 Hello everyone, Ross here at Teacher Toolkit, back with my weekly Monday night videos. I'm back after a 8,500 mile trip to lots of fantastic schools across the country. This week I'd like to talk about an evidence-informed school. Research culture show you a great example, so a bit more practical to begin with and then a little bit more educational research towards the end. I suppose inspired by my research from my book Guide to Memory and looking at all the data I've collected from teachers, particularly the phrase cognitive apprenticeship and what that actually means. So what I'd like to do, just let me just put the screen up here. So here is what I'd like to go through. How your school or are you working in a school that is research rich, I suppose. And before I get into details, you know, there's tons of research, but the research on research schools suggests that the strongest kind of evidence cultures are associated with dedicated time across staff groups, not just teaching staff or school leaders. Open learning cultures, high levels of research engagement across the school that's strong and prioritizes support structures. I recently found a great book called The Joys of Work by Bruce Paisley and inside there's 30 tips. And one thing I came across was there's a great story about the Korean airline industry in the late 80s and 90s where they suffered from most of the airline disasters across the globe. And essentially one reason for that was that traditional hierarchy or the structures in society and career don't allow people who are junior in junior positions to talk to seniors, particularly during a crisis. So if there's an accident and you're the pilot and I'm the sure death, there's a fear where I can't raise a concern. Compare this to where organizations with good cultures where people on the floor, I suppose can raise concerns with their leaders and leadership inspires and has channels open where people can create difficult conversations without fear or retribution. And it's a really interesting analogy. So if I just pop to a kind of key slide, let me just put myself over here for now. Here is this kind of traffic-like scale for you to look at in terms of where you view your current school. So the suggestion here is to look across each line. So this top line and ask yourself in your school, we have no time to dedicate anything to research at all. Or does your school currently give time to school leaders or people with particular positions? Or across the whole school, is there engaged embedded time allocated to improve our practice? So in this case, would you say your school is a red, amber, or green? And then when you look through this, I'm just gonna hide my face on the video for a moment. But when we get to the bottom, schools don't follow these models. So some of you might work in that particular context. And then thirdly, a research-practice relationship is not one way it highlights the importance of developing a relationship between knowledge, disseminating information, and presenting the conditions which all teachers can learn and collaborate with one another. On the next slide, this is my five minute research appraisal plan. Now you can find a video on my YouTube channel and a resource which explains all these boxes step by step. And I'm gonna show you one of the best examples I've found on my travels to schools all over the place. I guess thinking about seven key recommendations for all teachers, all school leaders who want to have a more highly engaged school where evidence is an integral part of school improvement. I think first of all, external research should be highly valued, it should be synthesized. Senior leaders are largely responsible for this, but also building awareness. Some schools have in the leadership or teaching and learning team a dedicated person that's responsible for reading the research, translating it into a bite-sized summary and then disseminating this with the staff. I guess a third point, I've got seven recommendations. Third one would be, engage in research evidence is collaborative, it's then thread into CPD. It should challenge our teacher beliefs and only lead into sustained change if there's time to have a good debate and where they can see impact in practice. That's critical for teaching staff. The fifth point, I suppose, would be that research recommendations underpin our decision-making. It's an ongoing iterative process and the CPD research aligns with how we shape our performance management, hence showing you this on the screen. If I just come out of this before I switch topics all together, I've got this resource here. So this is a 70-page document and it's probably the best thing I have seen on my travels of late. And this is from Staffordshire University Academy. I shared this before the summer. Essentially here, you've got a couple of pages on the screen. I'm just gonna double-check, you can see this, yes you can. And you can see here that if I just zoom in here, it's all been anonymized, but we've got a teacher here whose research appraisal question was to investigate scaffolding strategies to support SEMD students and prove a non-causing curriculum. Another example, non-teaching support. How can the business team improve how it works as a team? There's another one in the site staff about reducing graffiti and so on and so forth. It's a fabulous document. What I love about it the most is there's a one-page poster here of everything this individual has done to research, to share through CPD and then to report back their key findings. So there's one example read. You've got the topic, our influential read, takeaway tips, keyfinders and next steps. And they've been doing this a few years now and I was lucky enough to go and attend and see this being published. So if you want a copy, just give me a shout, I'll send you this anonymized copy, no problem whatsoever. Now, I'm gonna switch topics. I'm gonna switch over to cognitive apprenticeship. So let me just put this up on the screen here. Now this is a phrase some of you will be, might be unfamiliar with. I came across it from a piece of research by Collins et al. In 1991, not in 1991, I recently came across it but it was published in that time. What cognitive apprenticeship is is an instructional paradigm. So a concept for teachers to help identify the process of a task and make it visible to students. Help them situate abstract tasks in authentic concepts. So make abstract concepts concrete. So let me just pop out of this slide. Let me get the right one. I want you to see the traditional model first, I suppose. Traditionally, what we do as teachers is we do four things, I suppose. I've got the wrong slide up here, apologies. We do four things. The first way that we typically do in classrooms is we model the process. So traditional apprenticeship is defined as I model, I scaffold the resources, I fade away the resources as you develop expertise and I coach you along the process. So this is the traditional way that we do things in the classroom. Kind of four step process. I model the process, I make it visible. I then scaffold how you get there with chunking the information or giving you various resources and handouts along the way. I then as you develop a degree of metacognition or expertise, I fade my resources away to push your expertise on a step further and I coach you through a range of activities. What we've got here on the screen is another way of thinking about making a task easily observable. So number one, you know, bringing the thinking to the surface and making it visible. Secondly, the tasks as they come up and arise in the world with students naturally understanding the reasons for a finished product is to situate the abstract tasks of the school curriculum in context that makes sense to the students. So I guess with the photographs here I've got on the screen. You've got, you know, build a table, all sorts of things or make a chair in a design and technology classroom. But here's a real world example of a finished house or a finished chair. Let's have a look. Now that might be difficult to do that in some classrooms, which is why we need here's one I made earlier or we bring a video or whatever it might be from online into the classroom to let students see a real example. I guess the third part here, you know, in traditional apprenticeship, the skills that we learn are the task itself. And it's unlikely that students encounter situations where they can transfer the skills that are required in the real world. So much of our curriculum reform today, particularly here in England, now demands that students can transfer what they've learned. So in this case, this diversify slide suggests that we should consider, you know, the content, so the domain knowledge that we might have, the heuristic strategies, how we model the process, how we sequence the lesson structure of the curriculum between, you know, global issues, local issues, the complexity of the task, the diversity of skills that we could use. And then the sociological factors. So how do we immerse students with examples in the situation itself, so the relevance to the environment? How they can take a sense of ownership in the community? So, you know, when we have students involved in a local competition and they see a judge come in or an author or whoever it might be, they take a lot more pride and responsibility and there's a greater deal of excitement. We need to do more of those things in our skills. And then, I guess two finer points, intrinsic motivation. So how do we motivate students towards a coherent goal, whether it's a formal assessment or not, just the process of going through the learning loop, so to speak. And then, you know, exploiting corporations. So how do we get kids to work in teams, extend learning resources, bring in other things? So there's a resource on my site. So underneath these videos, which are live stream now, once they're published, I'll share the links to the evidence-informed traffic light that I showed at the start of this video, as well as the example from Staffordshire University School so you can see their public documents. And then I'll share this slide. We can get a lot more information. I'll send you a blog with the original research paper and these slides for you to take a little bit more of a look at. I guess to conclude, is in my research with Guide to Memory, many teachers are familiar with cognitive load. More of us are familiar with working memory, but mention the phrase cognitive apprenticeship and we're not so sure. Traditional apprenticeship, I model, Stafford, I fade the resources away and I coach and give you feedback along the way. That's what all teachers do. This is suggesting in terms of cognition is to identify, situate and diversify. So there's more slides there to explain it. I'm gonna leave the video there. That's long enough for everyone. I'll see you next Monday evening. I hope if you're back to school, you're fully in the rhythm and you're having good fun and meeting all your students otherwise from me. Happy Monday. I shall see you next week. Bye for now.