Educational Research Mentoring in School-Based Contexts

Sarah Fletcher is the Coordinator for Mentoring, Coaching and Induction at Bath Spa University, UK, and works with secondary and primary school teachers and students in many schools, including those in Japan and across the United Kingdom. She guides academic researchers and many teachers and students in schools through a process of ‘Educational Research Mentoring’ to help them elicit, engage with and represent their collaborative knowledge. This is scholarship that emerges through teaching, learning, and collaboration.

She sees ‘Educational Research Mentoring’ as one way of many to complement and enhance how educational researchers, students and teachers can learn together as they develop classroom teaching. Sarah advocates school-based research by teachers as a way to teacher development in her website TeacherResearch.net. She explains the process of teacher research and of mentoring this kind of research with teachers. In this website, she shares her work and the work of several teachers as well as explains that the role of educational research mentoring is being recognized increasingly as a means for helping teachers to undertake inquires about improving teaching and learning in their own classroom.

Sarah’s first snapshot entitled ‘Representing Teachers’ Knowledge,’ which was sponsored by the NCSL (National College of School Leadership), shares the educational mentoring relationship between Sarah Fletcher and Emma Kirby, which started in 2000.

In 2004, Sarah began using the KEEP toolkit to model how academic researchers, teachers and students can collaborate through inquiry. She chose the tool because ‘snapshots’ offered a user-friendly and attractive form of representation. They also addressed a few concerns she has had about sharing classroom research. Sarah explained that it had been difficult to represent teachers’ knowledge so that it could build on the work of others. It also had been difficult to capture and represent the experience of the classroom. At one point, Sarah therefore complemented such reports with photography but still wanted something that would be more “multi-dimensional.”

Since 2004, Sarah has found that the snapshots have supported teachers’ inquiries and made findings public, thereby producing knowledge about teaching and learning for other teachers and researchers to build upon.

Read her story, in her voice, below:

Capturing the Vitality and Creativity of Teaching in 3D

Taking as a starting point a notion that digital representations would enable teacher-researchers to share richer, contextualized understandings of their work, I tried several templates, which were freely available for digital representation, including the KEEP Toolkit. I eventually selected a KEEP Toolkit Project Template that I saw used by teacher researchers at the International Conference for Teacher Researchers in 2004, mainly because the enthusiasm among the users of the Toolkit at that conference was infectious!
I created my first draft snapshot in 12 hours and was delighted that it allowed me to capture teaching moments in 3D through the interaction between the layers of text, video, images, and audio.

Since 2004, I have introduced this tool to many teachers and students as a means for communicating their research in learning. Currently, I am working with over 30 teacher-researchers and also many student-researchers who are developing their Snapshots. My excitement lies in seeing how each brings his or her choices and values into how they represent knowledge. Although my preferred format for representing images, video and text is in columns, the Gallery of Teaching and Learning has provided an inspiring selection for teachers introduced to the concept of representing their teaching. Using some of these examples as guides, teachers have become increasingly adventurous in linking pages from their students as well as Critical Thinking Scaffolds into the ‘snapshots’ they create. Through their eyes the wider educational research community can have insights into the process of teaching and learning in schools, a privileged view that few otherwise attain.

Sharing Knowledge; Sharing Learning

KEEP Toolkit snapshots are an easily accessible resource for conference presentations, research workshops, and school workshops.

At the British Education Research Association meeting in August of 2005, the KEEP gallery facility enabled effective presentation of research by students with a teacher at the Bishop Wordsworth School, Salisbury.

In research workshops the presenter can build up a ‘snapshot’ as he or she interacts with the group giving a feeling of shared learning and ownership.

School workshops on using the KEEP Toolkit are increasingly reflecting the generative impact of educational research mentoring. Teachers who learnt to develop their own templates and snapshots alongside me are supporting one another as peer research mentors.

I have found the tool very useful for facilitating teachers’ sharing of their work. Templates are so simple to use and adapt and teachers like the fact that they can be kept private until they are ready for their “Grand Public Launch!” During busy school days, some teachers at Bitterne Park School in Southampton report how they can dive into the ICT room for a few minutes between lessons to log in the latest insight into their own research, knowing it will be safely stored for later development. Instead of sending large .doc files as attachments to one another teachers at Westwood S. Thomas School in Salisbury can send round just a URL of their snapshots on their own Yahoo discussion group.

My Gallery of Student Research and Gallery of Mentoring in ITT has enabled me to show how theories arising from practice in school and researched practice in academic and professional literature can be integrated and enriching for one another. The Gallery of Student research, for example, explicates how students undertook their own research into the presentation of lesson objectives by their teacher. Alongside this practical study of their own KEEP snapshot, there is a webpage devoted to the research field of “students as researchers” with a personal account of a research mentor assisting students.

Of my many KEEP Toolkit snapshots (and my KEEP dashboard is growing exponentially now!) my favourite is about “Kounai-ken.” This is in-service professional development experience for teachers in Japan and was created for a conference presentation in 2005. At conferences like this, not only can I tell an audience about the theoretical side of teachers’ development, I can “bring them into the class” using a clip of video and point out the different sections of KEEP snapshots that might challenge their assumptions.

Potential for sharing educational research globally is enormous and the snapshot depicting practitioner research in Guyuan, China, illustrates this
as it links teachers’ action enquiry, research mentoring and a school visit:

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of using KEEP Toolkit templates is their capacity to enable researchers to show evidence of their impact. This is surely what Ernest Boyer was driving at when he described the Scholarship of Teaching. Undertaking enquiry in school is all very well but unless practitioners can share the impact as well as the methodology of their research much of the value of school-based research stays unseen. Still at an experimental stage one of my latest snapshots represents impact evidence of teacher researcher enquiries using digital technology. Teachers talk about how and why their research matters to them and how it is adding value to educational opportunities they can offer to students. Moving away from, but not replacing more traditional survey methods, the ‘Talking Heads’ approach has a candour and a spontaneity that appeals.

Download "Mentoring for Leadership" Mentoring for Leadership