heart of heartlands lessons

Spending a Saturday going to a researchED conference presents pros and cons. A possible con is that you are doing teacher stuff on the weekend. A pro is that events by researchED - which is a relatively new organisation set up to spread research-informed teaching practices - are utterly inspiring and reinvigorate you to want to get back into the classroom and your departments to share and deploy all the things you've learnt. It makes you appreciate that while working in a school is a tough old slog, it is one of the most exciting and rewarding professions available. Plus the tickets are cheap and requires no one to cover your lessons, so your school should be more than happy to send you on your way.

The national researchED conference I went to on a Saturday in September has something for everyone. There are seven sessions of 40 minutes to choose from and the biggest challenge is selecting one talk over the other. There's a huge variety of things on offer whether whole school strategies, specific classroom techniques to contentious education debates. Dare I say it, after events like these, I wonder how much more I learnt about teaching in a single day versus a whole year of a PGCE.

From a packed out talk where I was standing up on psychological interventions to influence classroom behaviour, to an intimate session on whole school pupil wellbeing, to a huge hall of people listening one of the world's experts on research myths and safe-bets, it was positively overwhelming.

There were smaller nuggets that I’ve acted on straight away within my practice. Such as designing multiple choice tests in a way that boosts learning by not telling students how many answers are correct and occasionally having more than one correct answer. Or concepts that I’m thinking about but taking longer to act on such as strategies for influencing people - whether staffs or students - by following the acronym EAST. Easy (make it easy for people to do something you want them to do and remove any barriers so it becomes a habit). Attractive (make people aware of the benefits). Social (others are doing it too). Timely (tactical with timings as there are better and worse times to do things).

More generally, the buzzy atmosphere at such an event of thousands of educators is palpable. Even brief chats with fellow teachers also passionate about improving the the education of young people can reinforce the value of what you do day in day out.

The challenge is now to implement all that I’ve learnt. That issue of implementing and iterating new ideas into classroom practice and departments is a gap with education discussions and CPDs. Perhaps next researchED there'll be something on that!