Going Deep

Today we sit in a world where a Twitter or LinkedIn post can hold itself up to be expert advice.? ? ?Where someone that has had a piece of success claims to it to be a great life hack, or the quick route to success. ? Society seems to value immediate results over hard work.?

I went back to uni 11 years ago to start an MBA. ? 11 years after finishing my first degree.? ?? To say there was a sense of unease would be putting it mildly.

However, the four years that ensued were the most professionally challenging and rewarding of my career thus far.? ? It changed the way I think, being around people from different professional experiences, and disciplines was invigorating.

I’ve just started on some more research based learning, and you know what, I’m getting that same deep sense of inquisitiveness, of wondering, of insight.? I’m at the start of a journey, and I’m looking forward to it. ?

The joy of learning.

Why then, do we not invest enough in proper development in this sector? It is great that people want to share their experiences, but it’s really dangerous for us to assume that what has worked in one place, without a 'control' environment can be accurately and consistently replicated elsewhere.? Too often we see leading voices sharing 'great ideas' without considering other variables that may have contributed to the success.? ?

Peer to peer support, and professional generosity of sharing is fantastic,- and hugely valuable, but it can’t, and shouldn’t, replace deep, researched, and tested, practice.? ? We need to find a way to amplify the voices of those that are going deep, the ones who are taking sector practice forward, seeking to understand what works, and why, and proving it, not just anecdotally so. ?

Research schools were set up for just that purpose.? Their impact has been good, where it’s seen, but yet limited across the wider sector. The EEF is another organisation that was set up to find the new frontiers.? It’s done great things.? ? There's a whole separate article to be written about? the Behaviour Insight Team, an almost clandestine operation that started in Government, and has now been spun out to support driving behaviour change across huge areas of massive influence, with astonishing results. ? The EEF has been a beneficiary of funding and supported by the BIT, and many of the things we see coming out of there have been massively influenced by the practice from BIT. ? How then, do we amplify the work of these organisations?? How do we take the truly great work and get it spread amongst our 20,000 schools, and how can we further widen our scope to learn lessons from other sectors.? For rarely is there a new invention in the world these days, but there are plenty of opportunities for ideas to jump sectors and to be augmented and adapted, if only we can break out of our silos.

If we want British education to be better, if we want it to be world class, and if we genuinely want our children to get the very best, then we need to invest in our own professional development properly.?

It needs to be seen a key part of the way we work, - taking published theory and trying it in our own settings. ? We need to be completing the feedback loop - asking what the results were, and how we can improve it. Then actually doing that, and building a better research base of practice that we know works, consistently.