I'm not that familiar with the Australian education system but a lot of what you describe sounds very familiar in the UK. The move towards becoming genuinely evidence informed seems to be raising many of the same opportunities and challenges.
It also chimed with a discussion I wrote last week after visiting Frensham Heights, an innovative private school, where my focus was similarly on practitioner enquiry. Would be very curious to hear your opinion of a school like this: https://samuelkammin.substack.com/p/a-centenary-of-teacher-and-pupil. Do you think schools have become better at consuming research than generating it? It struck me that practitioner enquiry might be one of the missing pieces in the picture you describe. Many thanks for shedding some light on this interesting topic
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment, and for sharing your article.
I have completed action research projects under the supervision of Jean McNiff, and found the process enormously valuable. The greatest benefit wasn’t that I generated new knowledge for the profession, but that it required me to think much more carefully about evidence, my own assumptions and the relationship between theory and practice. As a form of professional learning, practitioner enquiry can be incredibly powerful.
Where I perhaps differ slightly is in the weight we place on the findings themselves. By their nature, practitioner enquiries are usually conducted with small samples, within highly specific contexts and without the methodological controls that characterise larger-scale research. That doesn’t diminish their value, but it does mean they should be interpreted with appropriate caution.
Given that children only get one chance at their education, I think schools should make full use of the increasingly robust body of evidence already available from researchers working at scale. Practitioner enquiry then becomes a way of helping teachers engage critically with that evidence, understand the principles behind it and consider how those principles are best enacted within their own setting, rather than asking every school to reinvent the evidence base from scratch.
I do think practitioner enquiry is one of the most valuable forms of professional development because it encourages teachers to think deeply about their practice. For me, its greatest contribution is in helping schools become more thoughtful consumers of research and more deliberate in how they translate evidence into their own context.
Thanks for your comment, it’s great to have this professional dialogue.
I completely agree and thank you for taking the time to get back. Teacher enquiry ideally shouldn't be setting out, as you say, to completely revise the research. Rather, it should be treated as additional insight that bolsters the existing large scale research in a practical applicable way.
It's very interesting to hear about your previous work with McNiff, I'd love to hear about some of your previous research projects in a future article perhaps. Thanks again for taking the time to respond and I look forward to reading more from you
I'm not that familiar with the Australian education system but a lot of what you describe sounds very familiar in the UK. The move towards becoming genuinely evidence informed seems to be raising many of the same opportunities and challenges.
It also chimed with a discussion I wrote last week after visiting Frensham Heights, an innovative private school, where my focus was similarly on practitioner enquiry. Would be very curious to hear your opinion of a school like this: https://samuelkammin.substack.com/p/a-centenary-of-teacher-and-pupil. Do you think schools have become better at consuming research than generating it? It struck me that practitioner enquiry might be one of the missing pieces in the picture you describe. Many thanks for shedding some light on this interesting topic
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment, and for sharing your article.
I have completed action research projects under the supervision of Jean McNiff, and found the process enormously valuable. The greatest benefit wasn’t that I generated new knowledge for the profession, but that it required me to think much more carefully about evidence, my own assumptions and the relationship between theory and practice. As a form of professional learning, practitioner enquiry can be incredibly powerful.
Where I perhaps differ slightly is in the weight we place on the findings themselves. By their nature, practitioner enquiries are usually conducted with small samples, within highly specific contexts and without the methodological controls that characterise larger-scale research. That doesn’t diminish their value, but it does mean they should be interpreted with appropriate caution.
Given that children only get one chance at their education, I think schools should make full use of the increasingly robust body of evidence already available from researchers working at scale. Practitioner enquiry then becomes a way of helping teachers engage critically with that evidence, understand the principles behind it and consider how those principles are best enacted within their own setting, rather than asking every school to reinvent the evidence base from scratch.
I do think practitioner enquiry is one of the most valuable forms of professional development because it encourages teachers to think deeply about their practice. For me, its greatest contribution is in helping schools become more thoughtful consumers of research and more deliberate in how they translate evidence into their own context.
Thanks for your comment, it’s great to have this professional dialogue.
I completely agree and thank you for taking the time to get back. Teacher enquiry ideally shouldn't be setting out, as you say, to completely revise the research. Rather, it should be treated as additional insight that bolsters the existing large scale research in a practical applicable way.
It's very interesting to hear about your previous work with McNiff, I'd love to hear about some of your previous research projects in a future article perhaps. Thanks again for taking the time to respond and I look forward to reading more from you