Image source: Kaboompics.com
By The Educator Collaborative 2023-2025 associate member Heather Lippert
Research-based. The words are splashed across every shiny new edition of literacy curricula. In the first few minutes of a professional development, someone will tell you about how this program, this curricula, this method is research-based. Inevitably, someone in the audience will ask: “Is this research based?” Someone else will offer a “one-pager” of research that supports the specific group of students another audience member asked about.
“Research-based” has become the phrase that implies that whatever is being sold or presented is the gold standard. At times, even when teachers bring up concerns about an approach or philosophy, a person in charge will brush off the criticism with a simple response: “This is research-based.”
End of discussion.
It’s the teachers-just-need-to-follow-this-because-it’s-research-based stamp.
However, as critical consumers in our current “science of” movement, it’s important for educators to ask: Which research counts? What kinds of research are important, valid and accepted? Unfortunately, there is often a large group of people whose daily research is ignored, devalued and left out of conversations: the classroom teacher’s research.
When I jumped into student teaching, the first thing my mentor teacher and I had to decide was if we were going to create a unit or teach a unit that has been already designed. I enthusiastically jumped at the idea of creating my own unit, and in the first few days of my student teaching placement, began researching who the kids in front of me were and which standards needed to be covered.
What came from my research? I developed a unit on the Harlem Renaissance for a class of 5th graders that was made up largely of students of color. During the unit I’d developed, students and I researched and wrote biographies of important figures (culminating in a wax figure/rent party), we compared music of the Harlem Renaissance to modern pop music, we wrote poetry, and we learned some dances.
I still remember how engaged my fifth graders were, the amazing art and poetry they created, and how their energy blossomed when they shared what they had learned about historical figures with younger students.
The impact of the unit blew my mind as a new teacher. This is why I wanted to be a teacher: to learn about kids and to design learning experiences that both taught them and engaged them. To watch them grow as they learned more about the world around them.
A few years ago, I sat in a professional development for a new “research-based” program that was being adopted. A fellow teacher wondered about assigning different lessons to students for students who might need something different. The consultant replied that the program knows the students in deep ways and advised my colleague to just “let the program run its track.” I sat quietly thinking about how my knowledge of my students was being de-professionalized. How the message was that this program that was created by well-intentioned people who weren’t in a classroom with my students every day would know what my students need better than me.
To many in the world, we are “just” classroom teachers and we need to just listen to the publishers and the researchers. I offer another idea: that as classroom teachers we know our students beyond their state test data. We know them from carefully mining what Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan call “street data.” We know our students deeply, and our voice should be deemed important when decisions are made both in our classrooms and within the bigger layers of our educational system.
Research doesn’t just happen in universities and labs with people who’ve earned PhDs. It happens every day in the classrooms of teachers who are teaching kids to read, write, listen and talk. We should be trusted when we have to do some improv because the “script” isn’t working.
Teachers are researchers. It’s time to value us in that role.
