Target Audience

K-12 Teachers, Curriculum Supervisors, Teacher Leaders, and Teacher Trainers

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Why this workshop?

Research will never tell teachers what to do—classrooms are just too complex for this ever to be the case. Research can, however, help school leaders in three ways:

 

The first is to identify “blind alleys”—areas where changes are unlikely to be of much benefit to students.

 

The second is to identify areas where changes will improve students’ learning.

 

The third, and perhaps the most important, is to provide information that school leaders can use to choose research-based interventions that will have the greatest impact in their local context.

 

An Overview
In this online presentation, participants will find out why meta-analysis, although popular with researchers, rarely provides useful guidance to school leaders about what will work most effectively in their schools.

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They will also learn about the five key questions that school leaders need to ask to become critical consumers of educational research so that the improvements they make will maximize the benefits for their teachers and their students.

The presentation will conclude with a discussion of what makes for effective teacher learning, and, in particular, why, for all but the least experienced practitioners, improvement is more a matter of habit change than knowledge acquisition.

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Workshop Aim

To provide teachers and leaders with a comprehensive framework for using research to decide school priorities while at the same time taking into account the school’s local context

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In this session, participants will learn:

• Why research should inform, but cannot dictate what teachers do

• Why meta-analysis does not provide a sound basis for setting priorities in schools

• The five questions that educators need to ask about research findings

• Why effective teacher learning requires both acquiring new learning and changing habits

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