 Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to this webinar organized by School Education Gateway European Toolkit for Schools, which is running the webinar series on promoting inclusive education and tackling early school living. So my name is Ina and together with my colleagues, Esme and Leonora, we are delighted to support this webinar, which will be dedicated to inclusive education. This webinar will present the project that uses as an innovative approach, inclusive inquiry, which involves children becoming researchers and working collaboratively with their teachers to design lessons that include all pupils, particularly those who might be seen as hard to reach. So inclusive inquiry extends the idea of engaging with students, voices, and having dialogues between children and teachers. This webinar will also showcase some real examples from schools that use this approach, so we'll present them during the webinar too. And our speaker panel for today is Kiki Mishio, is a professor of education at the University of Southampton, UK. And her research field is inclusive education, where her work focuses on children's and young people's voices as a means of understanding notions and marginalization and developing inclusive practices in schools. She'll be presenting with Mel Ensko as a professor of education at the University of Manchester, University of Glasgow, and at Queensland University of Technology. In the recent years, his research has had a significant impact on the global efforts of the UNESCO to promote inclusion and equity in education. So I'm very much looking forward to listening to our speakers. And just before giving the floor to our speakers, I would like to point out for our audience that this session will be recorded and will publish the recording and the slides of our speakers on the webinar page in the coming days. And in the meantime, you can pose questions in the question and answer chat box. And we'll try to address as many questions as possible in the end of the webinar. So Kiki and Mel, if you are ready, I'm happy to give you the floor. Thank you. Thank you, Inna. And welcome, everybody. First of all, I would like to thank the European Commission for this invitation. And Inna Ismini and Eleonora for all the technical support ahead of this presentation. And as Inna said, we will be presenting today about inclusive inquiry, which is an approach that we developed in collaboration with other colleagues. So today, it's only two of us here. Mel was a methodological consultant on the project, reaching the heart to reach. But in fact, we're representing a range of countries, five countries in particular, that were involved in this project, and a number of universities and schools that were involved. And the project was funded by the European Union Erasmus Plus program. So Mel and I prepared this presentation, having in mind as the audience, schools and teachers primarily, even though we are aware that there may be some academics amongst us. So towards the end, we'll be sharing some publications that can be used both by practitioners as well as academics. But it is collaborative work between universities and schools. So it will be a relevance both to schools as well as academics. And we've prepared this webinar in three parts. So first, we will be explaining the project and the background to the project that led to the development of this approach, inclusive inquiry. Then I will be giving an example from one English school that took part in the project, followed by your questions and any thoughts that you may have after you hear our presentation. So as I said, the project involved a range of partners. And it was a three-year project, which was due to finish in August. But it has been extended now until the end of December due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And the countries involved were Portugal, Spain, England, Denmark and Austria. And in each of our countries, we had one university and one partner school. So a total of 10 partners. However, more schools were involved. So we had a total of 30 schools, all primary. So England is leading the project, University of Southampton and Wordsworth Primary School. Austria, we had the University of Graz, the Chonau Primary School. Denmark, Arcus University and Nevoscole. Spain, University of Tónum of Madrid and Aldebaran School. And Portugal, University of Algarve. Agrupamento, the Rupinero, Erosa schools. So all these were primary schools. But as I said, in the second cycle of the project, we had 25 additional schools. So a total of 30 primary schools taking part in the project. And the main name of this project was to find ways of reaching out to all of our students, especially those that have seen us being hard to reach. And the project involved three cycles of collaborative action research. So in the first cycle, we piloted the approach, inclusive inquiry. And then in the second cycle, we used it extensively. And then the third cycle involved expansion of the approach in all the schools. Before I move on, I would like to clarify this phrase, hard to reach, that we have into inverted commas. And just make clear that for this project, any child can be seen as hard to reach at some point in school life. So we are moving away from traditional ways of looking at children and blaming individual children for difficulties that they are experiencing in school. And we're looking at the context and how this context might present difficulties for certain children. So through the approach, inclusive inquiry, we focus on how lessons can be hard to reach sometimes, rather than blaming hard to reach children. So we take the position, anybody can experience difficulties, and we're looking at how can we make changes to the context in order to address those difficulties. And our aim is to develop more inclusive lessons through dialogue between children and teachers. So this idea of dialogue is a central feature of our approach, inclusive inquiry, and it's moving beyond the idea of engaging with students' voices. Over to Mel now. This work that we're describing can be traced back over 20 years, really, to work that I've done with my colleagues, Cooke has done with her colleagues, and then the work we've done more recently together. This earlier work has all been about how do schools, in general, and teachers in classrooms in particular, respond to learn a diversity. And the formulation that we've developed over those 20 years is to see this about being about identifying and removing barriers that make it difficult for some children to participate and learn. So as Cooke says, we're not analysing barriers within children, we're analysing barriers within the context in which children are educated. Now the concept of barriers is a metaphor to make us think in a kind of broad way, because barriers can mean many things. There can be physical barriers that make it difficult for some children to come to school or to take part in school. Often those physical barriers are relatively easy to identify and usually can be overcome. But then there are other kinds of barriers that some of these are to do with policy. So the curriculum can be a barrier if it's not designed with all children and their interests in mind. The assessment systems that schools are required to use can create barriers if they don't celebrate the progress of all children. And of course, most importantly, the limitations of our own expertise as teachers can also be barriers. And to do with that, of course, there are more subtle barriers, the barriers that may be in our minds, the limitations of our own expectation of what's possible if we don't believe that some children can take part, if we don't think it's feasible for some children to learn, then that as well will create barriers. So what we've been trying to find out is how do you identify all those barriers? And how do you work together? And this is very much about people working together to address and overcome those barriers. The work we've done is very much focused on the use of forms of action research where practitioners in schools collect evidence and engage with that evidence to think about what might be done to reach those children who we see as being hard to reach. Now evidence can take many forms. The usual starting point is the statistics and we count everything and we have graphs and charts and we see patterns in terms of children's participation and in their learning. But then what we found is there's other kinds of evidence that's very important. Evidence collected by teachers having chance to see each other teaching and that's an important part of what we're going to talk about. But also evidence collected by hearing the views of children. Now trying this out in various places and trying to learn how to use it more effectively what we've seen is that it can create interruptions. In other words it makes people stop and think and question and talk and think about what else can we do. And of course this can sometimes create moments of turbulence where it disturbs the status quo within the school. Now amongst all of those evidence we come to the view increasingly over the last few years through the work that we've done that very powerful evidence is if we can find ways of hearing what children themselves think about being a student in this school about being a learner in this classroom. The project we're going to mainly talk about as Kiki has said is set within primary schools but actually it's important for us to explain that prior to this project there was another project also funded by the European Union which was actually focused in secondary schools and in that project we had eight secondary schools in three countries Portugal Spain and England. Three eight schools that were working in quite challenging circumstances in urban environments with very diverse populations and what we introduced to those eight schools and it was another three-year project was an approach which merged two ways of thinking one the idea of hearing the voice of students and the other an approach we adopted from elsewhere what's called lesson study. Now if I could just briefly explain that in case you're not aware of it lesson study is a professional development strategy that started and was developed in Japan and has subsequently been used in a number of other Asian countries and then gradually globally if you're interested in the approach simply Google lesson study and you'll get guides and examples but basically what it involves is usually a group of teachers probably three who volunteer to work together to explore how a lesson can be made more inclusive. The lesson they choose to explore is usually referred to as the research lesson and the three teachers plan the lesson together putting their expertise together to say how do we make this lesson effective for all children then what happens is each of the teachers teaches the lesson the research lesson with the other two teachers in the room observing what's going on probably observing mainly the level of engagement of the children. After each lesson the three teachers sit down and they reflect on what's happened and they refine their lesson plan and then it's taught by the second teacher and the same again and it's taught by the third teacher. There's quite a lot of research about all of this what it suggests is that when it works well and it's a feature of all the approaches we're talking about today is that they don't automatically work well we have to learn how to use them effectively but when it works well the evidence is quite convincing from many parts of the world that this can be a powerful form of professional learning. From that approach that was developed in those eight schools of eight secondary schools we came to the conclusion that we'd moved on that we'd gone beyond simply listening to the views of children simply getting the feedback of children gone beyond simply using the lesson study approach as it had been previously defined and we came to a view that we were on to something new and something new that we wanted to try out and eventually we call this inclusive inquiry and this diagram attempts to map out the factors involved in inclusive inquiry. You can start anywhere on the diagram because these four sets of factors interact so you could start on the left hand side and say this is about learning from differences learning from the differences of the children learning from the different ideas and approaches of our colleagues it's certainly about talking about learning and teaching talking in order to develop a language of practice where people can share ideas and indeed reflect upon their own practice and it is about development developing inclusive in practices through trialing things out through this process of action research but the most important factor in all of this that's why it's in the middle of the diagram is the stimulation of dialogue of discussions between students and teachers where they start to help one another to think about how a lesson can be more inclusive. As we find this approach through the work with the 30 schools in the five countries we've seen is involving three phases and Kiki will give an example of this in a moment to illustrate what it looks like it's about a group of teachers again typically three teachers working together with some children to plan the lesson they then teach the lesson in turn with their two colleagues and some of the other students watching what's going on and then they analyze the lesson the most important and distinctive feature of it is that children are trained to be researchers and they learn how to collect information from their classmates through discussion maybe through questionnaires through group activities and through observation so each teacher nominates three children to be student researchers and we ask them to choose three children who they think are in some way or other hard to reach and we leave that concept open so teachers make their professional judgment as to which children they choose they of course may choose some children who are obviously having difficulty in some way or another they may choose children who are presenting challenging behavior in the classroom but we found also that sometimes teachers because they know their children very well will teach will it choose children and maybe are being overlooked children are perhaps shy children are not participating so the concept of hard to reach is quite a subtle one that can be used and through all of those three phases dialogue between children and teachers is what seems to make a difference in the materials that you will receive all of that is explained with examples and there's also a framework which appears which gives in more detail what those three phases are about we call this the levels of use framework and this is to help groups of teachers to plan but also to help groups of teachers to make judgments as to whether they are putting the strategy in place fully because our our research into all of this suggests you're only going to get real impact if it's put into a into into practice fully so under each of the three phases one two and three there are series of descriptors of what we would expect to see when groups of teachers trios of teachers are putting inclusive inquiry into practice so let's look at an example what does this look like in practice so the example that I'm going to give you is based on our partner a hub school which supported the other additional schools in England a Wordsworth Primary School and it is a school with over 600 students in an area which is socially disadvantaged high percentage of students that do not have English as their first language over 40 proportion of children defined as having special educational needs and it's a quite diverse context and as Mel explained earlier teachers worked in trios so the example that I'm going to share with you is from three year three teachers and the students were at the age of between seven and eight years old for year three in England and each of the teachers chose three students to be researchers from their own classes that were seen as hard to reach in some way so we had teacher choosing somebody who lacked confidence or another one who chose somebody who recently joined the school and was not speaking English very well somebody else who chose a student who was on the autistic spectrum and as Mel said the teachers had flexibility to choose anybody that they thought that was hard to reach us in some way to take this crucial role of becoming student researchers and the teachers decided that they were going to focus on a literacy lesson and I'm going to give you some details about the lesson in a while but as we said it's very crucial in the process this idea of training student researchers so in essence what this training involves is thinking about learning so it is about making the student researchers think critically about learning especially when they observe lessons because as Mel explained to you earlier the approach involves teachers observing other teachers as well as these student researchers observing the lessons that they design with their teachers so our effort was to make children think critically about learning so in this particular school when the student the teacher who was leading the training with the support of the other teachers and the trio that I mentioned before they presented a range of pictures for the student researchers and asked them are the students learning in these pictures how do we know which photo shows the best learning and we've used this with a number of classes and in a number of schools and quite interestingly many times the students were saying that the children are learning when they have their head down just writing no talking no interaction at all and they thought that maybe the others at the water tank they may be playing rather than learning so in a way we wanted them to become much more critical about what the learning looks like and where which are the context in which learning takes place so following that the teacher who was leading the training that you can see on those pictures walked around with student researchers walked around the school in order to do some trial in observing lessons before they actually go and observe the lessons that they were going to design now in the English schools that's quite easy in the particular one because they had those glass walls so they could just stand outside even though they walk inside as well so here you can see what one of the student researchers notices and discusses when they came back so he was saying I saw people talking but I realized when I saw them for a bit longer they were talking on task because I realized that from far away they were talking with their heads down writing that kind of tells me they cannot be talking about something that's not what they are supposed to be doing so in a sense we wanted to help them not to jump into conclusions when they are observing but to look closely and explore what they are looking at so they try out that in order to be ready when they go and observe lessons in addition to this another dimension that we included in the training of the student researchers was this idea of how do we help primary school children having constructive dialogues with teachers so based on work that we've carried out in the past both with primary and secondary schools one of the things that we've identified is that sometimes students especially in primary schools are very honest in the way that they express their views and this is something that is good we don't want to lose that however in this process we focus on having constructive dialogues in order to make changes to the learning that is taking place and we know that some teachers might feel threatened or intimidated by having students observing their lessons so we were trying to find ways to make sure that these dialogues are indeed constructive so as you can see there we've shared with them on strips of papers various statements and we've asked them to start thinking how would that make a teacher feel if you say that at the end of their lesson these lessons was boring is this helpful is this going to help with identifying what we need to change in the lesson and we also wanted to focus their attention on the activities of the lesson rather than on the teacher so when they observe the lesson the focus is on student engagement rather than on the teachers themselves so it's not about to say if a teacher wears a nice dress or if the teacher is nice or smiley it is more about the activity so the activity allowed everyone to be involved or the activity made it difficult so these were the things we wanted them to think about before going and observing so following though that training the student researchers in each class decided what methods they were going to use in order to collect the views of their classmates so in addition to their focus on observation we also shared with them and practice a number of methods but we also gave them flexibility to use existing methods that they want to use so here you can see three student researchers collecting the views of their own classmates so what they have done here is that they presented a number of ideas to them such as having a dance in the lesson using an iPad in the lesson and using other sources of technology and then they asked them to do what they called blind voting so everybody had to put their head down and put their hand up after they read out each of those ideas so at the end of the session they analyze and they identify what students think about learning in school and how it can be changed in the way that it is delivered so following that teachers and student researchers get together in order to plan the lesson together so here you can see the student researchers from the three classes with their notes based on the ideas of their classmates as well as their own ideas and the three teachers planning the lesson together as I said at the beginning the lesson was a literacy lesson and the teachers wanted to focus on inverted commas that's the speech marks when we include where somebody is talking and that's what they wanted to focus on and they design a lesson together following long conversations and making changes about the activities that they're going to introduce and then one teacher teaches whilst the other two are observing alongside the student researchers from the other classes and then the process is repeated three times so here we can have just an idea of the lesson so here is the first lesson being taught and one of the ideas of the children was that they really liked quizzes so they wanted quizzes at different stages of the lesson in order for the teachers to be able to track progress and they wanted to have them in different color papers so that it's easy to monitor and you can see there that the other teachers and the other student researchers who do not belong in that class are observing keeping notes others are just looking and discussing with the teachers so this is again dialogue whilst they are observing the lessons at the end of each of the lessons the student researchers again collect the views of all the students in the class about the specific lesson to find out what they thought about the lesson and then they all gather together student researchers and teachers in order to analyze the lesson and see how it went where the activities that they suggested good in ensuring that every student could participate and also make possible changes to the lesson so in the specific example just to give you an example one of the suggestion was to use iPads individually to find out various examples about using the inverted commas and soon after the first and second lesson they realized that the iPads were distracting and not really helping children's learning so in the final lesson the teacher projected on her screen what they wanted them to do and everybody was much more focused and they did a lot better by introducing this change alongside others so during the second year we had six schools in each of the five countries that's 30 schools altogether primary schools all trialling the method that had been refined during the first year with the five hub schools and of course in each country as well we had a team from a local university so what we've got going on is a process of action research where teachers are trialling and refining the approach and learning from the trial and local researchers supporting and helping but also observing and analyzing the process because obviously we the questions we were asking were does it work is it effective is it having an impact and under what conditions does it have an impact and that's why we want to stress that the evidence we have suggests that this can be powerful but it has to be implemented in a very systematic and an accurate way following the guidance in the booklets that we will be sharing with you that that is the evidence that we found that it's it's the implementation putting this into practice so the implications of that of course is this is not easy it's not a quick fix there are I'm afraid around the world people who write books and offer guidance on how to make schools and lessons more inclusive and they make it sound simple they make it sound as if there are a few techniques that you can use my honest view from my experience is that is not the way forward what is it the way forward is a much more challenging way of people working together exploring through the use of evidence how lessons can be refined and often it's about the detail of the lesson the the engagement of the teacher with the children the way the tasks are presented and so on so that that's that's what we've learned and of course the implication of that is putting this into practice is very challenging and in the schools that were most successful of course it was because there was a commitment of the teachers but also I think because within the school there was an appropriate climate and there were senior people who are very supportive of this of this being introduced so part of the role of the researchers from the universities was to analyze the practice and the impact of the practice and we'll share with you some articles where you can read about this in more detail but in summary where this worked well we saw the impacts on the student in terms of their engagement in the lessons then being participating then participating on the activities of the lesson we saw impact in terms of the confidence of children children who previously have seemed to lack confidence seem to grow in confidence through all of this and then more specifically we did did have examples of children who had previously been said to be very difficult in terms of the behavior who now were starting to be much more integrated into the life of the school so we saw these impacts in the in the best examples we also saw and these things are related of course that over time there were changes in the relationships children more closely working with children teachers working more closely with teachers and children working more closely with their teachers becoming more cooperative it's worth saying I think that we have strong evidence that the biggest impact was on those children who were chosen to be the student researchers and remember they were chosen by their teachers because they were seen as being hard to reach and then the other area of impact was on the professional development of the teachers this is potentially a very powerful form of professional learning and what we saw and what we've captured examples of Kiki's just giving you an illustration of this how it got teachers to focus more specifically on aspects of their practice detail aspects of their practice use of questioning use of praise and so on that can make a big difference between a lesson that's okay to make it a lesson that is really very good in terms of the inclusion of all children and that seemed to be about teachers becoming more sensitive to the individuality of children and more aware of the individuality and more positive about diversity and of course what it also led to was the sharing of ideas and techniques amongst the teachers and it reminds us of course that even today teaching can be a quite lonely life you're in the classroom you've got the class maybe the door is closed and you've got challenges and problems and you have to solve them on your on there on your own in schools that are using these approaches that sense of professional isolation gradually disappears so that teachers and of course children are involved in a joint project of problem solving so in order to help other schools that have not been involved in this approach which as Mel just highlighted is quite complex even though we do have a detailed guidance and the 12 steps that we've presented earlier the levels of use framework we've developed these booklets six in total that you can download for free in five languages so it is German Portuguese Spanish English and Danish Danish yes thank you so they can be found on the website and you can download them for free so the first and the most important booklet I would say it's the first inclusive inquiry a step-by-step guide for teachers so those steps are explained clearly and you can see lots of examples as to how the different schools have approached each of the steps so though there are first specific steps there is some flexibility in there alongside the inclusive inquiry is the preparing student to be researchers guidance manual which the example I shared with you is from one of the English schools but there are lots of examples about how to organize your training for researchers and of course this depends on each context and you have to take that into account so again there are lots of useful suggestions and examples how to organize your training of researchers the third booklet is the accounts of developments in the five country networks so as we've explained from the start each country had a hub partner school but then in the second cycle we created networks of schools and those were the networks in each country so this booklet explains how the networks were set up what worked well what was challenging and we give some advice again based on the experience that we had how to ensure that these networks are helpful and support mechanism for schools in order to develop this approach in addition to these three there's three more booklets as I said a total of six booklets and the fourth one is the students voices toolkit which consists of various student voice activities primarily for student researchers to use to collect the views of their classmates but at the same time teachers can use those activities to collect the views of their students and there is a range of activities which were all developed by these schools that took part in the project from each of our countries and the final two booklets they are both guidance documents the first one is for monitoring students engagement and the second one for monitoring teachers thinking and practices so one of the things that we were interested was to monitor whether there were changes on students engagement in school as well as on teachers thinking and practices so we developed questionnaires that are included in these booklets and can be used by schools in order to monitor the progress so they can give them before the lesson and after the lesson and the same for the teacher's questionnaire before the whole process starts and at the end and there are clear explanations about how to ensure that you can compare the pre and post questionnaires so all of these are available for free as well as other material that you can find on our website such as newsletters, practitioners publications as well as academic publications so before we move into the question and answer session one of the things I'm sure you would have lots of questions and and we were here to hopefully be able to address those but we would like you to think as well what do we think about this approach that we've just presented would it work in your school how do you react to the idea of planning with student researchers as well as how do you feel about asking students and colleagues to observe lessons we know that some schools are used to these ideas but our experience suggests that there are other schools that have never experienced something like this and therefore we wanted to make you think about these questions if you want to find out more information of course our website and that's updated regularly because we still haven't finished with all the outputs as I have said the project finishes end of December we also have the video that we've asked all of you to watch before you join this webinar and the video has been prepared with staff training in mind so our idea was that you can use it to ask an introduction if you're going to use the inclusive inquiry approach and of course our email is there if you are interested in asking any other questions and the last two slides which I think have disappeared for some reason okay thank you are they there can you see that okay the last is some relevant publications these are all publications related to this project and the earlier project and we also have a list of other references that we've used today so I'm going to stop here now and then hand over to Eleonora thank you for your attention okay thank you so much um thank you so much to Mel and Kiki for such an inspiring presentation so right now it's a time to address some questions yeah there were there has been a lot of questions already from our from our audience so I will address it to our speakers in the meantime and we are expecting more questions so one of the first question is is it easier to implement this with students age 14 to 16 or is it better to do it from the very beginning levels because from what I see there also are students from very young age yeah um thanks for the question as Mel said a version of this approach we've used with secondary schools so we work with the age range that you are referring to but this particular project was in primary schools simply because most of the work around student voice is with secondary schools so we identified this gap in the literature and we wanted to do something about this now there is not I wouldn't say it's easier or more difficulty more difficult each one presents certain challenges and certain difficulties so you may argue that sometimes uh that students are more talkative when they are older so in secondary schools and therefore with primary schools we had to be very creative and very inventive in getting students views but of course it varies in the uh in terms of the context that you are working in so it does have challenges in both contexts so it's how you approach it and what methods you are using in order to enable students to express their views so one example I always give not just about this project sometimes schools hand out just questionnaires for students to express their views and they may think this is very easy because it just takes five or ten minutes for the secondary school students to complete the questionnaire but if we're talking about engaging with their authentic ideas we're looking at other much more creative ways like use of drawings and analyzing these that require a lot more time so that's quite important the use of methods that we are using so that my position is that it's not one way or another it has certain challenges and it is down to teachers and how they approach it I don't know if Mel wants to add anything to that well I broadly agree with what you say and I think another factor then is to do with the tradition of a particular school that I mean we sometimes use the word the culture of the school the way we work together and where we have worked together and I don't know about any other countries that are represented here but certainly in this country in England making a broad generalization there's a tendency for the relationship between adults and children to be more formal and that formality creates barriers between children and teachers now it's a broad generalization and there are many examples of where that's not true but it does seem to me that the kind of thinking we're talking about not just the particular approach of inclusive inquiry but the idea of respecting that children have a view or young people have a view that they can contribute I mean it seems to me that surely that's got to be even more so with teenagers than it is with younger children but I do think it's about traditions of schools in the schools that were involved in the project some people in some of the schools did believe that having worked in this way over a period of time it had changed the culture of the schools and some of the teachers said it's made our school more democratic more participatory more democratic and I think that would be right and I think you know the long-term impact of doing this to scale within a school as well as the impacts that we've talked about I would hope would change the overall atmosphere of the school and make it a more inclusive atmosphere in which everybody works and this approach is a kind of step in that direction. Excellent thank you so much Melan Kiki so we have some other questions the question is although children who are presenting challenges are considered to be the best candidates for being researchers can students who are not presenting challenges also be qualified to be researchers? Yeah that's an excellent question thank you for this absolutely and ideally the schools are going to implement the approach in a number of lessons so in many of our schools they implemented the approach in a second cycle and in a third cycle and in a fourth cycle and the ideally for us is that you should give the opportunity to every single student because as we've said the biggest impact was on those that have taken the role of researchers so the schools that are really fascinated by this approach and have embedded within their work have used it on a number of times and allowed a number of students to take this role so absolutely it's not even though for us the primary focus was those seen as hard to reach and as I said to start with for us any child can be seen as hard to reach even those that do very well at school and don't have challenges they may have some challenges at some point so the role of researchers is quite crucial and we encourage teachers to use more than one round to give the opportunities to other students as well. There's another argument for doing that of course which we've not mentioned think about the skills that the students are learning you know that these these skills of how to collect information how to engage and analyze information how to debate with other people including adults about what the information is collecting I mean these are generalizable skills which are going to be valuable to the students in other places and in other parts of the curriculum. Excellent thank you so much and the next question is can you maintain a dialect in a class with 30 students for example or is it just an ideal to have a smaller group or four to eight students? Yeah that's that's a very good question the position I am taking based on this work and previous work that we've done is that this is this is the starting point and it opens doors for having dialogues the dialogues might not be all at the same time and at the same level but it makes students feeling much more confident approaching teachers and having dialogues outside classroom in the corridor or even within the lesson. I think I think one of our teachers is saying that in the video how she saw how children changes were much more willing to express their views but of course then it's the idea of dialogue I'm always using the definition by Caroline Lodge which says dialogue is to arrive at a point that you wouldn't get to on your own so for us this is what we've seen that it's happening here that teachers and children are exchanging ideas and then changing their perceptions about their practices about what they're going to do next and many times about their own perceptions about learning and teaching and about individual students. So a simple answer though it's not as simple is that yes you can have dialogue maybe not with all at the same time all 30 in the class but it is about thinking how to find opportunities to have more sustained conversations and dialogues with individual children in smaller groups or even one-to-one. Mela I don't know if you have no I'm happy with that a different view no happy with that thank you thank you a lot Kiki so the next question is and also a comment very inspiring however how should we apply this method over teenagers kids can be easily guided and directed older ones do not follow the direction and because of many reasons like economic obstacles, academic laziness, English language inadequacy how what would you suggest? Thanks for this question and I'm not sure if the person who's raised this question was here at the start but I'm going to repeat what I said at the start that for us it's not about blaming individual children because of certain characteristics or because of certain barriers in their lives it is about moving beyond that and believing that all children can contribute and all children have valid views that we can engage with and by believing in that then we start looking at how can we take that into account to change the context to change the lessons that we're organizing I saw the comment about 14 to 16 I think it was mentioned the age 16 I've done work with post 16 further education college here in England and we've trained students as researchers and in that occasion it was students that were presenting certain challenges like the one that this participant in this comment has mentioned and the minute that the students are assigned that role they take their responsibility fully and they try to do their best in order to help their teachers so it is a matter of changing relationships between students and teachers and assigning them that responsibility so I'm not underestimating the pressures and the challenges involved but it's a different way of thinking so allow your students to surprise you I had many teachers saying that they were very unsure whether those students were going to be in a position to become student researchers and then they saw them completely transformed simply because they gave them this sense of responsibility and allow them to work together and be supported by their teachers and by other students so this is what I would say to this question Mel the other element of course that I'd want to add to that is through the process it's a recognition by adults that young people may have knowledge that we don't have insights that we don't have I remember in the earlier project in the secondary schools I arrived for a meeting in a inner city secondary school in Manchester and the meeting was due to start at 3.30 and I was a little bit earlier and I went into the classroom and the teacher who was going to be part of the group a male teacher was sitting in front of his laptop and this rather tall black boy was standing behind him boy of about 16 and I sort of stood in the background and said oh don't let me interrupt you and what it became clear was that the student was advising the teacher as to how to group the children in a lesson that was going to be taught tomorrow and he was saying I wouldn't put that boy with that boy and maybe that girl could be given the job of leading the group and of course what the teacher was getting insights into was the dynamics of the group of the student group which an adult wouldn't necessarily know about but this young man knew about and was able to advise the teacher there's all sorts of things going on in that conversation to do with changing relationships about respect but also as I say making recognizing that young people actually have insights that we don't necessarily have thanks a lot for your answer yeah I think it's very very interesting perspective so we have a couple of some time for a couple of more questions the question is when the student researchers are observing a lesson do they use some sort of observation form that they can feel in how does the observation work yes we do have in the materials an observation grid in fact we have a couple of observation grids with the in mind that the focus is on student engagement and the activity rather than the teacher what helps the students what makes it difficult for them but we also have some lessons that and some student researchers that they develop their own based on the lesson so they were just looking at certain activities so we do have observation grids but sometimes even with the very young children because some of those were used with five and six year olds children it was just having a tick box and a smiley face so there are variations so definitely we've got lots of suggestions but again people are flexible to use whatever works in their context we just want them to focus on the right things and always not mentioning individual students names so that we protect the other children's anonymity and an interesting aspect of that which connects to what I was just saying about the earlier question is it's interesting what do the children notice I mean the kind of frameworks that Kiki has mentioned they're fairly broad they invite children to you know they focus children's minds but then the interesting what the children notice and maybe children notice sometimes things that at adults we overlook thanks a lot for your answer I definitely see there are so many questions but we'll probably have time to address one more question so the question is is there any experience of the practice being used with different kinds of lessons for example outdoor lessons roleplay drama etc. Plenty of examples I think every lesson we've got examples including outdoor lessons I remember observing here in England but all sorts of lessons we've got plenty of examples and you can find some of those examples in our materials thank you Kiki so yes I'm tempted to ask one more question and then we can draw the webinar to the end so what is the reaction of the class when only certain students from the class are chosen to plan the lessons with the teachers yeah I guess this relates to the the other question about if it's going to be only those seniors hard to reach or is it going to be only certain students so you have to remember that the other students are also contributing to the design of the lesson through the student researcher collecting their views but of course it's different standing in front of your whole class and collecting the views of your classmates rather than just saying what you think and your idea being taken into account and the examples as I've said that we've seen because they use the approach a number of times they gave the opportunities to most of their students to become researchers so that's why we're saying it has to be dealt with sensitively and ideally use more than one time so that every student gets this opportunity so I didn't experience any kind of resentment or being unhappy they all knew that at some point they will take this role in the schools that we work with excellent thank you so much so yes I think we will draw this webinar to the end thank you so much I want to thank our speakers for such a fruitful contribution it was really really inspiring and I could see very strong interest within our audience the questions are coming and coming so unfortunately we cannot address all of them but it was definitely helpful to develop the teaching practices so thank you also to our audience for being with us today and I just wanted to also note that we will continue the talks on inclusive education the next week so there will be the upcoming webinar is titled the indicators for inclusive systems in and around schools so we'll also make an announcement in the chat box so you can read more information and join us next week and you also will be able to download the certificate of attendance of this webinar you will need to submit the the the evaluation form and after there will be an option to receive your certificate of participation we will also leave the link in the chat box please make sure to save it so it does not disappear anywhere so yes this is this is it from our side I want to thank you one more times for being with us today and thanks to our speakers it was really wonderful presentation so I wish you a wonderful evening and next weekend thank you so much and goodbye