Strategic Forum for Research in Education

Is there appropriate provision and incentivisation for the production of high quality and innovative practitioner research and enquiry?

The operational framework of Forum II (held on 17th and 18th June 2009 in Reading)conceptualised practitioner research and enquiry as the type of research carried out in a local context for “the improvement of practice and provision to enhance the quality of learning and educational services (typically local government, schools and national agency funding)”.

Research carried out by practitioners covers a broad spectrum of research ‘types’ and levels of formality. For example, EdD’s can be rooted in the disciplines and are assessed by academic standards in HEIs, whereas small-scale action research undertaken by an individual teacher or a department may often be highly contextualised.

Examples/ overview from countries

The  BERA/SAGE Practitioner Awards scheme has issued a call for submissions for its 2010 round (call for submissions).

In England the Teacher Learning Academy, which is was set up by the GTCE, has a strong focus on practitioner research as a means of professional development. As part of the TLA, teachers undertake an enquiry project based around their own practice.

The National Teacher Research Panel is a network which provides advice and support for teachers, supported by DCSF, GTCE, NCSL and LSIS and run by CUREE. Its purpose is to increase the involvement of teachers in research in terms of teacher engagement in research project and teachers undertaking their own research. 

In FE, LSIS funds projects through the Excellence, Innovation and Improvement Programme. This fund includes a range of different opportunities for practitioner research. Project outcomes are shared with the sector through the Excellence Gateway, and may be supplemented by further publication opportunities and dissemination events. While there is less visible evidence of practitioner research in compulsory education rather than post compulsory, one participant cautioned of trying to assess the level of research activity in the sector as some became ‘invisible’ if labelled as ‘pedagogic’ research (Hyland, 2009).

The majority of funding for practitioner research in Wales is through the GTCW. Continued Professional Development awards have been offered since 2001. The offer has changed over the years but whilst the work produced using the initial Teacher Research Scholarships were judged to be high quality there is some evidence to suggest that more recently standards have fallen. Chartered Teacher Status is also being piloted in Wales (Davies, 2009).

In Northern Ireland, as in Wales, the principal supporter of practitioner research in the compulsory sector is the General Teaching Council through professional development grants. The GTCNI has also developed the Access to Research Resources for Teachers Space (ARRTS) which provides a digital repository for practitioner research. In the lifelong learning sector there has been a lack of co-ordinated practitioner work. Recently DELNI with the Learning and Skills Development Agency (LSDANI) has supported practitioner research in the post-compulsory sector as part of the Essential Skills strategy though despite best efforts this work has struggled to have impact or gain recognition (Leitch with McCullough, 2009).

Scotland has a strong history of practitioner research and there is a strong focus on practitioner research in professional development (Hulme and Menter, 2008; Kirkwood and Christie, 2006). Expectations that teachers will be engaged with research to inform their practice are reflected in GTCS’s criteria, which teachers are required to meet through each stage of their training and development, from initial teacher training through to Chartered Teacher Status.

Further examples of strengths and areas for development in practitioner research for each UK country are included in the country mappings prepared for Forum II.

The role of practitioner research

The potential benefits of high-quality practitioner research are numerous – the current challenge is to ensure that the full potential of these benefits is reached.  Benefits identified by the discussion group chaired by Lesley Saunders at Forum II include:

• contribution towards an evidence base about teaching and learning
• identification and dissemination of best practice – or rather (since many did not like that term) quality of practice
• detailed description of innovations in particular real-life contexts
• contribution to the theorisation of teaching and learning
• deepening, even transformation, of individual practitioners’ thinking and practice – i.e. practitioner research as ‘powerful pedagogic process’.
• (re-)empowerment of practitioners as leaders of teaching and learning, enhancement of professional identity and sense of agency.
• the creation of good stories (about enquiry and improvement). (Saunders, 2009).

Quality in practitioner research

The quality of practitioner research is variable but much of this depends upon which criteria quality is judged (Forum I report; Oancea and Furlong, 2007). Academic criteria may not be the only relevant criteria. It is important not to equate informal localised research with poor quality research. One question raised by the group chaired by Fiona Hyland at the Forum was whether research for practitioner development and research for ‘new knowledge’ required different types of support (Hyland, 2009).

Bridging the gulf between research and teaching

Growing separation of research-intensive and teacher education-intensive HEIs, and of staff within those HEIs, is a problem for both teachers wishing to engage with leading academic research, and researchers searching for better engagement with practitioners in their work (Munn, 2008). 

Researcher/ practitioner engagement in general is a complex relationship and the connection to the knowledge base and methods needed to develop practitioner enquiry often depends on this relationship. A closer relationship between research and practice would be beneficial in terms of connecting the action researcher and their research to the knowledge base (and research methods) and working concurrently to promote research-informed practice. Incentives for academics in terms of RAE for example are not aligned with researcher engagement with practitioner research (Beckett, 2009; Hyland, 2009). Incentives for practitioners to engage in this type of activity – i.e. broadening their work and experience – are not particularly strong either.

Maximising the potential

A significant challenge is providing a structure or framework (or network) which would enable appropriate/relevant practitioner research and researchers to link together. Whilst some more formal research (such as EdD theses) is more closely connected to the existing knowledge base, there is still more work which could be done in this area, including purely practical developments such as providing an online repository (or something equivalent) for such work, which would enable a database (with some coding) to develop.

Other ideas included reviews of pratitioner research and ‘using practitioner research projects to test and develop proposed educational initiatives before they are implemented on a national scale’ and ‘deepening and critiquing the evidence from large-scale work with local case studies’  – an example of which is Cambridge Assessment using practitioner research as a vehicle for testing assessment policies. The group chaired by Colin Isham shared the view that practitioner research did not directly impact on policy but also reminded the Forum that channels to do so do exist such as the National Teacher Research Panel and the LSIS research programme. Two groups at the Forum noted that the issues chosen by practitioners to research could also be of considerable use to researchers and policymakers by elucidating the key challenges faced on the front line (Isham, 2009; Saunders, 2009).

Horizontal networks between practitioners are also likely to be important in terms of exploiting the potential of practitioner research as osmosis of ideas between practitioners is likely to be more effective than ideas and findings which have been translated to a higher level network and back down again from a central body. Incentives for practitioners to engage in disseminating ideas and networking projects do exist, but these opportunities only involve small numbers of practitioners.

Further reading

Kirkwood, M and Christie, D (2006) ‘The role of teacher research in continuing professional development’ British Journal of Educational Studies 54(4) 429-448.

Munn, P (2008) Building research capacity collaboratively: can we take ownership of our future? British Educational Research Journal  34(4) 413-430.

Oancea, A. and Furlong, J. (2007) Expressions of excellence and the assessment of applied and practice-based research. In: Research Papers in Education, 22(2), pp. 119 – 137.

Further questions/ outstanding issues

• Should there be more incentives to encourage researchers to continue to practice as is the norm in medical professions?
• Despite initiatives across the four countries such as the LSIS Excellence and Innovation programme, there is still an imbalance in favour of schools research rather that in the post compulsory sector. Whilst this is true across the research types it seems particularly evident in terms of practitioner research. What can be done to address this?
• Are online and e-learning developments being fully exploited in terms of practitioner research, in particular in connecting practitioners to the research base and facilitating training in research methods? Would an online, accessible database of EdD theses add value? If so, how can this more effectively be achieved?