Wednesday 11 May 2022, 16:00-17:00

Room 213 St Andrew's Building, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH

 

Remaining Skeptical of Collaborative Improvement for Educational Change

Prominent calls to establish equal and interactive partnership among government actors, practitioners, and the public for the purpose of school improvement are inspiring new ways of working. Networked Improvement Communities, Research Practice Partnerships, and Professional Learning Networks are just some of the exciting developments in collaborative improvement for educational change. However, collaborative improvement risks becoming ineffectual without open, honest, and direct discussion for how accountability, being the cornerstone of contemporary education policy, continues to create strife between prominent stakeholders working in this space. Participants will be asked to consider how decades of accountability politics in education has undermined the professionalism of educators. How can education researchers help bolster the professionalism of practitioners to support the formation of authentic collaborative governing arrangements in education? This seminar will explore one such effort. Recent empirical work will be shared that employs mixed methods social network analysis to trace the activities of a classroom practitioner as they scaled up their own maths initiative across a regional education system in England. This empirical work should be of interest to participants both for its unique mixed methods design and in the way it casts a classroom practitioner as the protagonist in a story of school improvement.

 

About the speaker

Thomas Cowhitt is a Lecturer of Educational Change and Collaborative Improvement with the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Dr. Cowhitt’s research examines collaborative governing arrangements in education. He is particularly interested in developing new research approaches for understanding educational systems and how to develop close research partnerships with school practitioners attempting to develop and scale-up their own improvements to teaching and learning. Dr. Cowhitt also has an interest in the digital humanities and works to develop new digital tools for the presentation of mixed methods research.

 

First published: 29 March 2022

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