ABSTRACT
Barber and Mourshed’s work, published as the McKinsey Report ‘How the World’s Best-performing School Systems Come Out on Top’, found there was no direct link between the amount of funding and the quality of teaching; rather, their recommendations focus on the importance of the ‘right’ people becoming teachers. The quality of their professional knowledge is ignored. This paper, in contrast, pays attention to the nature and quality of professional knowledge in addressing the problem of how the quality of teaching might be improved through improving the
research and evidence base underpinning educational practice (Davies et al. 2000, Hammersley 2002, Cochrane-Smith and Zeichner 2005) and using digital technologies to facilitate teachers’ access to a research-informed professional knowledge base. That such an evidence base is necessary to provide a strong foundation for practice is rarely if ever acknowledged in the discourse about school and system improvement. In England under the Labour Government (1997-2010), investments in systematic reviews of the evidence base for policy and practice1 revealed that much published education research is small-scale, focused either on the impact of government programmes and ‘within school’ strategies for improvement or on addressing generic issues of classroom pedagogy (e.g. questioning, explaining, grouping and ability). Little substantial research in subject-specific areas was found (Newman et al. 2004), yet national assessment systems prioritise assessment of school students’ knowledge and skills in subjects. This lack of research-based professional knowledge on subject specialist issues is further compounded by the fact that research published in journals is not generally designed around questions teachers want answered. In short, the knowledge that is produced and the management of it within the education sector are woefully lacking in systemic organisation and coherence.
