I have always been very impressed by the Sutton Trust. They are an educational think-tank or “do-tank” as they call themselves, focused on closing the attainment gap through good research. They are well known to teachers in England where schools recieve additional funding in the form of a “pupil premium” which follows learners from areas of deprivation. (Dreadful term in my view). Schools want to spend this pupil premium money wisely, and therefore the Sutton Trust’s list of different intervention programmes in schools, graded by effectiveness in raising attainment and correlated against good research, is invaluable and consequently very fully used by schools there.

They have identified a real problem; good research exists about learning in schools, but making sense of it for our own settings and circumstances is like panning for gold. It shouldn’t be like this; bodies like the Sutton Trust realise this and they commission their own research and meta-research to help sift through the swirling sands to hand us the raw nuggets. This meta-research is particularly helpful, since individual studies are often not statistically significant, or they are located so narrowly in the setting of the study that we can’t generalise the findings. A meta-study takes a larger sample of lots of the studies, and pulls out statistically significant wider trends that we can be more sure of, and therefore act-on with more confidence. One recent example of this was Professor John Hattie’s meta-study (Visible Learning study) of the effectiveness of schooling interventions such as AfL and reducing class sizes. This has been hugely influential in Scottish policy making and practice since 2009 when it was published.

http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

Well, all of this leads to me making a learning suggestion. The Sutton Trust have produced a really excellent meta-study in the form of “What makes great teaching?” by Coe, Aloisi, Higgins and Major. This work from October last year explores what works in learning and teaching, and what doesn’t. There are comforting messages in here for us, as much of what we do is endorsed, and of course, there are challenges for us too, as some of our frequently observed practices simply do not have a backing in meta-research. If we are serious about continuous improvement, then reports like this should be essential reading. Thankfully authoritative ones like this don’t come by all that often, so we don’t need to feel too overwhelmed. To be frank, school improvement must be underpinned by really strong shared understanding about what is most likely to work; all teachers and Quality Improvement Professionals working in schools should grab a nice hot drink and take an hour or so to enjoy this.

On a more playful note, I feel that someone should do a meta-study of “readability of useful reports”. Much useful academic research is strangled-at-birth because it is utterly unreadable and therefore lost. This one is “fairly readable” while the content is invaluable. When I get commissioned to produce the Boyle readability/usefulness scale, (please?), this will score highly but with a “mildly hard thinking but worth it” warning stamped on the cover!

Get it here for free:

http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/What-makes-great-teaching-FINAL-4.11.14.pdf

Matthew