Teachers as researchers

We are good teachers precisely because we don’t have one tried-and-true method, says Guy Claxton...

Many people seem to think education is like medicine, and ought to be ‘evidence-based’ in the same way. We should figure out plausible ideas about ‘what works’ in classrooms, and then submit them to large-scale randomised control trials to see if our method is better than some ‘control group’. But I don’t think this is either possible or desirable. I think teachers should be researchers – but in a very different sense. Let me explain.

First of all, this model assumes there are simple cause-and-effect relationships waiting to be discovered. But that isn’t true even in medicine. The methodology only works if all the ‘bodies’ in your sample can be treated as if they were alike – and they aren’t. The effects – and side-effects – of drugs vary widely from person to person, and are even influenced by those people’s behaviours and beliefs. Drugs don’t just cause a reliable ‘response’ to a ‘stimulus’; they impact upon a highly complicated mind-body system that can react in all kinds of ways. And if this is true for medical treatments, how much more true is it of those complex mind-body systems we find in schools and classrooms? Teachers can adopt a new textbook or seating arrangement, but the impact on the children or students is, as we all know, highly variable. Whatever you do differently, some of them will love it and some will be anxious or resistant, at least to start with. And just when you think you have cracked the way to make best use of, for example, some Building Learning Power (BLP) technique – along comes another year group who react quite differently, and you have to go back to the drawing board! Exploring the effectiveness of any change to teaching and learning is not, and can never be, an exact science. Any attempt to make it so will require you to radically misrepresent the nature of children and how they learn.

But we can and do make experiments in our own classrooms all the time, and we are better teachers for it. As both John Hattie and Dylan Wiliam have argued, we need to be keen observers of the effects of our teaching on children, and to keep tinkering with the way we talk, or the way we organise activities, in response to those observations. We are good teachers precisely because we don’t have one tried-and-true method that we plough on with regardless. The formative feedback that one child needs may be quite subtle and individual, and we can only make a good guess about what that might be if we take the trouble to watch and listen carefully to what that child is telling us (often non-verbally) about the particular nature of her difficulty.

But though all kids are different, every class quickly develops a mood or a culture which comes to narrow the bandwidth of the children’s diversity. (There may well be a few ‘outliers’, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them, who buck these cultural norms, but mostly they are small in number.) And we, as teachers, help to shape those norms, and also become more attuned to what they are. So we can treat 30 children as a group, and design activities that stand a good chance of working for most, if not all, of them – provided we are always on the lookout for the inevitable occasions when they don’t. And this means we can, up to a point, be experimenters with our teaching methods and strategies at a whole class level, and make cumulative progress in developing our own pedagogical habits.

In the context of BLP, we might introduce the children to the idea of learning logbooks, and look to see if using them helps the children become more reflective and thoughtful about managing their own learning. We might teach the children little techniques for what some teachers call ‘stilling’ their minds, so that, as one little girl once said to me, “we can learn to let our brains cool down so they will be able to bubble up with new ideas”. And we can take a rough measure of the creativity of the children’s writing before and after, and see if there has been any improvement.

So no, we shouldn’t try to be Researchers with a great big R. But if we have a researcher’s eye on our own practice, we can keep trying to help to prepare our children more and more effectively for the learning lives they are surely going to lead.