Using other people’s research is an exacting professional skill. It can be hard to step out of your comfort zone and try something new. As Charles Desforges, who first debunked the learning styles myth, argues: “The pull of the status quo in teaching is very strong.”

And teachers also need opportunities to use their professional judgement to adapt research-based interventions to meet the specific needs of their pupils.

How far, then, should they strive to be faithful to the original research? And how far can they adapt things without potentially jeopardising the use of research in the first place?

Let’s look at a couple of widespread examples. Owing to time pressures, many research lesson study (RLS) triads miss out the final dissemination stage. Does that mean the results can’t be used to judge the effectiveness of RLS?

Similarly, the complexity of synthetic phonics makes it easy to omit a tiny element such as getting pupils to point to a finger as they sound out phonemes to demonstrate that they’ve understood the basic structure. Does this shortcut mean it is not legitimate use of research?

Making adaptations

While teachers must have the chance to make professional judgements about using research, this has to happen in phases and depends on trying out interventions as specified a couple of times first before making adaptations.

Here are three helpful ground rules:

• 1. Remember that an intervention backed by good evidence is unlikely to include unnecessary steps. Asking pupils to touch their fingertips with each sound may seem pointless, but the importance of these visual clues about learning might only be apparent once you have taken a step back and observed your pupils closely.
• 2. Although research reports recommending an intervention may look alien, remember that they derive from the work of teachers and the learning efforts of lots of pupils. This might help to make sense of them in the early stages.
• 3. Bear in mind that when using new research, you won’t yet know what you don’t know about it. It is only through trialling an intervention in its entirety that we can understand how we might streamline the process to suit our pupils’ needs without losing elements that are essential to effectiveness. So rather than adapting an intervention from the outset, stick to the design initially and then streamline the approach gradually in the light of evidence from early experiments.

This process allows us to strike the right balance between fidelity to research and fidelity to the professional judgement of teachers.

Philippa Cordingley is chief executive of Curee. This is part four of a 24-part series that aims to help teachers become more research-informed