Chapter 12
Ten Principles for Effective Pedagogy

Rationale

The bold aim of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) was to work to improve outcomes for learners of all ages in teaching and learning contexts across the United Kingdom. At the conclusion of TLRP’s work, it is appropriate to consider what it has contributed to the understanding and advancement of effective pedagogy.

What is meant by ‘effective pedagogy’?

The effectiveness of educational provision needs to be evaluated by reference to the goals and values of the society it serves. Within contemporary Western democracies, three major strands of philosophical and political thinking on educational purposes are well established. The first concerns teaching and learning linked to economic productivity – and has taken various forms historically as labour market needs have evolved. The second concerns social cohesion and the inclusion (or control) of different groups within society – this remains important within our unequal and diverse communities today. The third concerns personal development, fulfilment and expression – with a contemporary manifestation perhaps in the term ‘wellbeing’. The three are, of course, deeply interconnected. Indeed, the view taken here conceptualises ‘effectiveness’ as a mutually beneficial synergy among the three.

What then of ‘pedagogy’? Many years ago, Brian Simon published a paper entitled: ‘Why no pedagogy in England?’ (1981). He compared the multi-disciplinary and scientific tradition of pedagogic thought and practice in Europe with the more instrumental approach to teaching that he found in England. Here, he argued, the development of teaching was dominated by a concern with the individual differences between learners and groups of learners, and how to respond to them. In contrast, as Simon put it:

This argument can be chased through at two-main levels. It has implications for forms of institutional provision – and Simon was a strong supporter of the comprehensive principle. It also has implications for teaching and learning practices and the way the highly contentious phrase, ‘what works’, is understood.

The TLRP, which has supported more than 100 projects, fellowships, thematic groups and capacity-building initiatives, focused primarily on the second of these two levels: on teaching and learning in authentic settings inside and outside of schools and other institutions, through the life course. The specific findings of TLRP’s projects are described in research briefings, articles, books, websites and other media. Its cross-programme thematic work is published in a series of commentaries on contemporary policy issues, as well as in special issues of journals, research reviews for external bodies, and in briefing papers for direct communications with policy makers.

A major ambition of the Programme, for both analytic and impact purposes, has been to try to produce an evidence-informed statement of ‘general principles’ of teaching and learning, just as Simon advocated. The basic view is that a great deal is actually known about pedagogy, both in the UK and internationally, but that the synthesis, communication and implementation of such knowledge are far weaker than they should be.

Why general ‘principles’ are an important outcome of TLRP

The diverse nature of TLRP’s projects, which focused on different research questions in different contexts, sometimes using different methods and theoretical perspectives, did not permit formal quantitative meta-analysis rendering aggregated effect sizes of interventions as indicators of ‘what works’. However, each project engaged with existing research in its own particular field or sub-field and built on this to take knowledge forward cumulatively. Through the mechanisms for knowledge exchange set up by TLRP, and drawing on their own particular networks and resources, research teams also developed thinking in dialogue with other researchers and users. In this way new insights were located in intellectual and political context through social processes.

The expectation that the research would be carried out in authentic settings made it impossible to control all the variables operating at any one time. But it enabled researchers, working with practitioners, to grapple with the issues of implementation that so often confound best efforts to ‘scale up’ promising innovations. Furthermore, it enabled practitioners to use their knowledge, of the features of particular settings and characteristics of learners, to develop and refine generalisations from the original research.

For all these reasons, when TLRP was asked what it (as a Programme) had found out about effective teaching and learning, generally, it was not justifiable to make unequivocal claims about findings in terms of categorical knowledge or cause–effect relationships. However, it was possible, in our judgement, to offer ‘evidence-informed principles’, which could engage with diverse forms of evidence whilst calling for the necessary application of contextualised judgement by teachers, practitioners and/or policy makers. Such principles, we believed, could enable the accumulation and organisation of knowledge in resilient, realistic and practically useful ways, and had the potential, progressively, to generate understanding and language for use within public debates.

How the ten principles were developed

The analytical and synthetic approach to reviewing the TLRP evidence involved an iterative process of working between the conceptual map that TLRP had developed to represent the scope of its interests with reference to teaching and learning (see Figure 12.1), and the outputs that were beginning to emerge from individual TLRP projects and cross-Programme thematic work. This model had a long gestation and can, in an early form, be found in a sociological analysis of classroom coping strategies (Pollard, 1982). However, it was simplified to its key elements to provide an analytic framework to structure cross-Programme discussion and analysis.

The majority of projects that were funded in the early phases of TLRP commissioning were focused on the school sector and these were considered first. However, many of the thematic initiatives went wider than the school sector. These were attempts to review findings across TLRP in relation to specific key ideas and to relate these insights to research and scholarship beyond TLRP in order to ground them in a wider literature. This review has a similar ambition: to provide a synoptic overview of what TLRP’s schools projects discovered about effective pedagogy but to relate this to TLRP’s work in other sectors of education, and to the broader literature that has accumulated internationally and over time. This is a grand ambition and has necessitated selection and précis in order to produce an accessible digest.

The schools projects and the thematic work reviewed here are listed in the Appendix. The codes allocated to such projects (P1–P21) and to thematic work (T1–T17) are used as a referencing system, unless a particular output needs to be cited. Other publications are accessible by following the web links given in the Appendix. Other TLRP investments are sometimes also referred to using standard referencing conventions and are not listed in the appendix. All TLRP work is accessible via www.tlrp.org.

The way in which the TLRP Directors’ Team tackled the analytical and synthetic task is best described as ‘narrative review’. One piece of thematic work (T12), led by Torrance and Sebba, was explicitly directed towards promoting a better understanding of the nature and roles of reviews of research. A typology of reviews was developed, which distinguished between reviews for academic and scholarly purposes and those for practice and policy purposes. The iterative review that the TLRP carried out was intended to serve both sets of purposes and attempts to address multiple audiences, albeit in rather different forms of presentation – an example of ‘commitment to “multi-vocalism” in review processes’ (Torrance and Sebba 2007, 3).

In terms of the classification developed by this thematic group, the present contribution cannot claim to be either a ‘definitive’ review of the ‘state of knowledge’ in the whole field, or a ‘systematic’ review intended to produce ‘conclusive, generalisable, politically defensible knowledge for action’. Although the evidence base is extensive, and reaches beyond TLRP, teaching and learning has too many dimensions for a single review to be definitive. Furthermore, evaluative exclusion and inclusion criteria were not strictly applied as expected in systematic reviews. In some senses this was not felt to be necessary because almost all the projects in TLRP’s portfolio, funded in the ‘generic phase’ to 2009, were evaluated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by independent peer and user referees appointed by the ESRC. The single exception was not criticised for the quality of its design, methods or analysis but because its outputs were rather thin at the time when the end of award report was submitted.

Preliminary work on this narrative review, the explicit aim of which was to add value to the TLRP by synthesising its most important findings, was accelerated by the need in 2005 to respond to an invitation from the education team at HM Treasury, under the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, to brief it about the progress of TLRP research. Aware of the current policy push for ‘rapid reviews’ or ‘rapid evidence appraisal’ (Boaz, Solesbury, and Sullivan, 2004), and the limited time to present an oral account of TLRP’s work, the notion of ten principles offered a purposive framework for an initial summary of findings from projects just completing, and some suitably tentative implications for policy in the light of the recently published 2005 Budget Report.

A model for ‘principles’, as a valued output from research review, was already in the public domain: the UK Assessment Reform Group had used this format as a way of summarising the evidence on effective ‘assessment for learning’ (formative assessment) (ARG, 2002). The ARG principles had been presented in a poster and disseminated widely by the Group and other organisations. Several years after publication these could still be found displayed in school classrooms and staffrooms, and used in the documentation of other agencies, although not always with clear attribution (see, e.g. DCSF, 2008: 6).

The meeting at the Treasury convinced the TLRP Directors’ Team of the need to publish something along similar lines for a general audience. So, in March 2006, it published Improving teaching and learning in schools as the second in its series of commentaries (James and Pollard, 2006). Initially written in response to the Schools White Paper, which later became the Education and Inspections Act 2006, this commentary argued that no amount of structural reform, such as the creation of different types of schools, would obviate the need for serious attention to the quality of relationships and pedagogic processes in classroom if the standards of education were genuinely to improve. Included in the commentary was the first version of the TLRP’s ten ‘evidence-informed principles for effective teaching and learning’, presented graphically on an ellipse to indicate that they represent no firm linear hierarchy. However, the sequence had a logic which helped with deciding an order when elaborated in text: beginning with pedagogical aims, and the way these are expressed in classroom practice, and extending to the conditions needed for effective pedagogy in the structures and cultures of schooling and the wider environment, including social and educational policy, locally and nationally. The relationship between elements was likened to the ripples when a pebble is thrown into a pond (James and Pollard, 2006: 5).

Educational innovation, even that which is primarily classroom-focused, almost always involves changes at several levels, which makes researching it similarly multilayered. However, by examining the evidence against the categories, and the categories against the evidence, the themes of interest were eventually reduced to four main clusters (see James and Pollard, 2008):

1. educational values and purposes;
2. curriculum, pedagogy and assessment;
3. personal and social processes and relationships;
4. teachers and policies.

TLRP’s ten principles were grouped under these headings (as they are in the Evidence section below). In most publications they are described as principles of effective teaching and learning. But here, as indicated in the title of this contribution, the term pedagogy is preferred for four main reasons. First, the audience for this contribution will be familiar with the term and not regard it as academic jargon. Second, the term is now more widely used by UK practitioners and policy makers, and it is used across most sectors of education and training, which was not the case when TLRP was set up. Third, and most importantly, ‘pedagogy’ expresses the contingent relationship between teaching and learning (see the quotation from Simon above) and does not treat teaching as something that can be considered separately from an understanding of how learners learn. Fourth, as TLRP researchers themselves pointed out, the work of the programme, certainly as it pertained to schools, focused more clearly on the implications for teaching of what we know about learning, than it did on developing new knowledge about learning per se.

In an article reflecting further on the question that Brian Simon posed in 1981, Alexander (2004: 11) defines pedagogy as follows:

This fits very well with the way TLRP came to understand pedagogy, and the present task of setting out the empirical and theoretical justification for the principles that we distilled from the work of the Programme.

As noted earlier, the ten principles were first generated with school teaching and learning in mind, drawing primarily on evidence from the schools projects. This focus is reflected in this contribution. However, there was interest in other sectors and the TLRP Directors’ Team was committed to exploring whether they might apply elsewhere. At the annual meeting for TLRP researchers, in November 2006, a session was devoted to critique of the principles as currently formulated and to questioning whether they had relevance in the post-compulsory settings that many later-funded projects were researching. This generated a lot of discussion, but the idea of having a similar set of principles for other sectors was generally endorsed. As a consequence, the wording of the ten principles was amended to be more generic. Later they were developed in two further Commentaries: one on effective teaching and learning in UK higher education and the other on higher skills development in the workplace. These have also been built on in a handbook for practitioners (Pollard, 2008) and in a further Commentary on professionalism and pedagogy (Pollard, 2010).

In the discussion that follows, this later version of the ten principles is used. There are two reasons for this decision. First, although contexts for learning vary, the common features in how people learn across the life course makes the validity of a shared set of principles sufficient to be worthy of serious consideration. Second, the majority of school projects had findings related to the importance of the learning of teachers as a condition for effective support of the learning of their pupils. Teachers are adult learners in the workplace and therefore the principles needed to apply to their learning too.

From 2005 to the present, discussions between researchers, practitioners, policy makers and other ‘user’ groups, have been a principal means of developing, refining and validating both the synthesis of research and the principles that arise from it. If these principles are valued as a way to accumulate and organise knowledge, with potential for further progressive development and use within public debates, then such discussion and iterative development will need to continue.

Argument and evidence

In this main section, the thinking underlying the articulation of particular principles is rehearsed and informing evidence from TLRP is outlined. The discussion is organised under the four headings given above. The aim is to identify the insights that TLRP researchers shared, and those on which they differed, and to tease out some of the underlying reasons for synergies or tensions. Some illustrative evidence from individual projects is included although projects or thematic initiatives, as entities, are more fully described elsewhere. Brief outlines are also available in audits of schools projects that have been written for other purposes (e.g. James and Pollard, 2009; Pollard, 2010).

Educational values and purposes (principle 1)

In the early days of the TLRP, a core objective was expressed as a need to investigate those teaching and learning practices that are most efficient and effective in enhancing the achievements of learners. Given the policy context in the schools sector at the time, there was an assumption that projects would provide evidence of gains in pupil attainment. This created difficulties for some project teams. First, properly validated standard measures did not exist for some of the outcomes that projects had been funded to research, e.g. learning how to learn capability. Second, causal relationships were difficult to establish in authentic settings where variables interact in uncontrollable ways. Third, most research projects depended on the cooperation of teachers and sometimes it was difficult to convince them that, say, the link between pupil engagement and better attainment is not self-evident.

Many TLRP researchers also resisted taking for granted the idea that gains in pupil attainment on standard measures, such as national test or examination results, were necessarily ‘a good thing’. They thought it important to examine the validity and reliability of these measures, to scrutinise the deeper purposes that such attainments were supposed to serve, and to investigate their effects on the behaviour of stakeholders. For example, were test results good indicators of enduring understanding and capability in important domains of learning? Did they lead to personal fulfilment and well-being? Did they contribute to the economic prosperity of the nation or to greater social justice and inclusion?

Some projects began to raise serious questions about the culture of performativity and/or the measures currently used (e.g. P7, P11, P13, P19, P21). In so doing, they rejected the notion that the responsibility of researchers is simply to report ‘what works’ in terms defined by others, especially groups who have strong vested interests. They pursued the idea that scholars and researchers have a legitimate role to play in democratic discussions about the aims, purposes and outcomes of education.

TLRP worked with the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain to examine the way in which the increasingly diverse intellectual resources of the educational research community might inform policy and, by extension, practice (T11). One paper from this thematic group (Bridges and Watts, 2008) argues that policy demands a much wider range of information than empirical research typically provides. One of the gaps is the normative gap. The values that inform policy can be investigated empirically, but empirical investigation alone cannot tell us what we ought to do. However, other forms of disciplined enquiry can address these normative questions. As Bridges (2009: 3) summarises:

Another thematic group (T2), which was convened earlier in the life of TLRP, examined how the first 30 projects to be funded (12 from the schools sector) used theoretical resources and empirical evidence to identify the learning outcomes of most interest in their specific context. Initial analysis of project documentation enabled seven categories of outcome to be identified:

1. Attainments – often school curriculum based (literacy, numeracy, science) or measures of basic competence in the workplace.
2. Understanding – of ideas, concepts, processes.
3. Cognitive and creative – imaginative construction of meaning, arts or performance.
4. Using – how to practise, manipulate, behave, engage in process or systems.
5. Higher order learning – advanced thinking, reasoning, metacognition.
6. Dispositions – attitudes, perceptions, motivations.
7. Membership, inclusion, self-worth – affinity towards and readiness to participate and contribute to groups; building social and substantive identities.

(James and Brown, 2005: 11)

TLRP research and deliberation justified and embraced a wide definition of educational values, purposes and outcomes. Attainments as measured by national tests and qualifications were by no means ignored but there was interest in other ‘outcomes’, such as engagement, participation, learning skills, dispositions and strategies, and the development of learning identities and autonomy. This range offered possibilities for a mutually productive synergy among educational aims linked to economic productivity, to the promotion of social cohesion and to personal flourishing. In a developed society all of these are important. This insight gave rise to the first of TLRP’s ten principles, which, in common with the others, recognises the legitimacy of a normative dimension:

It is one thing to ‘adopt a broad conception of worthwhile learning outcomes’ for lifelong and life-wide learning; it is quite another to know whether ends are achieved. Dispositions and capabilities developed during the years of compulsory schooling can be enhanced or undermined by the opportunities and constraints experienced in later life.

In 2003 the Labour Government in England published its Every Child Matters agenda which highlighted the importance of five outcomes of the education system: being healthy; staying safe; enjoying and achieving; making a positive contribution; and achieving economic well-being. The UK Government also funded a Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning (WBL), which similarly viewed learning as a potential benefit to the individual, the family, the community and the nation. However, there is a tension between meeting these broad-ranging objectives, with which few disagree, and focusing on the basic skills and qualifications that have been the major thrust of contemporary policy. At the 2006 TLRP conference, where the ten principles were debated with researchers, a participant from the WBL Centre pointed out that although its longitudinal analysis of UK birth cohort studies provides much evidence of people’s lives from birth to adulthood, ‘these data sets do not have rich data on the experience of school. It would be useful to develop better integration between these approaches’. This must surely be a challenge for future researchers if we are to move from description of patterns in educational trajectories to better explanations of why they occur.

Curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (principles 2-5)

Conceptions of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, and the interactions among them, lie at the heart of schooling. There has always been debate about what a whole curriculum should consist of, how it should be organised, what constitutes valued knowledge in a subject or field, how such knowledge can be represented and communicated to learners, and how learners’ knowledge, understanding and skills can be detected and evaluated. These debates have involved curriculum developers, subject specialists, cognitive psychologists and assessment experts. However, in the 1970s, the intervention of a group of British sociologists (Young, 1971), of which Basil Bernstein was the foremost, introduced a powerful new element into the debate. They argued that knowledge, and hence curricula, are socially constructed and contested. This influenced a major shift in the way curricula were viewed. It appeared to undermine objectivity and led to some post-modernist claims that any knowledge, or form of curriculum organisation, is as valuable (or not) as any other, and the greatest need is to engage in rigorous critique of the political control they exercise. At its most extreme, this relativism seemed to undermine any Enlightenment notion that progress in education is possible because consensus on goals and means, undistorted by power relations, was thought to be unattainable.

TLRP’s commitment to work ‘to improve outcomes for learners’ implied a belief that educational progress is possible. It never shared the extreme relativism of some post-modernists although it has tried to be inclusive of a wide range of theoretical perspectives within its activities. Pollard (2005: 3) viewed the Programme as a potential vehicle for ‘creative mediation’ and drew explicitly on an appeal to the Enlightenment commitment to the application of science and reason in the improvement of society. There is now wider evidence that researchers and scholars from a range of disciplines – epistemology, sociology, history, philosophy, cognitive science, curriculum theory, pedagogy and neuroscience – are ‘bringing knowledge back’ into play to ask new kinds of questions and to ask some old questions in new ways. For example: Are pedagogies domain-specific? Do they need to vary between subjects and cultures? What is it to ‘know’ a subject and does this vary? How is knowledge constructed in different domains? What is the difference between a subject and a discipline, and is it ever possible for school pupils to develop an understanding of disciplines, given the fact that they study many subjects and are not immersed in a single discipline in the way that university students can be? Do students learn by acquiring knowledge or participating in practices? How can participation in communities of epistemic practice be validly and reliably assessed?

In this section, TLRP research and deliberation is brought to bear on these issues in justification of the following four principles that relate to the triad of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Learning presupposes that learners are learning something. This ‘something’ may be called ‘knowledge’ but what constitutes knowledge is often disputed. Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ has been important in expanding the conception beyond declarative knowledge to embrace procedural knowledge, although, in policy contexts, this is often reduced to a debate about learning facts versus learning skills.

In his keynote presentation, on the ‘Complexity of Learning’, to the 2005 TLRP Annual Conference, Michael Eraut delineated three types of knowledge: codified knowledge, judged by its source, truth claims and acceptability to ‘gatekeepers’; other cultural knowledge as constructed and shared among communities and groups without undergoing codification; and personal knowledge defined as what people bring into new situations that enables them to think and act in those situations. This last type of knowledge comprises: codified knowledge ready for use; knowledge acquired during acculturation; knowledge constructed from experience, social interaction and reflection; skills; and episodes, impressions and images (case knowledge). Eraut made the important point that: ‘A person’s performance nearly always uses several of these kinds of knowledge in some integrated form, and is influenced by both context and feelings ’ [his emphases]. Eraut was drawing particularly on his research into workplace professional learning but these ideas are transferable to school learning. They support the argument implied in Principle 2, above, that a wide definition of what counts as valid knowledge, sensitive to context, should be valued.

A small number of TLRP schools projects focused very specifically on the learning of codified knowledge in subject domains. The project on The Role of Awareness in the Teaching and Learning of Literacy and Numeracy in Key Stage 2 (P4) focused upon aspects of learning to spell and learning fractions. This project was extended in Scotland but the Scottish project researched aspects of mathematics (proportion and ratio, referred to as ‘intensive quantities’) across school phases (P14). The Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) network of projects (P7) worked mainly in secondary schools to investigate how learning in science can be enhanced. In all these projects, the difficulties in teaching concepts and processes could only be tackled successfully by engaging with cultural and personal knowledge, with context as a crucial variable.

The literacy, numeracy and thinking skills projects were based in university departments of psychology. This raises an interesting question about whether forms of knowledge should be regarded primarily or exclusively as individual acquisitions of a cognitive nature. Does this take sufficient account of knowledge as embodied in social activity in communities of practice? Post-Vygotsky, educational researchers are aware of, and often sympathetic to, sociocultural claims that knowledge can only be constructed and revealed in and through social practices, especially through the use of shared language. Accordingly, consciousness, hence knowledge, is constantly being reinterpreted in dynamic interaction between mind and the world. The theoretical challenge faced by TLRP was deciding whether it could be a broad church, embracing a range of perspectives, from the cognitive to the sociocultural, even when these approaches appeared to contradict one another in rather fundamental ways.

The Learning Outcomes thematic group (T2), mentioned above, carried out an analysis of project documentation for evidence of Sfard’s (1998) two metaphors of educational discourse: the acquisition metaphor (AM) and the participation metaphor (PM). This analysis showed that most TLRP projects stood on more than one ‘metaphorical leg’ (James and Brown, 2005), confirming Sfard’s perception that there are difficulties in choosing just one. Whilst theoretical coherence might be served by adopting a purist stance, the practical consequences can limit the goals and outcomes conceived as desirable in the variety of contexts for learning.

Anne Edwards, in her keynote presentation to the 2005 TLRP Annual Conference, pointed out that individual learning is underplayed in versions of sociocultural theory that are most interested in change in systems (e.g. Engeström, 1999). However Engeström’s transformative version of Activity Theory helps when working on new problems where innovative solutions are called for. In these circumstances neither acquisition nor strict participation approaches to understanding learning help because there is need to go beyond what is already known in codified knowledge or cultural practice. From her Vygotskian stance, Edwards proposed ‘relational agency’ as a way of putting individual cognition back into the equation (Edwards, 2005). She quoted Shotter (1993: 111): ‘Vygotsky is concerned to study how people, through the use of their own social activities, by changing their own conditions of existence, can change themselves’.

Most of the researchers involved in TLRP projects claimed to take a sociocultural, or social constructivist, theoretical position. Sometimes these two perspectives were clearly distinguished (e.g. P8); sometimes they were merged (e.g. P7). The Programme, as a whole, had a commitment to interdisciplinary working, which implies a willingness to use the tools and constructs from diverse discourses. This has sometimes been difficult to achieve at project level, although:

The group Edwards omitted to mention were neuroscientists. Yet increasingly, in the twenty-first century, interest has grown in brain research. In 2007, a TLRP thematic seminar series on neuroscience and education (T4) published a commentary (Howard-Jones 2007) to improve dialogue and collaboration between neuroscience and other educational, psychological and social science communities. The significance of this publication lies in its ‘cautious optimism’. Although brain imaging techniques, and other experiments, are giving fascinating results, the authors are sceptical of current ‘brain-based applications’ that have not, themselves, been properly evaluated. However, there is a belief that neuroscience does have relevance to education, which needs to be explored. As Howard-Jones (2007: 23) expressed it: ‘. . . collaborative research projects may need to extend the cognitive neuroscience model of brain>mind>behaviour to incorporate processes of social construction pertinent to learning’. If sociocultural views are seriously embraced then a model of behaviour>mind>brain would need to be considered, or, more appropriately, brain<>mind<>behaviour, which would capture the interactions between individual cognition and the material and social world. No TLRP projects investigated this directly but TLRP can claim that it established its importance for future research. The challenges however are considerable because this would require researchers, eminent in their own fields, to commit to working with others whose discourses and methods are unfamiliar.

The significance of domain knowledge (often referred to as content or subject knowledge) for effective pedagogy was also investigated by TLRP in another thematic seminar series (T8). In their position papers, developed to initiate and to summarise debate in two conferences, Moon and McCormick formulated distinctions between knowledge, school knowledge and pedagogy. They based this on three clusters of ideas: the curriculum-orientated work of Shulman (1986), the cognitive approach of Gardner (1983, 1991) and the interrelated traditions of didactics and pedagogy in continental Europe (Verret, 1975; Chevallard, 1991).

Shulman’s distinction between subject content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge has spawned a plethora of subject-specific research projects. However, Moon and McCormick criticise its objectivist epistemology, which implies that knowledge is a contained, fixed and external body of information. They also question his view of pedagogy as skills and knowledge that the teacher possesses, rather than as interaction in the process of learning.

In contrast, Gardner draws extensively on the transactional psychology of Dewey (and Bruner) to argue that while subjects or disciplines are important, it is necessary to move beyond them:

According to Moon and McCormick this key insight still fails to address fully the issues thrown up by rapid and radical changes in domain knowledge. They therefore turn to literature in French, which explores the concept of ‘didactic transposition’ whereby subject knowledge is transformed into school knowledge. The work of Verret and, later, Chevallard emphasises that subject matter must undergo change, alteration and restructuring if it is to become teachable to novices or children. School knowledge becomes codified, partial and formalised in a syllabus, text or curriculum, which implies that learning has an initial state and an end state. This transformation of non-linear knowledge into programmable contents to be taught – termed didactics in the European tradition – is carefully distinguished from pedagogy, which is more about how to plan for, and respond to, problems and opportunities encountered in the flow of teaching and learning interactions.

Taking all these ideas together, Moon and McCormick present a model of the ways in which subject knowledge, school knowledge, pedagogic knowledge and personal constructs are related. They illustrate this with an example from the perspective of a teacher of English (taken from Banks, Leach, and Moon, 1999: 96, see Figure 12.2). Their discussion of codified knowledge, knowledge transformed through sociocultural processes, and personal knowledge, share much with Eraut’s typology, outlined above. Both accounts reflect an epistemological position that is neither purely objectivist nor entirely relativist. There is indeed ‘stuff’ to be learned – ideas, facts, processes, stories, skills, language and dispositions – but it is equally important to learn that valued knowledge is produced, contested and changed in dialogic processes within and between communities of practice. This is the perspective that underpins TLRP’s Principle 2 quoted above.

TLRP Principles 3 and 4, flow from the above discussion but focus more specifically on the ways in which knowledge is used in pedagogical processes to advance learning. These two principles are strongly linked and have theoretical and empirical foundations in the work of Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner.

The importance of taking account of prior learning, in cognitive terms, has been shown to be important in teaching and learning subjects such as mathematics and

science where misconceptions established at an earlier stage create serious barriers to new learning and need to be tackled. TLRP projects in these subjects made this a particular focus. It was a feature of the EPSE project (P7), which developed and evaluated sequences for teaching science concepts. It was also the focus of another EPSE project, which developed banks of diagnostic questions based on research about common misconceptions. The researchers found that carefully designed probes can provide quality information on pupils’ understanding of key concepts, and inform action. However, they also found that the level of pupils’ understanding of many fundamental science ideas is low, and increases only slowly with age. In other words, they cautioned that the level of challenge should not be underestimated. We should not be surprised by this conclusion. Support for the need to make associations with previous knowledge has largely been drawn from the psychological literature on meaning-making, but further evidence is emerging from neuroscience, which has linked this ability to activities in the inferior frontal lobes. The work of cognitive scientists, using fMRI scans, is beginning to show just how difficult it is to suppress naïve concepts of the physics-taught in school curricula (see Dunbar, Fugelsang, and Stein, 2007).

Mathematics and science are often described as cumulative subjects in which failure to understand basic concepts and principles leads to obvious difficulties in later learning. Other subjects have a less hierarchical or linear nature and the issues may seem less acute. However, the need to take account of prior learning still applies in different ways. What may be more important in these contexts – and is important in mathematics and science also – is to take account of understandings, skills and attitudes derived from the other worlds that pupils inhabit: from their homes, communities, media and peer groups. For example, a number of TLRP projects, especially those working with young children and/or investigating computer use, found benefits in teachers making more deliberate and positive use of the informal knowledge and understanding that children and young people acquire in their homes and local communities. This crucial aspect of effective pedagogy will be dealt with more fully in the section on personal and social processes and relationship, below. It has great significance for the equity dimensions of teaching and learning, as processes and in building identities. Another TLRP thematic seminar series (T10), on social diversity and difference, explored this further.

TLRP projects also had much to say about the ‘scaffolding’ of learning – an idea that was implicit in Vygotsky’s work but named as such by Bruner (Wood, Bruner, and Ross, 1976). Vygotsky’s conception of learning as object-oriented, tool-mediated activity emphasises the importance of choice and use of tools, especially language tools, in learning activity. The role of the ‘more expert other’ in helping the novice to make progress in the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is equally crucial. When these two elements are brought together, the pertinence of the concept of scaffolding becomes evident. Within schools, it is often assumed that the responsibility for scaffolding lies primarily with the class teacher. However, TLRP projects in post-school settings remind us that often there is no ‘teacher’ in these contexts and effective scaffolding can be provided by peers or by computer programmes. The key consideration, and the determinant of effectiveness, is whether tools – textbooks, computer programmes, other artefacts, signs, symbols and grading systems, etc. – are chosen and used appropriately. For example, tools such as interactive white-boards are not intrinsically valuable; their worth depends on how they are used. As TLRP projects found, the usefulness of new technologies is associated with the ways in which they are incorporated into learning activity and classroom dialogue.

The numeracy and literacy projects (P4 and P14) were centrally concerned with creating explicit scaffolds for teachers to use. And the thinking framework developed by the Thinking Skills project (P5) was itself a scaffold. Like the Inter-Play project (P1), the very large-scale EPPE 3–11 Project (P2) also provided evidence of the importance of both adult-initiated and child-initiated activity, including direct teaching and sustained shared thinking.

What emerges from all this evidence is the primacy of dialogue. But dialogue needs to be understood, not simply as oral interactions in classrooms, but as more varied communications between minds. Alexander (2006: 13) gives credit to Bakhtin (1981) for providing a vocabulary for exploring the nature and possibilities of dialogue. Bakhtin was interested in the relationship between the individual and society, present and past, between the developing mind and the thinking embodied in the wider culture, between our inner and outer worlds. While face-to-face interactions are important, a dialogue can be set up between authors and their readers so that readers have access to the author’s thinking and can use it to interrogate their own. The breadth of these ideas is reflected in ‘enacting dialogue’, one of twelve aims for primary education distilled from the Cambridge Primary Review, which describes advancing pedagogy through dialogue ‘between self and others, between personal and collective knowledge, between past and present, between different ways of making sense’ (Alexander, 2010: 199).

The dialogic approach that Alexander has been developing through his international research (Alexander, 2001; 2006) comprises a three-part repertoire informed by five dialogic principles. The repertoire consists of learning talk (narrating, explaining, questioning, answering, analysing, speculating, imagining, exploring, evaluating, discussing, arguing, justifying and negotiating), teaching talk (rote, recitation, exposition, discussion, dialogue) and interactive strategies (whole-class teaching, teacher-led group work, pupil-led group work, one-to-one pupil discussion, one-to-one discussion between pupil and teacher). The principles that inform this repertoire are that genuine dialogue is collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative and purposeful. According to Alexander, the most vital of these is cumulation: that teachers and pupils build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and enquiry. ‘If an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 168). However, this principle is also the most difficult to achieve, which has major implications for ‘assessment for learning’ (AfL), the pedagogical strategy that has been promoted extensively, by researchers and policy makers, in the UK and internationally.

The aims of the Learning How to Learn project (P13) – to develop, embed and spread assessment for learning practice in ways that promote autonomous learning by pupils – was in line with TLRP’s Principle 5 that, ‘Effective pedagogy needs assessment to be congruent with learning’, and especially that, ‘It should help to advance learning as well as determine whether learning has occurred’. This project focused very specifically on the relationship between assessment and learning and how a beneficial synergy might be established.

A related element of Principle 5: ‘Assessment should be designed and implemented with the goal of achieving maximum validity both in terms of learning outcomes and learning processes’ was specifically addressed by other projects, and by two thematic initiatives (T9, T13). Traditionally, the quality of assessments is judged by their reliability and their validity, which together indicate whether the inferences drawn from assessment results are dependable. Often more attention is paid to reliability for two reasons. First, there are clear technical procedures for enhancing reliability; second, the publication of unreliable results can have immediate and far-reaching political and personal consequences. However, there is a sense in which even reliable assessment results have no worth if they are not valid – if they have no meaning. Kane (2001) traces the development of validity theory over a century, from limited criterion-related models, through sophisticated construct models, to an argument-based approach. The current view is that validation requires an extended analysis of evidence, based on explicit statements of proposed interpretations, and consideration of competing interpretations.

What Kane makes clear is that validity cannot be achieved by the manipulation of statistical models; it requires qualitative analysis and judgement and is therefore open to contestation. In high stakes environments this is not easy to accept and the most powerful people in a system are inclined to limit potential damage by limiting the scope for dispute. In so doing they often also limit the validity of assessments.

The essence of the general problem, was identified by the Learning Outcomes thematic group:

No TLRP schools projects were established with a prime intention to develop new assessment instruments. Many had assumed that they would be able to use existing measures to detect the outcomes in which they were interested. National tests and examinations (e.g. GCSE) were widely used as proxy measures of attainment, together with cognitive abilities tests (e.g. PIPS in P3, P6, P12), and self-report inventories of metacognition, motivation or attitudes towards learning (e.g. ELLI in P3; ALCPs in P5). However, the choice was motivated as much by the need to have some measure of change over time, across cases or in comparison with control groups, as by the need for construct validity. The desire to reconceptualise learning outcomes and the need to investigate change were fundamentally in tension. On the one hand, investigating change usually requires some baseline assessment, which encourages the use of existing measures; on the other hand, new conceptions of learning outcomes require new measures and these demand extensive development and trialling. This situation, created mainly by the conditions of TLRP commissioning, was unsatisfactory. Little could be done to change the situation for currently funded projects but a thematic group was set up to explore the issues further.

The Assessment of Significant Learning Outcomes (ASLO) thematic group (T9), which drew on the expertise of the UK Assessment Reform Group, set out to examine the relationships between assessment and pedagogy and between assessment and curriculum, and, specifically, issues of alignment or congruence. Five case studies were chosen to investigate how the assessment of learning outcomes was understood in different contexts: school mathematics in England; Learning to Learn in countries of the European Union; workplace learning in the UK; higher education in the UK; and vocational education in England. Three initial questions were used to frame the enquiry:

1. What are the significant learning outcomes that are not being assessed in a system that relies wholly on test-based assessment procedures?
2. What are the indicators of student performance, which have been, or could be, developed in relation to such learning outcomes?
3. What assessment procedures do not rely on testing but do, or might, give dependable measures of student performance?

‘Curriculum’ and ‘assessment’ were seen in fundamentally different ways in each context, and, in only two of the five settings, was the term ‘learning outcomes’ in widespread use. However, four common themes emerged across the five case studies: construct definition; progression; the impact of assessment procedures; system-level accountability as a driver of alignment. The familiar problem of construct definition – how, and by whom, the constructs involved are defined and made real – was exemplified by school mathematics.

The conclusion from this aspect of the ASLO enquiry was that the constructs underpinning programmes of study are often inadequately articulated.

Enabling progression is at the heart of pedagogy and therefore central to formative assessment (assessment for learning), however, the ASLO case studies showed that summative assessment requirements, driven by pressure for uniformity and accountability, often constrain teachers from using their own judgement to nurture progression. Equally, the impact of assessment procedures on the alignment between intended and actual learning outcomes is considerable. Misalignment in this respect can represent a threat to the integrity of learning itself. The examples studied highlighted numerous ways in which assessment procedures disrupted desirable learning or encouraged undesirable learning. Case studies – such as the project to develop a European indicator for learning to learn capability – also revealed just how influential the political imperatives for system-level accountability can be. ‘They drive the role of assessment in defining the relevant constructs and, perhaps more crucially, shape how teachers and students then interpret and enact those constructs.’ (Daugherty, 2009: 3).

The evidence of the ASLO thematic work suggests that the relationship between assessment and curriculum is more multi-dimensional and multi-level than the terms ‘alignment’ or ‘congruence’ imply. The group concluded that it might be better understood as a complex, non-linear, interacting system with the ultimate goal being a synergy of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. This takes us back to the proposition at the very beginning of this section.

Ideas and evidence from the ASLO seminar were incorporated into a TLRP Commentary on Assessment in Schools. Fit for Purpose? (T13). This was also prepared with the help of the Assessment Reform Group (ARG) (Mansell, James and the Assessment Reform Group, 2009). Its purpose was to present policy makers – in the run-up to the 2010 general election – with four key challenges drawn from the collective research intelligence of TLRP and ARG. In light of the evidence that assessment systems in the UK, and elsewhere, are expected to serve an enormous range of purposes – many of them quite remote from their original intentions to evaluate what a pupil knows, understands and can do – education professionals, policy makers and the public should be aware of the unintended consequences of assessment policy decisions and initiatives. At the heart of the matter are concerns about fitness for purpose, which are also about the quality of assessments. The commentary identified different criteria for judging such quality depending on whether the purpose was formative, summative or evaluative. It contested the common view that a single set of assessments could serve several purposes without distorting one purpose or another. The four challenges were therefore: to extend, embed and spread good in-class assessment practice through the professional development of teachers; to enhance confidence in tests and examinations by improving their reliability and validity; to justify the costs of the assessment system, which in England was calculated as £750 million per annum; and to avoid micro-management by politicians and managers who are ill-equipped to make technical judgements of quality. Above all, assessment systems must be congruent with the overarching purpose of education systems to advance learning.

One of the outputs (Filer and Pollard, 2000), from the TLRP Associate projects on Identity and Learning (P21), shed light on assessment from a different angle by focusing specifically on pupil perspectives, strategies, relationships and identities developed in assessment encounters. As in other contexts of schooling, children develop their identities through successive experiences as they move through schooling. Experiences of assessment are shown to be among the most powerful. As in the TLRP project on Consulting Pupils on the Assessment of their Learning (P15), which also focused on pupil perspectives, assessment is revealed as a social process. Performance is inseparable from context and results take meaning from social and cultural interpretation. The case for strengthening the validity of the inferences drawn from assessments is therefore overwhelming if learners’ sense of agency and identity is to be promoted and not destroyed.

Personal and social processes and relationships (principles 6-8)

This cluster of principles also reflects contemporary awareness of the influence of social, as well as psychological, factors on learning. As noted above, TLRP funded psychologists such as Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes (P4) and Christine Howe (P14), and neuroscientists such as Paul Howard-Jones (T4), although the major disciplinary framework from which it drew was that of education itself. In this respect, the Programme reflected the contemporary UK field with an eclectic mix of projects, many informed by sociological and sociocultural theory. For example, several projects shared an interest in Bourdieu and another group identified with activity theory. Some, particularly those concerned with identity, were influenced by the symbolic interactionist roots of British qualitative sociology of education.

Most TLRP projects started from specific educational issues but explicitly maintained a theoretically-informed awareness of agency, culture and context in education. The outcomes of such work are reflected in the three principles below.

In relation to Principle 6, almost all TLRP schools projects affirmed the importance of developing active engagement, positive learning dispositions, self-confidence and learning awareness. Indeed, in an era that saw a steady growth, within much of the UK, of central control over curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, the engagement of learners has become an increasingly pressing contemporary issue.

Traditionally, in psychological terms, such issues have been framed in terms of motivation with emphasis being placed on ways of engaging individual learners in particular tasks. The work of Carol Dweck (1999) for instance, on ‘mastery’ and ‘learned helplessness’ as orientations to new learning challenges, has been very influential in the UK. In parallel, though, has been a practical humanistic tradition in British education drawing on the practitioner enquiry movement initiated by Lawrence Stenhouse (1975). TLRP’s network on Consulting Pupils about Teaching and Learning (P10) was a manifestation of this commitment to practical theorising and improvement. Led by the late Jean Rudduck, the Consulting Pupils network directly engaged teachers, children and young people in 46 schools in reflection on their classroom practices and school experiences (Rudduck and McIntyre, 2007). Indirectly, it connected with thousands more in building from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) in affirming the quality and constructive nature of feedback about teaching and learning that pupils were able to offer. Outcomes included enhanced commitment to learning and improved teacher–pupil relationships. The work was widely influential and contributed, for example, to provision for pupil opinions in the framework through which all schools in England were externally inspected.

The UK tradition of qualitative sociology has also developed to offer a complementary understanding of how learners perceive and make sense of their school experiences. For example, the Identity and Learning Programme, a TLRP associate investment (P21), was a longitudinal series of ethnographic projects by Pollard and Filer tracking two cohorts of children from age 4 to 16 (e.g. Pollard and Filer, 1999). It started in the mid 1980s and demonstrated how pupils progressively develop strategies to cope with the challenges of schooling over time, and how secure forms of learning become embedded in meaningful personal narratives and identities. Where school curricula fail to make meaningful connections with the learner, then it is argued that pupil performance and capability are likely to be shallow and transitory. Similar ideas were reflected in other TLRP projects. A developed example is provided by a study of further education experiences – Transforming Learning Cultures (James and Biesta, 2007) – which recognised the way in which institutional conditions enable or constrain opportunities for independent learning. Another is that of Crozier and colleagues (2009) who analysed disjunctions in the experiences of working class students entering higher education. However, the analysis was developed most thoroughly by the Learning Lives project (Biesta et al., 2001) which studied learners across the lifecourse using a combination of evidence from a large-scale cohort study and case study interviews reviewing learning careers over time. This study was important for its lifelong reach and demonstration of the durability of attitudes deriving from early school experiences. In particular, it reported how narratives about learning and educational experiences are used as frameworks of interpretation in the development of identity, self-confidence and agency.

A seminar series on Transitions through the Lifecourse was established to explore such ideas across TLRP projects (T17). Through this work, transitions between sectors at different phases of life were reviewed – home to school, school to college, college and university, between workplaces – and analyses of social class, gender, disability and age patterns were also undertaken (Ecclestone, Biesta, and Hughes, 2010). The emerging analysis was initially seen as a possible way of constructing a meta-narrative for the TLRP programme as a whole, since the work of many projects could be plotted across dimensions of the lifecourse. As it developed, the interest in transitions deepened because of the discontinuities and disruption to progression in learning that was often observed. The social dimension remained prominent in the thinking of TLRP teams. As John Field suggested, in his introduction to an edited collection on this work, it is necessary to recognise the ‘diversity of individual experience’ but we ‘should not neglect the collective dimensions to transition’. He went on: ‘we need to examine systematically the sites in which learning occurs and the nature of locally experienced structures of opportunity’ (Field, 2010: xxiii).

Here then we can clearly see the emphasis on the social of a significant cluster of TLRP projects, and their concern for the construction of meaning in relation to circumstances. The promotion of learner independence and autonomy, in this sense, is not just about the effectiveness of learning. It also concerns the realisation of rights, formation as a person, manifestation of citizenship and contribution of individuals to history.

Principle 7 focuses on how teaching and learning foster both individual and social processes and outcomes. Practitioners consistently assert the importance of ‘good relationships’ in classrooms or, to put it another way, the necessity for teacher–pupil respect as the foundation of discipline, order and learning. Indeed, the longitudinal work of TLRP’s associated Identity and Learning project (P21) claimed that ‘meaning and opportunity in classrooms build from everyday relationships’ (Pollard and Filer, 2007) – thus encapsulating the interrelationship of individual perspectives and social interaction. Some projects used the concept of social capital (Putnam, 1993) in discussion of broad social opportunities whilst noting the formative role that school and classroom processes and peer-relations can play in such accumulation.

More specifically, several TLRP projects investigated the particular educational uses to which such relationships and processes can be put. For example, reference has been made earlier to the projects on thinking skills, learning how to learn and pupil consultation.

The TLRP Group Work projects (P12 and P6) particularly demonstrate the benefits of efforts to improve student’s mastery of cooperation and collaboration. Pupils involved in such developments made significant academic gains, which were stable across schools in different social contexts. The implications are that group work can produce significant benefits to attainment, motivation and behaviour. However, this requires explicit preparation and support. Group work skills need to be approached developmentally: social skills first, then communication skills, then problem-solving. Providing teachers with practical ‘relational’ strategies, based on principles, provides a successful approach to raising standards and improving behaviour – and thus moves beyond the general affirmation of relationships. A TLRP Research Training Fellowship study (Bevan, Pedder, James and Carmichael, 2007) of on-screen learning using concept-mapping software also found that significant sustained learning gains were only associated with structured opportunities for collaborative peer discussion. These projects confirm the vital importance of classroom dialogue when it is put to use in building explicit awareness of learning processes.

Principle 8 asserts the significance of informal learning and urges its utilisation in more formal educational settings. This principle can thus be expressed simply, but has profound implications and challenges. Recognition of the social and cultural dimensions of learning in many TLRP projects produced a heightened awareness of learners, relationships and contexts. In successive annual Programme conferences, researchers struggled with how to study, analyse and represent the learning that took place beyond formal educational settings. Two seminar series were established to wrestle with these issues.

The first seminar series was entitled, Contexts, Communities and Networks: Mobilising Learners’ Resources and Relationships in Different Domains (T16, see Edwards, Biesta, and Thorpe, 2009). Meeting over a two-year period, representatives of projects and others explored the nature of learning in different settings and the validity, or otherwise, of contrastive descriptions of these processes. Sociocultural theory provided a major driver here. So, for example, a study of literacy practices in further education (Ivanic et al., 2009) demonstrated how learners’ everyday, vernacular experience yielded significant educational value when ways were found to draw on this knowledge in college settings. This approach echoed Dewey’s emphasis on the validity of many different kinds of experience. The implications for pedagogy are profound. As Thorpe and Mayes (2009: 160) put it in their review of the work of the seminar series:

A second TLRP investment was led by Leon Feinstein and drew, beyond the Programme, on the work of the Centre for the Wider Benefits of Learning (WBL) at the University of London, Institute of Education (T15, see Schuller et al., 2004; Feinstein, Budge et al., 2008). This Centre specialises in analysis of social, economic, medical and environmental factors influencing learning across the lifecourse and draws on both qualitative research and large-scale statistical analysis of cohort, economic and social data. TLRP’s portfolio of projects, though rather different in nature, echoed the Centre’s range of concerns and an association was therefore developed. In particular, whilst WBL worked on patterns in life trajectories, TLRP focused on pedagogic and learning processes. This work came together in a Foresight publication for the UK Government Office for Science entitled Learning through life: Future challenges (Feinstein, Vorhaus, and Sabates, 2008). Citing TLRP’s Ten Principles, this report argued that only quality education and learning can enhance skill and capability.

In England, the New Labour government did indeed demonstrate greater awareness of the significance of social context in relation to children and young people. For example, as noted earlier, the Every Child Matters agenda and integration of national health, social and educational provision into Children’s Services across the whole country were clear evidence of holistic analysis and of attempts to promote inclusion through the coordination of services.

TLRP’s own work in these areas was at rather different levels, whether in workplace, university or school education. Two areas of research stand out regarding school education – home–school relations and the influence of new technologies.

The Home-School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE) project (P3, see Hughes, 2006), investigated how the home and school environments for learning might complement each other. Focusing upon literacy and numeracy in these two worlds, the team helped teachers, parents and children to find new ways of exchanging knowledge between home and primary school, using videos, photographs, shoeboxes of artefacts, etc. They then investigated how this process of knowledge exchange could enhance learning and ease the transition to secondary school.

Explicit home–school knowledge exchange activities produced impact on outcomes but this was mediated by social class, gender and attainment – factors that underline the importance of handling informal learning with sensitivity in order to avoid negative consequences for particular groups of pupils.

In TLRP’s discussions, the juxtaposition of formal and informal learning came to signify debates about the influence of social context. This was sometimes represented in terms of bounded environments, often with the classroom or child at the core and with multiple contextual layers circling beyond. Another usage, adoption of which grew over time, saw context more in terms of ever-present interpolating factors that crossed boundaries rather than being constrained by them. In this respect, Cole’s (1996) distinction was helpful between general uses of the term ‘context’ to denote ‘that which surrounds us’ and ‘that which weaves us together’. The latter usage was particularly illuminative in relation to the influence of new technology on learning.

TLRP’s work on technology began modestly with a single project on the integration of ICT into everyday classroom practices. The InterActive Education project (P8) worked with primary and secondary school teachers to study how subject knowledge could be enhanced through the use of new technologies. The use of mobile and other forms of technology is now so pervasive and so embedded within the cultures of children and young people that it provides a very strong illustration of the knowledge and experiential resources that exist beyond formal educational settings. Such knowledge is, however, somewhat idiosyncratic and uneven, making it a difficult resource to harness in schools. The project found that technology could be particularly effective at enhancing subject knowledge when teachers were able to bridge between the idiosyncratic and the intended curricular learning using tailored software. The software was seen, in sociocultural terms, as a mediating tool in support of the teaching–learning process. A similar conclusion was reached in a supplementary early years technology project in Scotland – InterPlay (P1). In this work, the ‘guided interaction’ of teachers and young children was seen as crucial in supporting dispositions to learn through the use of new technologies – including electronic toys and devices of many sorts, as well as technologies designed for more conventional educational processes.

In 2007, TLRP was able to launch a completely new phase of investigation on Technology Enhanced Learning with the joint backing of two UK Research Councils and an additional £12 million in funding. Known as TLRP-TEL and under the leadership of Richard Noss, this phase of work has developed its own momentum and will run to the end of 2012. Following a development phase, eight major projects were selected for investment. Thematic analysis on flexibility inclusion, personalisation, productivity and capacity building was built in from the start (see www.tlrp.org/tel – accessed May 17, 2011). This thematic work is conclusively demonstrating the experiential power of new technology and its influence on learning, and also the fact that such phenomena are fast moving with high potential for penetrating conventional forms of educational provision. The new world of technological learning and experience is thus both a fantastic resource and a considerable threat to schooling practices as they have been understood in the past.

The InterActive Education projects synoptic book (Sutherland, Robertson, and John, 2009) reflects on this in terms of its implications for school contexts. In this book Robertson and Dale write that there is a ‘tendency to view schools as islands, loosely connected to society. . . . What young people learn in other places and spaces has little currency in the classroom . . . and . . . schools are represented as enduring features of the landscape, immune to change’ (155). They suggest that schools reflect an ‘assemblage’ of social relations, assumptions and organisational arrangements with significant effects on pupils, teachers, parents and others. Change, they suggest, is inevitable, as the impact of new technology and of learning beyond school accumulates. The book concludes: ‘Maybe it is time to consider young people’s out-of-school knowledge and cultures not as ‘distractions’ from the main business of schooling, but as rich, complex, diverse and powerful sources for learning and as an important place to start in designing education for the twenty-first century’ (176).

Teachers and policies (principles 9 and 10)

A distinctive characteristic of TLRP schools projects was their aim to generate new knowledge about effective teaching and learning in authentic settings, i.e. in classrooms led by teachers. In almost all cases this encouraged them to work directly with teachers, or other education professionals in classrooms, to develop innovations. This contrasts with much existing research on ‘what works’, especially from the United States, which tends to rely on university-based researchers to develop and test interventions in quasi-experimental settings. Under this system, those programmes, projects and products that achieve respectable effect sizes are disseminated through, for example, the What Works Clearinghouse. However, the transformation of evidence-based knowledge into sustainable and effective practice cannot be taken for granted. Promising innovations often fail simply because they are not implemented; and implementation depends on those who work on a daily basis with pupils taking ownership of new ideas and practices. This requires teacher learning.

The premise from which TLRP started made investigation of teacher learning an integral part of the work of most projects. Therefore, almost all projects contributed some evidence to underpin TLRP Principle 9:

Much debate has centred on the issue of whether teachers need to learn new techniques or whether the ideas underpinning them are more important. Some argue (e.g. Webb et al., 2004) that changing practices can lead to changes in beliefs; others (e.g. Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) take the view that changing behaviour depends on changing beliefs because they provide the necessary reasons to act. The general conclusion, to be drawn from the diverse studies in TLRP, is that changes in behaviour and beliefs are both necessary and should be developed together, progressively. Furthermore, effective pedagogy depends not only on behavioural change and the acquisition of new knowledge but on the development of values and dispositions, and reappraisal of roles and relationships in and beyond the classroom. Such learning by teachers takes place in the workplace, through participation in collaborative activities with other ‘insiders’, although the involvement of outsiders, such as researchers, and the provision of well-researched materials can be highly valued.

These conclusions began to emerge early in the life of TLRP. During a mini-conference held in 2002, which brought together the first projects to conclude their work, researchers with very different interests (P4, P7, P10, P11 and P19) discovered that they all had findings regarding teacher learning. These were initially fleshed out in a BERA conference symposium and then published in a special issue of the journal, Research Papers in Education (volume 20, number 2, June 2005). The editorial to this issue summarised the common themes:

1. Learning is both individual and collective and involves both the acquisition of knowledge and skills and participation in social processes. Thus the development of supportive professional cultures within which teachers can learn is vitally important. Within schools, especially secondary schools, the focus is often the department or team. However, the very cohesion of these groups can create insularity and inhibit change. Dynamic and expansive learning environments need to provide opportunities for boundary crossings, which encourage teachers to learn from others in different networks or communities of practice.
2. Teachers are most ready to accept ideas for change if they resonate with their existing or previous beliefs and experience. However, this does not make them right or appropriate. Teachers need to develop the knowledge and skills to evaluate evidence and the confidence to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, including their own. This is difficult and it is often helpful to involve outsiders, perhaps researchers from universities or visiting teachers from other schools, in helping teachers to see things differently. Teachers need to be assured that it is acceptable and often fruitful to take risks. Trust is therefore of the essence.
3. Evidence from research about effective practice is not always sufficiently accessible for teachers to use as a basis for action. Findings often need to be transformed into practical and concrete strategies that they can try out. This may involve the production of concise and user-friendly materials written in natural language although ideas are often mediated best by talk and personal contacts with other teachers who have had some success in using them. Researchers have a responsibility to communicate their work in accessible ways but other education professionals can also have an effective role in mediation of this kind. (James, 2005: 107–8)

The TLRP studies reported here emphasise the importance of interactions among teacher factors (e.g. knowledge, attitudes and behaviour), cultural factors (e.g. professional networks or communities) and structural factors (e.g. policy contexts).

As further TLRP projects reported their findings, these insights were elaborated, refined and expanded. Teacher-research, action research, practice-based enquiry or lesson study were regarded as key professional learning activities and many projects incorporated these in their design.

Underlying the findings are some deeper questions about the purpose and value of action research and collaborative enquiry. These relate to earlier discussion about learning in general – about whether learning is an individual or a social process, and what and whose ends it serves. Such issues were also explored in, Changing Teacher Roles, Identities and Professionalism (C-TRIP) (T5), one of TLRP’s most successful thematic seminar series. These seminars invited presentation of new empirical and theoretical work and brought together two important traditions of enquiry about teachers’ lives and practices: research that investigates the social and policy contexts of teachers’ lives and research that focuses on the enhancement of professional practice.

In his C-TRIP seminar paper, Elliott (2006) traces the concept of ‘research-based teaching’ in the UK to the work of Lawrence Stenhouse and his Humanities Curriculum Project in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He claims that Stenhouse had emancipatory intent:

However, Elliott also perceives that the ‘teachers as researchers’ movement has been re-shaped by the ‘standards agenda’.

Data from many TLRP projects indicated structural constraints on teachers’ capacity for professional learning that were not simply practical but ‘an assault on values’ (Woods et al., 1997: 84). For example, approximately 80% of 1200 teachers surveyed in the Learning How to Learn project (P13) reported marked gaps between what they valued and what they practised. Most teachers believed more strongly in promoting learning autonomy in their pupils than claimed to practise it; and they practised ‘performance orientation’ more than they believed in its value (James et al., 2007: 56). In-depth interviews with 37 teachers revealed that they felt constrained by the press for rapid ‘curriculum coverage’, ‘teaching to the test’ and a ‘tick box culture’. Although values–practice gaps reduced significantly during the course of the project, some remained. This poses a question about whether professionals who are able articulate educational values should be expected to tolerate such levels of tension and dilemma in their professional lives. An optimistic message from this project was that the 20% of teachers, who had most success in promoting AfL in their classrooms, were those who demonstrated a capacity for strategic and reflective thinking and took responsibility for what happened in their classrooms. They were not inclined to blame external circumstances or pupil characteristics but concentrated on the ways in which they could improve the learning experiences for pupils (James et al., 2007: 215).

The character of teachers’ professional lives was, as mentioned above, the other strand of interest in the C-TRIP thematic seminar series (T5). It was also the particular focus of a TLRP associate project, Variations in Teachers’ Work, Lives, and their Effects on Pupils (VITAE) (P17). This longitudinal study of 300 teachers provided a new perspective on teachers’ quality, retention and effectiveness over the whole of their careers. The project found that: (i) pupils of teachers who are committed and resilient are likely to attain more than pupils whose teachers are not; (ii) teachers’ sense of positive professional identity is associated with well-being and job satisfaction and this is a key factor in their effectiveness; (iii) the commitment and resilience of teachers in schools serving more disadvantaged communities are more persistently challenged than others; (iv) teachers do not necessarily become more effective over time – a minority risk becoming less effective in later years; and (v) sustaining and enhancing commitment and resilience is a key quality and retention issue. The project concluded that strategies are needed for meeting the needs of teachers in different phases in their professional lives, and in different communities. Furthermore, CPD may not be as influential as the work context in creating commitment, resilience and well-being in teachers. These factors are important in that they are correlated with pupil outcomes. This finding resonates with other TLRP research that looked beyond continuous professional development (CPD), as the main opportunity for teacher learning, to issues around recruitment, retention, initial teacher education (ITE) and induction.

In England, the influential EPPE project (P2) found that the recruitment of highly qualified staff is the key factor in effective pre-school education. In Northern Ireland, Innovations for a Values-based Approach to Teacher Education project (P18), questioned the value of professional development activities. Focusing on the role of values in recruitment, ITE and induction, the project discovered that beginning teachers in Northern Ireland lacked diversity; few shared background with pupils, which made connection and communication difficult. This difficulty was compounded by the appointment of new teachers to temporary positions, which led to inconsistent induction. In Scotland, the Competence-based Learning in the Early Professional Development of Teachers project (P20) investigated informal identity formation in beginning teachers. As in the projects on pupil group work (see above), the emotional and relational aspects were found to be important in the early stages, with role aspects, including cognitive learning, featuring later. Patterns of social interaction correlated with job satisfaction. The director of this project noted at the 2006 TLRP annual conference:

Comparing teacher education across the four countries of the United Kingdom, a TLRP thematic group on Teaching and Learning Policy in Post-devolution UK Contexts (T7) found aspects of both convergence and divergence in grade structures, services, standards and structures.

All these studies suggest that the two strands of the C-TRIP seminar series are closely interrelated: the enhancement of professional practice is influenced by the social and policy context of teacher’s lives. C-TRIP accumulated a very considerable body of evidence on the material significance of policy – connected with history, regional or national specificity and education phase or sector – which contributes to the case for TLRP’s tenth principle:

Most TLRP projects raised questions and produced evidence about the impact of policy at three levels – school, local authority and the nation – and the interactions among these levels.

At school level many researchers observed that when senior management support innovation it becomes sustainable. However, head teachers revealed their concerns about leading learning in their schools within the context of prescriptive government policy. For example, within the Learning How to Learn project (P13), Swaffield and MacBeath (2006) found that challenges for leadership include resolving tension between ‘bottom-up’ growth and ‘top-down’ mandated change. Yet it was those school management systems that prioritised developing a sense of purpose, supporting professional development, auditing expertise and supporting networking, that were significantly more effective in fostering learning how to learn in classrooms (James et al., 2007). Similarly, the Pupil Consultation project (P10) found that support and commitment of school leaders was vital to ensure that consultation led to transformation in pedagogic practice. The InterActive Education and the Interactive Teaching projects (P8, P16) also found that support for professional development, to help teachers develop expertise in using ICT in dialogic teaching, was as important as providing equipment and technical training in its use.

Amongst TLRP project teams there was sometimes a perception that progress was being made despite government policy rather than because of it. However, there were exceptions. Some projects worked directly with policy makers to influence the policy agenda. The EPPE associate project, directly funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (formerly the Department for Education and Skills; now, since the 2010 election, the Department for Education), has been highly effective in influencing policy for pre-school. The Thinking Skills project (P5) worked with policy makers in Northern Ireland, in Wales and in some local authorities in England; larger-scale development projects have been rolled out as a result. The project on Intensive Quantities (P14) has had an impact on the Scottish curriculum for mathematics, as a result of direct contact. And the EPSE project (P7) has influenced the creation of the twenty-first century science GCSE, and the demise of the Key Stage 3 national tests in science, which overemphasised factual recall and underemphasised conceptual learning and scientific literacy. However, anomalies and tensions remain and there is still much work to do to make policy better informed by research evidence. Building the social capital, to support meaningful activities and to ameliorate policy constraints on developing effective pedagogy, may be slightly easier in the smaller and more cohesive countries of the UK. But values are always contested in a democracy and challenges are likely to remain. What is important is that all those with an interest in effective pedagogy – pupils, parents, teachers, researchers, policy makers and the public at large – strive together to find and establish socially just policy frameworks that truly support learning for diverse learners.

At the beginning of this review, it was noted that the first version of TLRP’s ten principles was presented graphically on an ellipse to indicate that they represent no firm linear hierarchy. However, the sequence reproduced here claims to possess a logic. Two later versions, adapted for higher education (David, 2009) and workplace learning (Brown, 2009), reverse the order. Thus, the TLRP principle related to policy frameworks comes first in these versions. This decision was partly influenced by a post-school project, Policy, Learning and Inclusion in the Learning and Skills Sector, that investigated the impact of key national policy levers, such as funding, targets and inspection, on teaching, learning and assessment in the Learning and Skills System (LSS). After the 2006 TLRP annual meeting, when these principles were debated, this project team held a ‘long discussion’ and submitted a detailed commentary on the tenth principle, questioning its ordering. Among the points they made are two which have relevance beyond the LSS:

• Centralised control appears to be having the paradoxical effect of increasing the agency of tutors, precisely because a punitive audit culture and an excess of policy have forced them to consider their basic values and their professional stance.
• We agree with the conclusion of Seymour Sarason that teachers cannot create the conditions for students to become creative lifelong learners, if those conditions do not exist for the teachers.

The project team concluded (Coffield, 2008: 25) that the skills sector would benefit from a ‘social partnership’ between government and other stakeholders with more local and collaborative decision-making. ‘This would allow for more professional participation and feedback, making change more gradual and reflective.’ This conclusion might equally apply to the schools sector.

Conclusion

In this contribution we have reviewed the origins and characteristics of TLRP’s ten principles of effective teaching and learning and have provided illustrations of their evidential foundations. We have acknowledged the presentation of ‘ten principles’ as a summarising device to distil complexity and to contribute towards the quality of judgements by practitioners, policy makers and others.

The presentation of ten principles is TLRP’s attempt to answer the question which was posed at the start of its funding: ‘How can outcomes be improved for learners in all educational contexts and sectors across the UK?’. Such a question can only be answered in general terms and this we have tried to do. However, we are aware that other research groups, across the world, are wrestling with similar attempts to construct synoptic representations of their understanding.

International knowledge builds through exchange but must, in education, be applied with reference to the particular cultural, social, economic and political contexts of each country. Particular issues will thus be fore-grounded in relation to specific contexts, and different interpretations may be placed on some findings. Given contextual variations and the nature of education in relation to national futures and the distribution of opportunities, this is inevitable. However, a major responsibility for academics, we believe, is to look for commonalities. In this, we both join with Brian Simon in regretting the weakness of pedagogic awareness in England and align with international scholars in working towards global understanding.

Appendix A: Projects and thematic work reviewed for this chapter

Projects

Early years projects

P1: INTERPLAY: PLAY, LEARNING AND ICT IN PRE-SCHOOL SETTINGS

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-0006, 2003–2006, £87k

PI: Lydia Plowman, University of Stirling

P2: EPPE 3–11: THE EFFECTIVE PRE-SCHOOL AND PRIMARY EDUCATION (EPPE 3–11) (A TLRP Associated Project)

Award: DFES and DCSF, 2003–2013

PI: Brenda Taggart, Institute of Education, University of London

Primary education projects

P3: HOME-SCHOOL KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

Award: ESRC L139 25 1078, 2001–2005, £965k

PI: Martin Hughes, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

P4: THE ROLE OF AWARENESS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING LITERACY AND NUMERACY IN KEY STAGE 2

Award: ESRC L139251015, 2001–2004, £788k

PI: Terezinha Nunes, Oxford University

P5: SUSTAINABLE THINKING CLASSROOMS

Award: ESRCL 139 25 1042, 2001–2004, £233k

PI: Carol McGuinness, Queen’s University Belfast

P6: SUPPORTING GROUPWORK IN SCOTTISH SCHOOLS: AGE AND THE URBAN/RURAL DIVIDE

Award: ESRCRES-139-25-0004, 2003–2004, £74k

PI: Donald Christie, University of Strathclyde

Secondary education projects

P7: TOWARDS EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE IN SCIENCE EDUCATION (A network of projects)

Award: ESRC L139251003, 2000–2003, £449k

PI: Robin Millar, University of York

P8: INTERACTIVE EDUCATION: TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE INFORMATION AGE

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-1060, 2001–2004, £934k

PI: Ros Sutherland, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

P9: FACILITATING TEACHER ENGAGEMENT IN MORE INCLUSIVE PRACTICE

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-0160, 2005–2007, £122k including co-funding

PI: Sue Davies, Trinity College Carmarthen

Across school phases projects

P10: CONSULTING PUPILS ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING (A network of projects)

Award: ESRCL13925 1006, 2000–2003, £425k

PI: Jean Rudduck, University of Cambridge

P11: UNDERSTANDING AND DEVELOPING INCLUSIVE PRACTICES IN SCHOOLS (A network of projects)

Award: ESRCL13925 1001, 2000–2003, £444k

PI: Mel Ainscow, University of Manchester

P12: IMPROVING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PUPIL GROUPS IN CLASSROOMS

Award: ESRCL139 25 1046, 2001–2005, £1,006k

PI: Peter Blatchford, Institute of Education London

P13: LEARNING HOW TO LEARN: IN CLASSROOMS, SCHOOLS AND NETWORKS

Award: ESRCL139 25 1020, 2001–2005, £926k

PI: Mary James, University of Cambridge and Institute of Education London

P14: 5–14 MATHEMATICS IN SCOTLAND: THE RELEVANCE OF INTENSIVE QUANTITIES

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-0009, 2003–2005, £60k

PI: Christine Howe, Strathclyde University

P15: CONSULTING PUPILS ON THE ASSESSMENT OF THEIR LEARNING (CPAL)

Award: ESRCRES-139-25-0163, 2005–2007, £87k

PI: Ruth Leitch, Queen’s University Belfast

P16: THE USE OF ICT TO IMPROVE LEARNING AND ATTAINMENT THROUGH INTERACTIVE TEACHING

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-0167, 2005–2007, £115k

PI: Steve Kennewell, Swansea Metropolitan University

P17: VARIATIONS IN TEACHERS’ WORK, LIVES, AND THEIR EFFECTS ON PUPILS (VITAE) (A TLRP Associated Project)

Award: DFES, 2001–2006

PI: Christopher Day, School of Education, University of Nottingham

Higher education projects

P18: INNOVATIONS FOR A VALUES-BASED APPROACH TO TEACHER EDUCATION

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-0152, 2005–2007, £126k

PI: Alan Smith, University of Ulster

Workplace learning projects

P19: IMPROVING INCENTIVES TO LEARNING IN THE WORKPLACE (A network of projects)

Award: ESRC L139251005, 2000–2003, £473k

PI: Phil Hodkinson, University of Leeds (for the project relevant to the school sector)

P20: COMPETENCE-BASED LEARNING IN THE EARLY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHERS

Award: ESRC RES-139-25-0122, 2004–2008, £732k

PI: Jim McNally, University of Stirling

Lifelong learning project

P21: IDENTITY AND LEARNING (A TLRP Associated Project)

Award: ESRC general large grants, 1998–2004

PI: Andrew Pollard, Institute of Education, London

Thematic work

T1: TEACHER LEARNING (2002–2004)

Convenor: Mary James, University of Cambridge

T2: IDENTIFYING LEARNING OUTCOMES (2003–2004)

Convenor: Mary James, University of Cambridge

T3: PERSONALISED LEARNING (2004)

Convenors: Andrew Pollard and Mary James, University of Cambridge

T4: NEUROSCIENCE, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND TEACHING (2005–2006)

Convenor: Paul Howard-Jones, University of Bristol

T5: CHANGING TEACHER ROLES, IDENTITIES AND PROFESSIONALISM (2005–2006)

Convenor: Sharon Gewirtz, King’s College London

T6: SCIENCE EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS (2006)

Convenor: John Gilbert, University of Reading

T7: TEACHING AND LEARNING POLICY IN POST-DEVOLUTION UK CONTEXTS (2006–2007)

Convenor: Ian Menter, Glasgow University

T8: CURRICULUM AND DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE (2006–2007)

Convenors: Robert McCormick and Robert Moon, Open University

T9: ASSESSMENT OF SIGNIFICANT LEARNING OUTCOMES (2006–2007)

Convenor: Richard Daugherty, University of Cardiff

T10: SOCIAL DIVERSITY AND DIFFERENCE: RESEARCHING INEQUALITIES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING (2006–2007)

Convenor: Miriam David, Institute of Education London

T11: EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH FINDINGS (2006–2007)

Convenor: David Bridges, University of Cambridge

T12: REVIEWING REVIEWS (2006–2007)

Convenor: Harry Torrance, Manchester Metropolitan University

T13: ASSESSMENT IN SCHOOLS (2008–2009)

Convenor: Mary James, University of Cambridge

T14: COMMUNICATION, IMPACT AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER (2004–2007)

Convenor: Andrew Pollard, Institute of Education London

T15: IMPACT OF SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, MEDICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS AND INTERVENTIONS ACROSS THE LIFECOURSE (2006–2007)

Convenor: Leon Feinstein, Institute of Education London

T16: CONTEXTS, COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS (2005–2006)

Convenor: Richard Edwards, University of Stirling

T17: TRANSITIONS THROUGH THE LIFECOURSE: ANALYSING THE EFFECTS OF IDENTITY, AGENCY AND STRUCTURE (2006–2006)

Convenor: Kathryn Ecclestone, Oxford Brookes University