At home, Laura Tsabet has a bookshelf devoted to books about teaching.

“It’s a bit sad, really,” she says, “but I like being good at what I do, and research helps me do that.”

Tsabet is lead practitioner in teaching and learning at The Bourne Academy, in Bournemouth. Teachers at the 11-18 comprehensive are given an hour, every Monday, in which to read up on, discuss and engage with academic research.

It is increasingly accepted that teaching practice should be informed by academic research. More and more schools are offering teachers ringfenced time for reading up on research, employing a dedicated research lead to disseminate research throughout the school, or providing professional development sessions devoted to research-informed practice.

However, educational research is now facing something of a crisis (see box, page 45). Questions have been raised about whether academics repeating research studies would reach the same conclusions second time around, casting doubt over the validity of the original research.

As a result, the Education Endowment Foundation has undertaken to revisit all the research in its teaching and learning toolkit, which aims to present research to teachers in digestible chunks. This has implications for teachers in the classroom: many have begun asking whether it really matters if classroom practice is research-informed after all.

Tsabet initially recruited 10 coaches from among staff members, each of whom worked with a group of teachers during the weekly sessions, looking into different areas of research.

But, earlier this year, teachers began approaching her, asking if they could spend their time reading independently instead. So now they spend the sessions reading on their own, and report back at the end of the year to discuss what they have found out.

“We’ll decide then whether to carry on as more of a book club kind of group,” Tsabet says.

“Not everyone sees it as a positive thing. A lot of people see it as time they could use planning, which is understandable.”

She recently polled staff about the sessions. Answers were anonymous; 20 per cent of teachers said they were a waste of time.

Philippa Cordingley, chief executive of the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education, says there are obvious reasons for this.

“Research journals are written for a very narrow set of purposes: pursuing research excellence,” she says. “And they’re not always written terribly well. It’s all about taking research forward - it’s not about informing practice.”

But this does not mean that there is no role for research in schools. Jonathan Haslam, director of the Institute for Effective Education, says that teachers simply need to be very clear about what question they are looking for research to answer, or what problems they want it to solve.

“It’s about trying to be as explicit about that as possible,” he says. “That gives you the best chance that you can look for research or approaches to address that problem.

“Sometimes, people might make the improvement they want to see so broad that it becomes difficult to see what impacts on what.”

For example, he says, teachers might want to improve the resilience of pupils, when faced with the new-style GCSE. This could potentially cover everything from improving exam technique to building up vocabulary.

“Sometimes there can be a tendency to throw a whole bunch of solutions at a problem, where it might be better to home in on one of those problems, and look at solutions to that,” Haslam says.

Clarity and context

But even then, research might not have the impact that individual teachers were hoping for.

“I think the important thing for me about research is that it can only tell you what’s happened before, in other classrooms,” says Niki Kaiser, network research leader for Norwich Research School. “What you then have to do is work out how that relates to your context.

“Yes, you will draw on the ideas that come out of research. But, day to day, that has to be very much contextualised, and you’re the one who knows best how to apply it.”

Bronwen Maxwell, deputy head of the Centre for Research and Knowledge Exchange at Sheffield Hallam University, agrees that this is vital.

“You can take one thing that’s got good evidence behind it, and in a similar context it’s likely to work,” she says. “But there’s no guarantee. It’s not just what works: it’s what works where and for whom. That’s the question teachers should be asking.”

Forget this, Kaiser says, and research can be actively dangerous. “It’s a starting point,” she says. “It’s never an answer. As soon as you see research as a silver bullet, as a shiny new thing that you just need to do straight away, it becomes dangerous.”

This, she says, is why the role of the research leader is vital. “If people really listen, then the research lead can be a very valuable role,” she says.

“Part of the challenge for teachers is to take research from somewhere else and implement it in your context. If you’ve got someone who’s able to look what’s behind the research, to filter it, to look at the nuance, then it’s a really valuable role.”

This is what Kaiser does. She is, she says, “someone who looks around and filters and feeds it back to teachers in whatever form”. She adds: “They have the time and space and knowledge to work out whether something’s worth pursuing or not, and then help with the implementation.”

For example, she says, a teacher might come to her with a piece of research that, while new and popular, does not have any particularly strong evidence behind it.

“There’s a lot of things, understandably, that people pick up on,” Kaiser says. “I guess I’d just talk to them. Unless it was something damaging, I’d just talk to them about research sources. Ultimately, yes, I’d tell people not to use it. But I’d be careful how I did that. I’d say: ‘Who was this research carried out on? How many people were in the study?’”

Top-down approach

Fads with little or no basis in research - such as, notoriously, Brain Gym or the learning styles approach - catch on, Cordingley believes, because they speak to something that teachers want to know: the worry or fear that keeps them up in the night.

“What you need to say as a teacher is: ‘Why am I so excited about this?’” she says. “Instead of rushing to act, just say: ‘Let me look at my students’ learning and what the obstacles are to progress that I really want to look at.’

“Then go to the head of teaching and learning. Say, ‘This looks good - I want to look into it. Can you help with this? What do you know, with your knowledge? And can you just tell me how this maps onto the nearest systematic review?’”

This is where the culture of a school is important. Engagement with research is more effective, Maxwell argues, when senior leaders or a research lead points teachers towards research that is likely to work in their own contexts.

“Leaders often act as a filter,” she says. “Teachers have to be in the classroom the vast majority of their working lives. They can’t spend a lot of time researching. But leaders can bring things to CPD meetings, explain why they’re likely to work, and those conditions where they’re likely to work.”

But, just as teachers need to question the research they bring into the classroom, so school leaders need to think carefully about how much evidence there is behind professional development sessions.

“Sometimes quick fixes are good, but not always,” Maxwell says. “There’s some really good CPD that’s clearly research-informed, and there’s some that are just glossy websites. There’s a spectrum, and there’s certainly scope for CPD to be more research informed.

“It’s also to do with the way that CPD is delivered, so there’s time for teachers to engage with core principles, and to reflect on them.”

This needs to be accompanied by a classroom culture of trial and error. “Teachers need to be free to try things out,” she says. “Some are good at evaluating it themselves; some need support to be able to do that.

“Where you have senior leaders who are supportive, encouraging people to try out things in their own classrooms, and it’s OK if it doesn’t work. Just exploring what does work.”

A research lead or research-aware headteacher can also point teachers in the direction of systematic reviews and meta-analyses: extensive overviews of existing research on any given topic. These allow teachers to see the bigger picture, beyond a single study with dramatic results.

“You can only really do a systematic review when you’ve got lots of evidence,” Cordingley says. “I’d expect a head of teaching and learning to be able to ask of research: does this use a systematic review? In an ideal world, everyone would know to ask this question.”

Teacher-led reviews

The areas of research teachers are most interested in are not always the areas where systematic reviews have been carried out.

This highlights another problem with educational research: the fact that it is shaped by academics, rather than teachers. In her ideal world, Cordingley says, systematic reviews would be carried out to answer the questions that teachers most wanted to ask.

“At the moment, they’re done because researchers want to do them,” she says. “What’s driving them at the moment is research excellence, rather than practical use.” Kaiser agrees. “If you’ve got someone who’s able to look what’s behind research, filter it, and look at the nuance, then that’s a really valuable role,” she says.

And school culture can also go a long way towards deciding how teachers view research, Maxwell believes. “Engaging more teachers is partly about the way it’s gone about at school,” she says. “It has to be related to an issue that’s a particular concern for them. It has to be about something that they’re worried or puzzled about in their classroom, so it’s worth giving it a go.”

But, Tsabet adds, it is important to remember that research is only one tool among many. “Research doesn’t have all the answers,” she says. “It’s just something to try.

“I do think it’s important to use research, but it’s also important to know your own biases, and to read a lot of things, not just one.

“When it comes down to it, it’s about the pupils. It’s what you know will work for your pupils.”

Adi Bloom is comment editor at Tes. She tweets @adibloom_tes

This article originally appeared in the 5 July 2019 issue under the headline “Handle with care”