ETF Practitioner Research Conference: Discussant commentary

1. ETF Practitioner Research Conference: Discussant commentary Ann-Marie Bathmaker, University of Birmingham 8 July 2014

2. A Vivienne Westwood experience • A wealth of research • Diversity of practice, investigation, and proposed action • Different and innovative methods for conducting and presenting research • Tortuous pleasure in writing and presenting research work • Thank goodness for blogs, reports, summaries of your research

3. Pressures framing the work • Improving practice to achieve better inspection grades:Will this improve our inspection grades?Will this move a classroom observation grade up?Will this get learners a higher grade (even though they may not have learned anything more)? • Improving practices to achieve more successful learning and teaching:How do you convince the government?Practice doesn’t actually look like what we thought.

4. Not a quick fix but a slow burn These projects, within this framework for conducting research, allow you to develop the capacity, confidence and courage to be critical about your own current practices and the practices used by your organisations: • Initial assessment of learners using standard diagnostic programmes prove to be superficial and possibly unhelpful. A more hands-on, engaged initial assessment can enable learners to make progress at a more challenging level of study. • Students want to pass, not aim for higher grades.Tutors focusing on higher grades can become instrumental rather than educative.Instead work on HOTS – higher order thinking skills – not as an instrumental route to higher grades, but to achieve deeper learning

5. The market is saturated with training providers:for employers to work with trainees with learning difficulties and learning disabilities requires significant changes in the perceptions of employers, which might be achieved through a CLOSE and SUSTAINED relationship with employers • Lack of public knowledge about traineeships (which could read any new training initiative or qualification)need IAG for training providers, tutors, employers as well as prospective learners and trainees.

6. Learning from the swampy lowlands • Not learning from private schools, what works, perfect practice INSTEAD • Learning from the challenges, the highs and lows, the real life narratives and experience of everyday life teaching in the learning and skills sector • Challenging taken-for-granted expectationse.g. teachers’ questioning technique isn’t what it might bee.g. students don’t want their teachers to get involved with them through Facebook

7. Diverse approaches to research • Students as active researchers working with teachers and other practitioners • Using fiction created from the narratives of character and resilience from learners on the margins (then used as training tool for learning coaches and mentors and for resilience training with young people) • Qualitative as well as quantitative methods • Carefully conducted research • Reflection on research methods

8. Collect the teacher’s ‘voice’ as well as the learner’s ‘voice’

9. Engaging teachers and students in understanding and using Bloom’s taxonomy to encourage more effective learning • Using local history as a central resource to develop learners’ confidence, skills, knowledge and capacities • Making feedback productive: making space for students to reflect and ACT on feedback • Collaborative learning plans instead of individual learning plans (to develop the ‘soft’ and ‘generic’ skills for employment such as teamwork) • Visits to cultural venues (of very many kinds) as a basis for learning (for learners: ‘a reason to continue to study’; ‘led me to volunteering’; ‘can talk to others with confidence’; ‘improved well-being’ • Conopoly: buy and sell prisons; buy wings and houseblocks • Use Facebook to reach out to students who may be at risk (of dropping out etc), but not via teachers, use students as the ‘hub’ for such work

10. Using and being inspired by existing research • Piaget • Irons • Falchikov • Clarke • Wiliam on formative assessment • Clough on narrative • Cooper on dyslexia • Peer and Reid on multilingualism • Bogdashina on gestalt perception in relation to autism • Amador and Amador on academic advising • Frank Coffield

11. A beautiful idea: rigorous practitioner research • Deep learning about practice through: • research • writing • presenting • responding to questions and challenges