Question 1

Are there specific examples of benefits to teachers that might help me to persuade my colleagues that research can be helpful?

The benefits of teacher engagement in and with research include:

• increasing the depth of teachers' professional judgement and their confidence in those judgements;
• increasing dialogue between teachers about teaching and learning and enabling such dialogue to dig beneath surface features of classroom transactions;
• enhancing teachers' repertoire of teaching and learning strategies and ideas;
• enhancing teachers' knowledge about their subject, the ways in which children learn it and common misconceptions within it;
• enhancing teachers' sense of creativity and sense of professional self esteem.
  

Many of these benefits occur as a direct by-product of specific aspects of teacher research.  For example:

• discussing classroom observations or videos, which naturally draws teachers in to making their ideas and beliefs explicit;
• looking at video clips, observations data or pupil perceptions about one's own practice, which inevitably draws teachers into reviewing what they do and thinking about how this relates to strategies highlighted by research or by colleagues;
• studying efforts over time systematically, which helps teachers to stick with new approaches through the phase when everything goes out of kilter, to the point where new approaches can be integrated with tried and tested strategies;
• reading about a range of effective strategies and theories - helps teachers see a broader pattern of possibilities and develop ideas about alternatives available.

Some teachers find that research is a natural way of pulling together the threads of different national initiatives – and so working smarter not harder.

For example:

• teacher researchers can find that their research experience and evidence makes it easy to pass through the performance threshold – the evidence is already all there;
• Advanced Skills teachers have found that having undertaken research has helped them both to secure their appointment and to fulfil their duties;
• many people in Education Action Zones or Excellence in Cities clusters are finding teacher research or enquiry is an effective form of CPD that helps them to fulfil funding requirements.

Benefits to pupils are harder to trace rigorously because there are so many different factors that connect pupil learning to CPD.  But reports from, for example, the School Based Research Consortia and the Improving Quality of Education for All programme (IQEA) show:

• developments in pupils' thinking and control over their own learning , for instance from using pupil learning logs;
• developments in pupils' confidence, in their willingness to take risks, learn from mistakes and embrace the challenge;
• rising performance trajectories; and
• improved motivation.

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