Good teachers are instinctively drawn to work and learn together.
This instinct is built on strong foundations: evidence suggests that collaboration is important in effectively using research, as well as learning about effective practices.
So, what can research tell us about how and why working together can help us structure our collaboration to promote the best outcomes for pupils?
Evidence about research at any scale points to the importance of testing or “triangulating” evidence about the effectiveness of a process through the lens of a range of pupils.
Significant practical limits restrict the numbers of pupils and classes one teacher can work with. But when you carry out enquiries and research with colleagues, you automatically increase the range and number of pupils that you are working with. Pooling and exploring evidence together harnesses your natural instinct to collaborate with peers, adding rigour by testing your emerging evidence and conclusions for larger and more diverse groups.
By involving more teachers in an enquiry, we create an opportunity to explore key factors from a range of practitioner perspectives. And in working together, we significantly enrich the process of identifying enquiry questions - coming up with hypotheses and developing manageable tools for collecting evidence to explore what those hypotheses could mean for our own teaching practices and our pupils’ learning.
When it comes to learning from other people’s research, teachers who work together both risk looking silly when they try an approach that research says might be effective, but is not part of “how we do things here”.
Sharing the risk increases trust and helps teachers to persevere in the face of challenges that arise from disrupting existing routines.
What’s more, exploring evidence about how pupils respond to research-informed changes with colleagues creates a natural, non-threatening environment for making our practices, beliefs and assumptions explicit. When we explore similarities and differences between pupil-teacher dynamics together, reviewing and refining them feels more relevant and manageable.
Finally, reading research in the context of observing different responses from colleagues is an important stepping stone between research on paper and research in practice.
Research articles might seem alien, but working through them together moves us to feel that engaging in and with research is both achievable and useful on a day-to-day basis.
Philippa Cordingley is the chief executive of Curee
