Teaching and researching with professional educators at Westwood St. Thomas School: How are we contributing to the knowledge-base of education?

Jack Whitehead, Department of Education, University of Bath

It is a pleasure to accept the invitation to write an introduction to this collection of educational enquiries by the master and doctor educators I have been teaching and working with for the last two years (2001-2003) in meetings at Westwood St. Thomas School. The teacher-researchers are Stuart Jones, Mark Potts, Margaret Page, Jean Bell, Jayne Stillwell, Kate Hosey, Susan Wilcox, Karen Collins, Simon Radcliffe, Simon Riding, Toni Bowden and Bob Ainsworth. Andrew Byekwago has recently joined the group and Kate Hosey is on maternity leave. My colleague Sarah Fletcher has also tutored a unit on the programme, provided individual mentoring as part of the Best Practice Research Scholarship Programme, photographed and provided video-tapes of the group at work.

The pleasure in being and working with such a group of committed educators lies in sharing their passion and delight in helping pupils and colleagues to improve their learning, as well as their own. The pleasure is also in seeing the educational influence of some of the ideas I have been able to generate in the 30 years of my own productive life at the University of Bath. The ideas have been generated in working with novice teachers, master educators and doctor educators and learning from the ideas of others. Simon Riding has helped to extend my understanding through his idea of 'living myself through others'. He puts this so well in his masters dissertation on ‘Living myself through others. How can I account for my claims and understanding of a teacher-research group at Westwood St Thomas School?’ I can see in my pleasure that I am living myself through others, as I recognise the value of my work for others.

Stuart Jones, one of the deputy headteachers at Westwood St. Thomas School, exercised his educational leadership in forming and sustaining the group through its first year and his Doctor of Education Degree has been awarded. This included his Dissertation on:

Strategy, Culture and School Development Planning: A Case Study of Staff Perspectives in a Secondary School.

Since September 2002, Mark Potts, a deputy headteacher at Westwood has co-ordinated the work of the MA group and undertaken his own action research as a member of the group.

The titles of the educational enquiries in the list below stress the importance placed by members of the group on helping pupils to improve their learning. Live web-links have been created to the Educational Enquiry (EE) and Methods of Educational Enquiry (MEE) units that are presently available. The Methods of Educational Unit is the only compulsory unit in the masters programme. The educational enquiries in the group are focused on questions that each teacher-researcher is asking of themselves as they work at improving their practice and helping students and/or colleagues to improve their own learning. Here are some of the completed units with the live links to those currently available. The links will be updated as more, completed accounts are made available for e-communication. The best introduction to the work of the group is to read some of these accounts. After the list below I've added some brief comments to explain the connections I am seeing between the accounts from the teacher-researchers in the Westwood group and the extending global networks of teacher-researchers who are contributing to the re-formation and extension of the knowledge-base of education.

Jean Bell (2002) - How can I improve the quality of my teaching in order to motivate year 9 boys?

Karen Collins (2003) - How can I effectively manage students' learning to take account of self-assessment within Modern Foreign Languages?

Karen Collins (2002) - Methods of Educational Enquiry Module: Plan of a small-scale enquiry linked to the development of a skills-based cross-curricular Citizenship based module for Able, Gifted and Talented students in Years 9-11, bearing in mind particularly the concepts of validity, reliability and triangulation and how they are related in this context.

Mark Potts (2003) How can I live out my democratic values in practice more fully by using formative assessment techniques to influence my own learning and the learning of others?

Mark Potts (2003) How can I use my own values and my experience of schools in South Africa to influence my own education and the education of others?

Simon Riding (2002) A Case Study on the impact of a teacher-research group at Westwood St Thomas School on professional knowledge and development.

Other successfully completed EEs and MEEs and work in the process of examining - not yet available on the web-site.

Bob Ainsworth - How do I encourage my students in Year 10 Intermediate GNVQ in Business to improve their learning through writing assignments in their GNVQ Business Course.

Bob Ainsworth - How can I improve my understanding of the role of education for looked after children when subject to the control of Social Services through the initiatives introduced by Government?

Jean Bell - How can I improve the quality of my teaching in order to motivate year 9 boys in food technology.

Toni Bowden - How can I develop positive working relationships within my classroom, which have an impact on learning.

Karen Collins - To what extent have my values as an educator been influenced by the role of G & T co-ordinator?

Kate Hosey - How can I use elements of the Transforming Learning Programme to help improve my teaching of 10Y English.

Margaret Parkes - How do I improve my teaching of Literacy, motivating the underachieving boys in my class?

Margaret Parkes - How can I improve the numbers of pupils attending an after-school club for Mathematics, using my enjoyment of the subject as a motivating factor and thereby hope to improve the results of children at the end of KS2?

Mark Potts - How can I live out my democratic values in practice more fully byusing formative assessment techniques to influence my own learning and the learning of others?

Simon Ratcliffe - ‘I Rhyme to see myself’:An exploration of creative dialogue and its power to enhance the teaching of English.

Simon Riding - How can I manage the development of an approach to Whole School Literacy through using Action Research as an aid to this?

Jayne Stillman - How have I improved my learning and provision of the arts using lottery grant funding?

Jayne Stillman - How is it that I evoke creativity in learners?

Sally Wilcocks - How do I improve my English teaching with a low ability group, using my Music teaching as a model?

Sally Wilcox - How can I raise the self-esteem of low ability students using music? (MEE)

There are four original ideas from my own educational research that seem to be having some global influence in international networks of teacher-researchers.

The first is that in educational enquiries of the kind, 'How am I improving what I am doing?' and 'How do I improve my practice?', 'I' exists as a living contradiction in holding together embodied values and their denial in practice. The genesis and growth of some implications of this idea can be seen in Vol. 1 of my doctoral thesis on, How do I improve my practice? Creating a discipline of education through educational enquiry.

The second is that practitioner-researchers can generate and test their own living educational theories from such enquiries as descriptions and explanations for their own learning. The most widely used paper on this idea was published in the Cambridge Journal of Education in 1989.

The third is that the embodied values of professional educators can, through their educational enquiries be transformed into living and communicable educational standards of judgement. Moira Laidlaw's doctorate has integrated this idea and made an original contribution to the idea of living standards of judgement.

The fourth is that the creation and testing of shared living educational theories can influence the education of social formations. Jackie Delong's doctorate has integrated this idea

The living educational theories of master and doctor educators can be accessed in the living theory section of actionresearch.net

For my analysis of the evidence from self-study teacher-researcher on the reconstitution and extension of educational theory and knowledge you can read the chapter WHAT COUNTS AS EVIDENCE IN SELF-STUDIES OF TEACHER EDUCATION PRACTICES? submitted for publication in the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching Practice (Kluwer academic publishers. The Netherland's in press)

The significance of the teacher-researcher movement in improving practice and in reconstituting educational knowledge and theory can be appreciated and understood in the expression, definition and communication of educational standards of judgement.

The importance of the ideas of 'embodied' knowledge and of transforming embodied values into living educational standards of judgement has been growing in my work over the last few years. The ideas became clearer as I reviewed a book on Unfolding Bodymind: Exploring Possibility Through Education (Hocking, Brent; Haskell, Johnna; and Linds, Warren. (Eds.) (2001) Brandon, VT: Psychology Press/Holistic Education Press.). You can access this review at: http://coe.asu.edu/edrev/reviews/rev141.htm)

The following papers from Educational Researcher, a Journal of the American Educational Research Association help to connect the significance of the accounts of the Westwood teacher-researchers to the global educational conversations on the nature of educational knowledge and theory.

Bullough, R. & Pinnegar, S. (2001) Guidelines for Quality in Autobiographical Forms of Self-Study Research. Educational Researcher, Vol. 30, No.3, pp. 13-21

Coulter, D. & Wiens, J. (2002) Educational Judgement: Linking the Actor and the Spectator. Educational Researcher, Vol. 31, No.4, pp. 15-25.

Hiebert, J., Gallimore, R, & Stigler, W. (2002) A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would it look like and how can we get one? Educational Researcher, Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 3-15.

Snow, C. E. (2001) Knowing What We Know: Children, Teachers, Children. Presidential Address to AERA, 2001, in Seattle, in Educational Researcher, Vol. 30, No.7, pp.3-9.

Colin Smith's paper in Teacher Development explores the implications of the development of shared living theories in the context of learning and teaching policies and teacher-research:

Smith, C. (2002) 'Supporting Teacher and School Development: learning and
teaching policies, shared living theories and teacher-research
partnerships'. Teacher Development, Volume 6, Number 2, pp. 157- 179.

You can access the final draft of Colin's paper at:

http://www.actionresearch.net/evol.smith.doc