Can a Teacher do Research?

Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #142

Hello! A few of the updates I’ve shared recently connect in some way to how educators engage with research evidence.

I’m interested in how we act as (sceptical) consumers of research, how we stay open to adjusting our own ideas as we learn more about the evidence. I’m also very curious about what role teachers play in doing and sharing research.

My experience

Although my degree was in Psychology, I didn’t immediately start to apply these ideas to my pedagogy as a school and university teacher. I suppose I saw psychology research and teaching as two rather different worlds. Like a lot of new teachers, my practice was probably heavily influenced by tradition and by my own experiences, as well as by some of the fads policies of the time!

It was only when I began to get frustrated by practical issues such as forgetting and student underperformance that I began to look deeper into ideas like long-term memory and the spacing effect, and saw how potentially transformative these could be.

Nowadays, I consider myself both a teacher and a researcher, and I am sure there are plenty of other professionals who receive these updates similarly straddle these roles, even if not equally.

Recommended talk on the issue

The fascinating talk below by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, shared with the Centre for Educational Neuroscience a few months ago, reflects well on these issues and comes from someone who has studied the issue of teacher research engagement. The title is, ‘How can teachers become learning scientists, and why would this improve education?’.

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The big question that Dr. Tokuhama-Espinosa asks is why research on mind, brain and education has not been become better embedded in teacher education and in the education professions more generally. She makes several key points:

• Barriers include time, complexity of the ideas, consensus, and leadership;

• Teachers need to read (and produce) more ‘translational science’, including good books on cognitive science – such as Agarwal & Bain’s ‘Powerful Teaching’ (and perhaps also blogs like this one?);

• All of this requires changes to leadership.

The whole video is worth a watch!

Engagement in and with research

Being a teacher and a learning scientist could mean different things. It could involve:

• Engagement with research, reading it and trying to apply it;

• Sharing ideas and influencing practice to become more evidence-based;

• Carrying out your own research.

Where are you in the process of engagement with and in research? Do you carry out anything that you would consider to be research (or enquiry) of your own? If not, perhaps that could be something to explore in the next academic year.

Here’s an article co-authored by Dr. Tokuhama‐Espinosa if you want to find out more about her work in this area:

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Tokuhama‐Espinosa, T., & Nouri, A. (2023). Teachers' mind, brain, and education literacy: A survey of scientists' views. Mind, Brain, and Education, 17(3), 170–174.

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All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Areas of Confusion in Cognitive Science, part 2

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