit, and updates to guidance reports, to know that what the EEF ‘say’ will change as the evidence does.

Professor __________ says…

While it is true that we are more likely to believe if the message is reiterated by a ‘prominent academic’ or ‘expert teacher’ (I would add ‘author’ and ‘Teacher Twitterati’ to that list), we still need view our sources critically, and examine what they are claiming as well as who they are. But prominent voices are often experts who have built credibility over time. There are many experts who we can go to because we trust their methods as well as their conclusions. If someone has published a book on a subject, it doesn’t automatically make them an expert, but it does give us an indication that they have researched the topic and wrestled with recommendations and conclusions.

(And people can be a credible source without the prominence.)

We definitely should show our working, and draw attention to the evidence that informs our approaches. But if it is an afterthought, it will be nothing more than an additional slide on a powerpoint or line in a policy. If you are exploring that evidence, communicating it clearly and implementing it effectively, the credible source is you.

Mark Miller is Director of Bradford Research School

See the full list of mechanisms below, and the other blogs in the series.