In recent years, there have been multiple calls to make teaching more evidence informed. Sometimes this is accompanied with (what I would call exaggerated) claims about the poor quality of initial teacher education (ITE). 

It’s true that there are examples of both good- and poor-quality teacher training, and I don’t mind the calls for more evidence-informed teaching, just as long as this doesn’t lead to a narrowing of what is deemed acceptable practice.

As a researcher, I have been working with ITE colleagues to find the balance in our teacher training for mathematics, through the Erasmus+ Research in Teacher Education (RiTE) project. 

In this project, several European institutions from England, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland are working together to improve their teacher education. This is happening at different levels: some countries are focusing on the quality of university teaching while others, like us, are focusing on the content of their courses.

The challenge for us is how to organise a secondary mathematics course in such a way that there is plenty of space for the essentials of teaching, including instruction, subject knowledge, pedagogy and classroom management, while still instilling the master’s degree-level thinking about research that befits a postgraduate qualification. 

We chose to integrate teaching about the use of research into master’s-level assignments, using two different methods. Firstly, we looked at what Breckon and Dodson (2016) call “evidence-use mechanisms”: the different ways in which you can incentivise people to use research. We mainly focused on creating awareness of why evidence is useful and why building research skills, such as the ability to evaluate and to conduct your own studies, is essential. 

To start with, we needed a clear definition of “evidence”. For some, the only “real” evidence is a randomised controlled trial, while for others, data collected by teachers, as in action research, is also worthwhile. We decided both were valid, as long as the chosen method fit the research questions.

However, to distinguish “evidence” from the collection of data that both researchers and teachers do on a daily basis, we specified that evidence must be collected systematically, with intent and purpose.

A second approach we use is the “expansive learning cycle” - a rather abstract approach aimed at creating new professional knowledge that we set out to make more concrete. 

First, we made videos discussing peer-reviewed journal articles for two mathematical topics. After a month of studying these articles, just when trainees were starting to feel comfortable with the material, we gave them an article that questioned their truths. Not only does this make it clear that other views exist but it shows that you need to take an evidence-informed stance to be able to synthesise different sources in a critical way. 

These are just two ways we can help teachers to become more evidence informed; of course, there are many more. But if we can help trainees to take an inclusive view of evidence, while also being critical, that certainly seems like a good place to start. 

Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies

This article originally appeared in the 17 December 2021 issue