THE BENEFITS OF CLASSROOM RESEARCH

Written by Karen McGhie. Read the original post in English at london-school-online.com

Over the past two years, as part of our regular CPD sessions with our teachers, we have taken on the challenge of conducting research in our classrooms with our own students. From the original idea and our subsequent experiments, ‘The London Lab’ has become a staple of our teacher development programme each year. In an upcoming post, we will be talking more about the results that we obtained and what this means for our teaching, but in this month’s offering, we will focus more on the experience of conducting classroom research, what benefits it can bring and how you can implement similar programmes in your school.

Why implement a classroom research programme?

When we go through initial teacher training, we are often bombarded with reading on different teaching topics, and this tends to include reference to research that has been conducted in the past. However, a lot of this research was carried out quite a long time ago and may not be that relevant to your current teaching context. Despite the fact that there are excellent English teaching journals whose main objective is to publish research conducted around the world, a lot of this research was conducted in university settings, which is not the context in which most English teachers work around the world. Many teachers go through their teaching career taking these results and subsequent conclusions as the only way to teach, without considering that some of the ideas might be outdated or irrelevant.

As a CELTA and teacher training centre, we use a lot of these findings to guide our teacher development courses and provide information on effective teaching techniques. A good teacher is someone who bases their actions on principles and evidence, and so it seemed only natural for us to dedicate time during the year to challenging our perceptions of teaching and learning and making sure that the information we are giving teachers is accurate and relevant to their context.

Bearing this in mind, we embarked on a journey of teaching discovery and decided to include all of our teachers in experiments to find out more about the students we have in our classes and teaching in general.

What are the benefits?

Having conducted research with a group of teachers over two academic years, there are some notable benefits that we have observed, both for the teachers and the students involved.

1. Teachers think more analytically about their students’ learning. If they are involved in research and they know that they are going to be asked to put forward a research proposal during the year, teachers are much more likely to think more analytically in the classroom. They consider their students learning in more depth and think about what could affect their students’ performance more.
2. Students are more curious about what they are learning. When students are aware that they have been part of an experiment, it makes them much more curious about what they have been doing and what conclusions we have drawn from the results they got in class. In our experience, it has been really worthwhile sharing our results with our students and helping them understand how they can improve.
3. Teachers work together towards a common goal that they are all involved in. Involving all teachers in a school-wide experiment is something that brings them together as they are working towards the common goal of discovering something new. We all form our hypotheses at the beginning and then come back together after having conducted the experiment in class to analyse the results. It’s something that everyone is involved in and can relate to.
4. Results are more meaningful and relatable. As you are working on research in your particular teaching context and with your students, the results become much more meaningful and more than just numbers on a spreadsheet. The results relate directly to their students and therefore become more motivating.
5. Research encourages deeper conversation and understanding of teaching. Teachers talk about a lot of things in their breaks between classes, but very often these can be negative conversations about things that have happened in class or particular students. Having a common goal related to teaching encourages deeper conversation about teaching and what they can do as a group to improve their students’ learning experience.
6. Teachers understand their students’ learning better. Results provide teachers with a deeper understanding of their own teaching, and also of the learning capacity and limitations of their students. Perhaps the experiment has revealed why certain students behave or perform in a certain way, and this can help teachers empathise with them more and be generally more understanding of what their students are going through.
7. Teachers feel motivated and like they are making a difference. When teachers discover something new or challenge their ideas on teaching, they are generally more motivated in the classroom. The conclusions drawn allow them to make a difference to their students learning experience and consider what they can do in class to promote learning and development.
8. Results provide real action points that can be used in the classroom. Key and targeted action points can be extracted from the results obtained and this can be used for teacher development sessions both now and in the future. There is no limit to how many teachers can benefit from the classroom research that is conducted.

How can you implement a similar programme?

No matter whether classroom research is done on a smaller or bigger scale, it can provide meaningful results for teachers and guide them in their daily teaching. However, there are some elements that we have discovered when conducting research in order to make it as effective as possible:

1. Have a control group. In order to correctly analyse the results obtained, there needs to be results from a control group in which none of the variables are changed from the regular day-to-day learning and teaching.
2. Consider areas of teaching that have a real impact on ss’ performance. Teachers should think about a variety of areas of teaching that they feel have an impact on ss’ performance and then teachers should come to a consensus on what area they think is the most important one to be investigated.
3. Record the data effectively. Data should be recorded on an Excel document and then manipulated in a way that means that overall conclusions can be drawn. This might mean a few Excel tutorials are needed in order to work out what formulas to use and how to manipulate the data to get the best results.
4. Don’t tell ss what the experiment is beforehand. It’s great to let ss know what they results are after the experiment, but if you tell them what you are looking for before they do a task, they are not going to do it naturally.
5. Try to maintain the same conditions for control and experimental groups. The only variables that should be changing are the ones that you are researching. Everything else should be as similar as possible in order to give reliable results. We have found that this is not always easy in the classroom, but you have to try to control those variables as much as possible.
6. Have deadlines to complete experiments and involve teachers in the results analysis. Ideally, all teachers should compete their experiments at the same time to control the variable and make sure that the conditions are as similar as they can be between groups of students. Give teachers clear deadlines and ensure that they know when and how to report the data obtained in their classes.

Conclusion

Implementing classroom research with a large group of students has definitely been an eye-opening experience and one that we have learnt a lot from. We are excited to keep developing our teaching techniques and finding out much more about our students’ learning. Stay tuned, as we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned about teaching through our classroom research in an upcoming post.

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