Elaine Hall

A Sound Foundation? What We Know about the Impact of Environments on Learning and the Implications for Building Schools for the Future.

This paper reports on a literature review conducted in the UK for the Design Council and CfBT (Higgins et al., 2005) which looked at the evidence of the impact of environments on learning in schools. We have reviewed the available evidence regarding different facets of the physical environment and provided an analysis based on different areas of effect, including the extent to which different facets interact (positively and negatively) with one another. Our conclusions suggest that, although the research often indicates the parameters of an effective environment, there is an overall lack of empirical evidence about the impact of individual elements of the physical environment which might inform school design at a practical level to support student achievement. However, at a secondary level of analysis, there are indications that environmental change can be part of a catalytic process of school development and improvement. The implications of these findings for Building Schools for the Future will be discussed.

Action Research in the Classroom

Introduction Action Research and Professional Enquiry Deciding on a Research(able) Question and Choosing Complementary Research Tools Collecting Data from Pupils Collecting Data from Teachers Collecting Data from Parents and Other Adults Interpreting Your Data Sharing Your Findings Moving Forward Classroom Enquiry and Professional Development

Getting Together to Improve the School Environment: User Consultation, Participatory Design and Student Voice.

This article first investigates historical trends in both the practice and the understanding of consultation, considering the often contrasting perspectives of architects and designers, compared to teachers and educationalists. Differing assumptions held by these two broad groups of professionals can lead to conflicting aims and objectives for school buildings, even where there is determination to communicate effectively and find common ground. Our exploration of this issue will centre on the potential contribution of users of the educational environment and, in particular, what happens to the student perspective. Consultation over school buildings has tended in the past to centre on educators, and so miss out direct involvement of students (Woolner et al., 2005). However, there is increasing conviction that children should participate in decision-making (Burke and Grosvenor, 2003; Clark et al., 2003), including about school-design (DfES, 2002), and methods are being developed to do this (Wall and Higgins, 2006). The historical analysis will bring us to a point where, using the example of one school, the consultation procedure in practice can be reflected on. This will form the second element of the article, exploring consultation within the modern context of participatory school design and student voice. The experiences of a school undergoing redesign of a classroom space will be discussed in light of the dichotomy previously established, the perspective of architecture in contrast to that of education. The role of the childs view in influencing design solutions will be considered, together with the consequences for teaching and learning, consultation procedures and the re-design of school buildings.

Engaging in and engaging with research: teacher inquiry and development

The connection between teacher inquiry, professional development and school improvement was recognised 30 years ago by Lawrence Stenhouse. Stenhouse contributed many valuable insights into the role of practitioner enquiry in creating and utilising knowledge about teaching and learning, much of which is still to be applied systematically in teacher education and professional development. This paper draws on the Learning to Learn Phase 3 Evaluation, a three‐year‐action research project in which teachers in primary and secondary schools across the UK completed three cycles of practitioner inquiry to explore tools, pedagogies and other innovations which would promote dispositions of ‘learning to learn’ (L2L). The paper focuses on identifying those aspects of being involved in L2L that support teachers’ learning and the way that the teachers themselves understand the impact on their professional development. Data from over 60 semi‐structured interviews undertaken over the three years of the project, the case study reports compiled by teachers at the end of each year of the project and collaborative workshops involving teachers and university researchers as co‐inquirers are used to explore teachers’ learning. Qualitative methods are used to develop a thematic analysis of the interviews, case studies and the teachers’ understanding of the relationships between inquiry, research and continuing professional development (CPD) in order to identify categories and generate key concepts that can inform a theoretical understanding of the impact of professional inquiry on teachers’ learning. The findings contribute to our understanding of the role of inquiry and research in schools in supporting professional learning by suggesting how tools and models of working are developed.

Noise in schools: a holistic approach to the issue.

Much of the research evidence relating to the physical learning environment of schools is inconclusive, contradictory or incomplete. Nevertheless, within this confusing area, research from a number of disciplines, using a range of methodologies, points to the negative impact of noise on students’ learning. In this paper, drawing on our systematic review of learning environments we review the weight of evidence in relation to noise, considering what implications the results of these studies have for the design and use of learning spaces in schools. We make four key points. Firstly that noise over a given level does appear to have a negative impact on learning. Secondly that beneath these levels noise may or may not be problematic, depending on the social, cultural and pedagogical expectations of the students and teachers. Thirdly we argue that when noise is deemed to be a difficulty, this finding cannot simply be translated into design prescriptions. The reasons for this indeterminacy include differing understandings of the routes through which noise produces learning deficits, as well as relationships between noise and other elements of the environment, particularly the impacts of physical solutions to noise problems. Finally, we suggest that solutions to noise problems will not be produced by viewing noise in isolation, or even as part of the physical environment, but through participatory approaches to understanding and adapting the structure, organisation and use of learning spaces in schools.

Catalytic tools: understanding the interaction of enquiry and feedback in teachers’ learning

This paper investigates how the use of Pupil Views Templates (PVTs), a tool designed to elicit, record and analyse the development of students’ awareness of their own learning processes, supports teachers’ professional learning. This paper reports on a three‐year collaborative practitioner enquiry project involving more than 30 primary and secondary schools in England. The data set includes practitioners’ case studies, interviews, questionnaires and cross‐project analysis completed by the university team. Analysis focuses on the role of feedback, stimulated through the use of PVTs, in teachers’ learning through three dimensions: the influence of student feedback on teachers as part of the pedagogical encounter; the influence of student feedback on schools within the context of the practitioner enquiry projects; the influence of feedback on the lead teacher researchers. Links between the tools used, the source of the feedback, and teachers’ learning are mapped from a ‘second order perspective’ derived from the diverse data sources.

Learning to Learn: Teacher Research in the Zone of Proximal Development

This article draws on an action research project in primary and secondary schools which was funded through the Campaign for Learning, and supported by Newcastle University with a focus on ‘Learning to Learn’. This is a potentially useful concept for teachers and academics as attempts are made to move beyond curriculum‐driven and assessment‐dominated education towards inclusive and lifelong learning. At the end of the academic years 2003–2004 and 2004–2005, a total of 43 teachers from schools involved in researching Learning to Learn completed questionnaires and were interviewed about the progress of their individual research projects in the context of the wider programme. They were asked to discuss issues of autonomy and control, expectations and motivation and how change was manifesting itself in their contexts. Clear messages about the need for teacher ownership of the research balanced with the need for scaffolding emerged from the analysis.

Developing practices in teachers’ professional dialogue in England: using Coaching Dimensions as an epistemic tool

This paper demonstrates how teachers who were working in a range of developmental relationships with researchers used Coaching Dimensions to understand, describe, analyse and improve the quality of their coaching and mentoring conversations. The findings are based on analysis of transcriptions of case studies of one-to-one professional dialogue practice. The dimensions of coaching provide a language and mechanism through which teachers can analyse and reflect on their ‘coaching’ practice. They can act as a metacognitive tool for teachers, providing them with the opportunity to engage with the complexity of their practice. Such self-knowledge enables productive practice development, and an ability to talk with peers about how their practice is developing. This can help teachers to plan for, and be more responsive within, coaching or mentoring meetings. Use of the dimensions allows the relationships between the nature and the intent of practice to be explored and may help to clarify the roles of different types of professional dialogue, securing them within continuing professional development structures in schools. As relationships and trust within coaching and mentoring partnerships can be vulnerable, gaining greater awareness of the significance of the semantics of the dialogue can support the participants to match intent with outcome.

'That's not quite the way we see it': the epistemological challenge of visual data

In research textbooks, and much of the research practice, they describe, qualitative processes and interpretivist epistemologies tend to dominate visual methodology. This article challenges the assumptions behind this dominance. Using exemplification from three existing visual data sets produced through one large education research project, this article considers the affordances and constraints of the research process focusing particularly on analysis. It examines how and when the visual can be incorporated, gives some critical reflections on the role and use of visual methods to fulfil different research intents, and, in particular, considers combining large, open-ended data sets with acceptable and rigorous analysis techniques. We then explore arguments about the nature of visual data, what is considered epistemologically appropriate and the decision-making which accompanies any appraisal of process in education research. The intention is to challenge ourselves, and fellow visual methods researchers, to develop a more complete understanding of the theory and practice of visual research.

Visual methodology: previously, now and in the future

This special issue of IJRME reflects the fact that visual methodology in educational research is at an important turning point. There has been a rapid expansion in practice within educational research, but we feel that it is now necessary to reflect critically on the ways in which visual methods are used: the collection of data, approaches to analysis and dissemination, the questions visual data are being used to address and those they are not; and how research identified as ‘visual’ is located in the wider field and how it contributes to the wider aspirations of research for learning and teaching. This special issue aims to facilitate dialogue about visual methodology in educational research and to explore how researchers in the field are conceptualizing quality in visual methods. We invited contributors to investigate issues of trustworthiness, rigour, reliability, validity and credibility and how these can be approached to give visual methods equivalent status alongside other education research practices. Overall, the purpose of this issue is not only to exemplify good practice in analysis and representation of visual data, but also to focus on emerging theoretical debates about the role of visual methods in the creation and translation of knowledge and their relevance for education. In answer to the question of ‘why now?’, it is worth noting that although the use of visual artefacts as data has a longer history in some social sciences (Banks 2001), the visual had tended until relatively recently to be overlooked in education (Prosser 1998; Rose 2001), but is now frequently a concern of researchers. That there has been this rapid expansion in research practice suggests that this special issue is timely. Furthermore, while some disciplines have tended to concentrate either on the visual data themselves (Rose 2001) or alternatively to mainly use visual information to elicit further data (Harper 2002), education has tended to borrow from a diversity of disciplines in terms of methods, intentions and uses of the visual. This is probably related to the more pragmatic, practice-based understandings that many educational researchers have of their field and, in fact, many of the popular methods within education research can be traced back to techniques developed in practice in education or elsewhere. So, for example, draw and write techniques were initially developed to elicit understandings of concepts such as risk by public health professionals (Whetton and McWhirter 1998) while enabling children to make photographs remains a particularly popular method in research in public health and community psychology (Darbyshire, Macdougall, and Schiller 2005; Croghan et al. 2008), as well as in education. Certainly, our experiences as researchers has consisted in initially making use of visual methods because visual data are common in schools and visual artefacts are often successful in mediating conversations with participants of all ages. With backgrounds in teaching,