What is so noticeable about this movement is that it has not emerged from our universities. This is not to say that such ideas are no longer at large within schools - far from it - but the intellectual underpinnings of such methods have been challenged: a vital first step in reversing the damage they have done. I have already mentioned Brain Gym, but alongside it we can place learning styles, multiple intelligences, discovery learning, and the 21st-century skills movement as hollow shells of their former selves. Some classroom practice, which until 5 years ago was endemic in the profession, has been held up to scrutiny and found wanting.
Like all great institutions, ResearchED formalises a wider movement, or culture-change, that has been taking place within education. 3 years later, the answer appears to be ‘yes’. It promoted much discussion, and following a Twitter conversation involving Ben Goldacre, the gauntlet was thrown down in the direction of Tom Bennett: ‘can you organise a grassroots movement amongst teachers campaigning for better use of educational research?’ Tom was asked. The Goldacre Report was published by the Department for Education in March, 2013.
I hope we have all been rubbing our ‘brain buttons’ in anticipation of today’s event… We were shocked by Goldacre’s exposure of un-evidenced practices in his 2009 book ‘Bad Science’, exemplified by now legendary pseudo-science of Brain Gym. In 2013, the government invited Ben Goldacre to write a report explaining how the education sector could make better use of evidence. Tom Bennett created ResearchED, but central government can make some small claim for having provided the spark. Now in its third year, and crossing 3 continents, ResearchED is a remarkable example of a grassroots movement, driven not by worthies on high, but by teachers on the ground, united by a desire to know how they can improve outcomes for their pupils. No event indicates this better than ResearchED. Since I became Shadow Minister for Schools in 2005, I have seen the teaching profession make strides towards Carnine’s ideal of a ‘mature profession’. Carnine wrote that a defining feature of a ‘mature profession’ - for example medicine or the law - was a willingness to engage with research findings. He was frustrated at the education profession’s unwillingness to acknowledge the empirical evidence in favour of a teacher-led classroom. Carnine was, and still is, a strong advocate of Direct Instruction. In 1999 Douglas Carnine, a Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, wrote a short but pungent paper entitled ‘ Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices’. It is a privilege to be attending an event attended by over 700 teachers, all spending their first weekend of a new term educating themselves about classroom research, to be participants in a conference of teachers with so much potential to transform this country’s educational landscape.
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