Professional Learning and Teacher Agency

Welcome to the Evidence-Based Education Podcast, the place where educators, leaders and administrators come to explore the evidence that underpins great teaching. Together we unpack powerful ideas, discover practical strategies and hear from leading experts to help you make a difference in your classroom, school or college. Let's get started. Welcome everybody to another episode of the EBE Podcast. I'm Stuart Kynes, Director of Education here at Evidence-Based Education and it is my pleasure today to welcome a special guest from the Charter of College teaching. Welcome to Dr. Liza Murrier Mula. I think I've pronounced that okay. Is that right? You have, yes. Excellent. Well it's really nice to welcome you along to this episode of the podcast where we're going to have a route around in thinking about teacher professional learning, leadership of professional learning, agency autonomy, all kinds of things that are really doing the rounds in terms of people's thinking about how they structure professional learning, what kind of models they adopt in terms of decisions about compliance or where to let loose and all kinds of things like that. So I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into that discussion with you today. But before we do any of that, please could you tell me and anybody listening to this? We usually get at least one lesson or so. Tell that person just a bit about you and also the work that you do at the Charter of College of Teaching. Yes of course. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's great to be here Stuart. My name is so you've introduced myself already. I'm head of research and policy at the Charter of College of Teaching, which is the professional body for teachers in England. And we work on empowering and knowledgeable evidence-informed teaching professions. So our role really is to link research policy and practice in education and we do that in a number of ways. We do that through our peer reviewed impact journal, which is a practitioner journal that we publish, termly and in which you can read publications from researchers and teachers, sometimes in dialogue. Each article is peer reviewed, which is really important. So both researchers and teachers get feedback from each other about the rigor of their research, but also its applicability to the classroom, which is great. We obviously run a whole programme on accreditation through the Charter Teacher Pathway, which is open to teachers and leaders, which really focuses on recognising teachers expertise, teachers classroom expertise, leaders expertise, mentors expertise. We can talk a little bit about that in a minute. We run lots of events and we also increasingly are involved in trying to influence policies through our reports and through our consultations with our members, so members of the Charter College get an opportunity to feed into consultations such as the recent curriculum and assessment review and others. So that sort of covers and we've got lots of online courses as well as well on a variety of topics that are sort of us in a nutshell. Thank you very much and I will declare that I am a fellow of the Charter College of Teaching and a proud supporter of the Charter College of Teaching and I think that the work that you and the team have done there since this inception has been really, really amazing and in fact, you know, leading an awful lot of the conversation about professional learning informed by robust evidence and increasingly giving a voice to people who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have that voice and particularly I like receiving my copies for some reason or the three copies arrive for every issue of impact at my house and I share them widely by the way, but it's a great publication of for anybody who is not a member of the Charter College of Teaching, you should definitely do that. Okay, so let's get stuck in. We're going to try and kind of like I said have a think about some of the the context of professional learning right now and you've already mentioned things like here in England, the curriculum and assessment review and in lots and lots of parts of the world when education reform comes along it creates all kinds of hustle and bustle lots and lots of questioning lots and lots of you know thinking about what should we prioritize what should we do who's leading what how is it all going to happen and and I think that then that kind of that background of change and of you know new decisions new goals and things like that feeds quite neatly into the first thing that I'd really like us to talk about which is to do with teachers and their own agency their own decision-making control however you want to frame it and in things that I've heard you say previously I think you argue that teacher agency is crucial but often is overlooked and gets overlooked perhaps and I hope this isn't like misrepresentation but due to a lack of trust from people in leadership roles and policy-making roles parents others so if we assume that that is the you know the position that you that's the the kind of starting point that there is this lack of trust why do you think there's this a deficit a lack of it and what can we do about it over to you to solve that particular problem in the next three minutes absolutely so in our report where we propose a new definition of teacher professionalism we unpick exactly that topic of teacher agency professional trust in a little bit more detail and we know from plenty of research that has been that trust in a teaching profession has been eroding in England one of the reasons for example that is cited in literature is that the profession has become and that's not just a case in teaching it's a case for other professions as well that the more female a profession becomes the more the trust and the status in that status of the profession trust in that profession erode so that's just interesting to bear in mind I think a lot of professions are struggling with a decrease in trust from the public due to information being more widely accessible all of that communication that information is obviously sometimes can be misrepresented and so there is certainly an eroding trust there but on the flip side of that I think it was really positive to see that the curriculum and assessment reviewed that just published two days ago actually explicitly mentions the importance of teachers having autonomy or agency we can go into the details or not of the definitions of these concepts over their practice and this is important for a number of reasons so let me just talk about two possibly when we look at curriculum reform a lot of international research highlights the importance of teacher buy-in so whilst top-down approaches to curriculum reform can be beneficial in the short term and when large changes need to be implemented and in particular in the context of a low qualified teacher workforce so if you think about developing countries for example whether focus needs to be on upskilling a teacher workforce that may not be adequately qualified to start with in such case quite a structure program to upskill teachers and leaders may be necessary the same is true for struggling schools in English contexts and elsewhere for example so if you need to turn around a school quickly that may well work but actually in the long term and if we consider teacher retention we know that having agency over once work over once decisions in the classroom can actually positively impact teacher jobs satisfaction and we know that the happier people are and the more confident and content they are in their jobs well they longer they tend to stay in the profession of course there are a number of factors that play into that but I think that's something that is really important to bear in mind the current context of curriculum reform on the one hand and teacher shortages on the other so I feel that in light of all of that reflecting on the fact also that we've put a lot of policy changes in place in recent years that have really upskilled teachers have really improved initial teacher education so we can be confident that teachers are experts in what they do especially also in terms of the continuous professional developments that they receive throughout their careers so at some point we need to let go and trust teachers to take the right decisions for their students and their classrooms because ultimately they are the ones who know their classrooms best and that's where I'd link into evidence in form practice as well I think sometimes evidence in form practice can be perceived and communicated as in very top-down ways in research is something that happens in academia they found out what happens best in classrooms it then gets communicated to teachers and they should just implement what researchers find but actually that's not how evidence in form practice works and we know that's obviously definitely not the view of evidence in form practice as that your organisation advocates for and definite not what we advocate for, because teachers need to adapt any evidence that is generated elsewhere to their context and they need to take ownership of it and reflect critically on whether it actually works for them for their students and in their classrooms because classrooms are hugely complex with lots of students with different needs, different backgrounds and we need to be able to account for that and just the nature of research means that we can't account for all of that nuance in a large scale study. So there we go, three minutes in a nutshell. Well done for delivering on the brief of, you know, in three minutes, like sort of go for it, I'm impressed. So there's a few things there that I really want to touch on. Well firstly is this distinction between agency and autonomy and certainly my perception of this, having got myself into lots of like, let's say troublesome conversations and talking about autonomy is that, so I think pure autonomy should not be like what we're looking for in the classroom because like that just suggests that then anything goes and whatever you want to do is you have autonomy to make that decision. So I think talking about agency seems to probably fit a little bit more comfortably for me about a teacher having, it's about control. What do you have control over? What are the decisions for you to make not just optional but actually these are your decisions you must make decisions around these things? That seems really important to me and I sometimes end up talking about instead of just autonomy, I talk about managed autonomy, which I don't know whether that's a good term or not, but it's like the idea that I have comes from listening to desert island discs actually a long time ago and listening to the amazing Miranda Hart, talking about how she would like to spend her holidays and she said that she likes to relax within a structure. And I thought that's what teachers should be doing. There should be a clear structure but within that structure they're confident to kind of go no actually I'm going to shift over here or over there or I'm going to change this to this because of my understanding of the contextual needs within my classroom. So that was one thing I wanted to say in response to that idea of autonomy and agency and building on that when you talked about the early need or sorry the need in schools and systems where you're kind of moving from a lack of deep knowledge and understanding of like effective practice and lack of systemic kind of process that is just a base level of good for teaching and earning then why wouldn't you kind of go very quickly to say actually no we need to establish certain things, certain routines, certain rules for how we do things around here to stem the tide and sort out a problem that you have identified. That would seem like a sensible approach in that first instance but my worry then is like if that is just if that's the goal if we just say well that's where we'll always be and without thinking ahead to what you describe I think is that sort of more mature and professionalism rooted in the people who are the professionals. Surely that's got to be the goal that those people are the experts empowered knowledgeable highly skilled, highly respected and so I kind of see that certainly in England we've done an incredible work around building the sort of like a base knowledge of cognitive psychology and also cognitive science around you know attention and working memory and all that's really helped I think in lots of ways I think you know we've done a lot around understanding how to maximize the opportunity that learners have and saying right we need to get the most out of an hour long lesson with rules and routines and things like that but what I also see is that the way that we've done that has been to in lots of instances to say therefore everybody must comply with this set of practices and approaches in our school, in our trust, in our group and what have you and I'm excuse me I worry that if that sort of remains as the you know the goal or the practice you know going forwards that then that's quite off putting I think for somebody who wants to be unleashed as a true professional in all of this so so what what can people do like what's you know if if I'm a school leader and I come to you say all right so I think we've in our school we have done some good work and we've got to a point where things are going well but I want to move on from a culture of compliance where people do what they are doing because I tell them to do it and I'm you know overcharacterising here right but I want to get to this other place that you talk about of teachers you know and us as a group feeling that we have agency what what what are the first kind of practical steps that somebody could take in their school to do that so I think it's all rooted in recognising teachers expertise so a secondary school leader for example could do a relatively easy thing and get together with heads of departments and start to discuss how say something like retrieval practice or interleaving or any other if you want to start with the cognitive science strategies actually looks like in their departments and to what extent they've observed that it's working or not working the tweaks that they've made it really start that professional dialogue so that we get from we move on from a point where teachers are implementing this just because that's all to do it to a point where they take a strategy they apply it and they reflect on it critically so I'd like to mention two things that we did with the charged college so we ran two big projects on journal clubs journal clubs are approached to teachers cpd and that is very common in health care and has been around for around 200 years in which teachers teachers and leaders meet on the roughly monthly basis could be every six weeks they all read the same research paper or summary of research paper in our case it was impact articles they assess what they read critically so it would really unpick the number of participants what the study really wanted to do then they reflect on its relevance for their context and then they decide on how they're actually going to take what they read about and implement it in their classrooms they go away they try it and then in their next meeting they start the meeting very reflecting critically on how it went and in some cases it may go really well and may have worked really well in other cases it maybe didn't and so that creates a really powerful basis for professional dialogue because we move away from a conversation about I like or I don't like these strategies or a superficial engagement with research and we really give everyone the tools to take ownership over something that is rooted in evidence and I think that's really important and leads back to what you said about this understanding of autonomy or agency just being everyone doing what they want it what they want to do it's absolutely not the understanding and when you engage with the research literature that's not what it means and when we talk about professionalism and the importance of agency in taking ownership over one's professional decisions that's very much the understanding that it's rooted in evidence it's rooted in high quality knowledge but then you need to tweak it so that's one approach to a trial then it's been evaluated by NFER and Cheffi Elzhalem and they found it to be effective and actually positively influencing teachers critical research engagement skills their ability to apply research in the classroom and their teaching skills but the importance was that you still have that ownership you don't feel like something is done to you and it recognizes each participant for their particular expertise and in a second project we actually expanded to include teacher as teaching assistants and focusing particularly on research on how to support students with special education on needs and again it was just so empowering for teaching assistants to be recognised for their expertise because they are the ones who work one on one or in small groups with students who really have that expertise and that communication is really important and in another piece of research that we did was a cognitive science research priority setting activity now that sounds very grand but essentially what we did is we said okay so we've now identified a number of strategies from the cognitive sciences that are considered to be effective we used a report from the EF that identified these strategies and again going back to retrieval interleaving metacognitive strategies etc but what we want to know now is from teachers who have been implementing these strategies well. How is it going and crucially, what questions do you have now that you've been implementing these strategies in your classroom for a while? And that was eye-opening and just really interesting to capture and share what they've, the questions that they had. And of course, we had questions about frequency. So for example, retrieval practice is really effective. But does that mean we should be starting every single lesson with retrieval practice? We don't have the answer is we don't know. Or interleaving. So which problem should I be interleaving? How far back should I go? Questions around how different subjects can operate together? Because of course, yes, you do your study on one particular subject. But then in a school, you have multiple subjects following each other. So what's kind of the cumulative effect of using these strategies? It's really, really interesting questions that captured the complexity of applying some of these strategies, which doesn't take away at all from the findings about the effectiveness. But it just adds this important nuance. And again, goes back to that agency to that critical engagement to say, okay, I've taken this, I've applied it, and now what? And I think that's what really the chartered college stands for to recognise that teacher expertise and to communicate it back to policymakers, to leaders, to researchers to say, okay, here are the experts who are applying this in the classroom. These are the questions that they have, these are the concerns that they have, let's do something perhaps it. And that's music to my ears actually, because that's precisely the same kind of underpinning foundation for the work that we do at EBE with the great teaching toolkit. So as you were talking there about journal clubs, what I had in my mind was our development cycles. So anybody using the toolkit will work through a development cycle where they, as an individual are working within a group or with a coach or a mentor, will then move from some kind of, you know, a principle of evidence in form practice, like, you know, about creating a climate of high expectations, high challenge, high trust. And then from there to set a really, really clear goal, you know, it's supported through there, the goals get suggested for you, techniques get suggested for you, but all the while you're choosing, you are saying, this is important to me. I've got some feedback from, you know, students, from colleagues, from myself, whatever, but this is important to me and I'm going to choose to then focus on this thing, to learn about this thing, to understand a little bit about the research behind it. And then to go and test it out and then, and next week I'll come back and I'll tell you how it went. And maybe it went fine and maybe it didn't. Maybe I just, it's the wrong thing for me right now. And all of that's fine. Well, I think there's something liberating in us taking a, like one more step on from, you know, everybody must, you know, you must create a climate of high expectations and therefore you must do this, this, this, to the step on actually is saying, okay, we want everybody to create a climate of high expectations. Here's a set of options and it's over to you to choose and to work out and to adapt to your context and, you know, adaptation is the lifeblood of teaching and the people who do the adaptation are teachers and teaching assistants who are there day in day out. So we have to support them. I love listening to what you said there about that and I think it's again, trust is, trust is a key part of this, but there's also, you know, I don't, I don't think it's just about saying, look, school leaders, just trust people. It's, we then have to kind of support people with the guardrails and the frameworks that allow them to make really good choices. And that's the sort of fundamental, I think, of what you're doing, what we're doing is, you know, going back to me, around the heart, you know, relax within a framework, you know, feel comfortable in there and no way you can go but also be given the leeway and the agency and the trust to go there and make your choices and also then be responsible for your choices, you know, if it goes completely pear-shaped and you didn't like, you know, it didn't work, what have you, that's, that's you doing that, leading that is you to then look back and say, what could I do better and reflect properly in such a, I think this is, this is, this is good, I'm enjoying this, this is nice. Absolutely. And I think you, a little briefly alluded to careers, they just there as well. And I think that's also something to bear in mind again, something where maybe leaders can sort of enable teacher agency to some extent. So we also know that kind of in, in earlier career stages, teachers and other professionals tend to benefit a lot from more guided approaches because of course it's hugely overwhelming to join a profession and we've all been there, right? You first year, in first days and years in the classroom are hugely overwhelming, there is so much to take into consideration. So having a framework to be able to hold on to can be really important having that structure that allows you to relax and also enjoy joining a profession, hopefully not burn out within the first years, but actually once you reach the mid career stage, which is the final literature in many different ways, but in a project with colleagues from Sheffield Hallam University, we defined it as roughly five to 15 years in the profession. We can see that we found that it can be really beneficial for teachers to take more ownership over their CPD, so their professional developments are rather than being told what they need to develop. And of course, I'm not talking about statutory CPD, of course, that's, I'm putting that to the side, but taking ownership over what they want to develop as practitioners, the skills that they want to look into, that can be really powerful in improving teachers' job satisfaction and feeling that they've got some control. Of course, that can still be aligned within the structure of school priorities. So again, if we don't want to create an atmosphere where everyone just goes off and does their own thing, although that can be powerful as well, there can be an overarching structure of schools priorities for a year. And within that, teachers get to choose the type of CPD and the content that they want to engage with, because that can also just correspond to their learning needs, where they are in their understanding of different concepts, or even the type of CPD they want to engage with. Some people correspond better to online self-paced models, others will say no, actually. I need that half day away in a room with other people, where I know that I'm not going to get pulled out, I'm not going to have to respond to any emails. And we should be able to provide that agency over teacher development. So I think that's another way where school leaders can put concrete steps into place to support teachers to take more ownership over their teaching, but also over their professional development. Yeah, and I think there's so much support in place, so much focus on early years in teaching, the early part of a teacher's career. But then a bit of an open space for what happens next. And I think there's real merit in spending time and thinking about how you kind of unscathold the way in which professional learning and such like is structured. Again, not just keeping it open and going, well, do something, do nothing, do what you're like, it's not that. There's a middle way in there that helps people to feel like there's a clear pathway, but that they're the ones who are choosing the steps that they take along that pathway. And I think I was looking again at the new off-stead inspection toolkits that comes into playing three days time, I think. And the section in the leadership governance there on professional learning and expertise talks about in the expected section, it's about having a programme of professional learning. So at least that's kind of saying it's not just some random one-hit things. There's a programme suggests there's some sort of thought through continuity. And in the strong one, it talks about coherent professional learning curriculum that's matched to individual needs. And there I'm starting to think, hang on, that sounds really interesting because then you have to actually go, well, what are individual leads here? And then I think that might help to elevate that conversation about career stages, subject areas, you know, difference basically. And acknowledging that, you know, we do have individual needs as teachers and that one size, you know, doesn't offer fit all, and particularly as you're progressing through your career, that is different to those early stages. And actually, I want to try and build out this idea of difference. And and how we kind of, perhaps broad in our thinking about how we support teachers in the classroom to get really good at the day job and then keep on getting better. And as I look back over the last decade, decade and a half in England, in particular, this whole thing of evidence informed or evidence based or whatever, it's become, right? It's massively prevalent in loads and loads of places, loads of frameworks, organizations like yours exist, mine exists, you see it in ITT, early career frameworks, in NPQs, it's all over the place. But has it become synonymous, evidence informed practice has become synonymous with cognitive science? And I think you've argued about this with real passion, I think, but by focusing in so heavily on cognitive science, we perhaps then miss the beat with bringing in bodies of evidence from other areas of social sciences, applied linguistics, things like that. And before I hand over to you, the way that I see this, just to kind of give a visual metaphor, is that a thing? I don't know, anyway, is to say, we put this massive spotlight onto cognitive science, right? And that was a good thing in lots and lots of ways. It's got us all talking about really important things. But when you put a spotlight on one thing, other stuff goes into the shadows. And I think that some of these other things like motivation, in particular, stuff around, I'm really interested in occupational self-regulation for teachers, those have just kind of gone into the shadows. And I think it's time to turn all the lights on. So what are we missing out on in your view there, if we're at the minute? Absolutely, couldn't agree more. And so let's start with motivation, for example, because at least as back to what we were talking about earlier, we noted it can be hugely motivating for teachers to take ownership over their own CPD. So that's what we discussed earlier. That's yet another reason to try and enable that. But I think we also need to look into the importance of motivation and engagement for learning. And now, please don't anyone who's listening and wants to jump to the conclusion, no, at least Maria said that they need to be engaged and that means they need to be jumping around and no. Exactly. So we know it is true that being engaged doesn't necessarily mean that students are learning. So they can look very active, they can look like they're very engaged in their learning, but actually when they then look at what they've acquired in terms of knowledge of skills, or skills, they may show very low results. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't, they don't need to be engaged or motivated to learn. We actually have a whole body of evidence that highlights the importance of motivation. We know it from psychology, even when we think about ourselves, like how much do we enjoy doing something that we don't want to do? As adults, we rarely do anything. We don't want to do apart from maybe going to work everybody, I don't know, depends on the jobs that we have. And of course, it's important that there are things that we need to do without enjoying them. I absolutely get that point, but there is also a huge body of evidence that supports the need for motivation and engagement. And as a linguist myself, so I'm a trained foreign language teacher, I've done work in classrooms and then I did a PhD in applied linguistics. Applied linguistics is the research field that looks at how we should be teaching languages amongst other things. That's been around since the 50s and had a huge search since the 70s. So there is a massive body of research that we can pull on. And a lot of things that we've learned since, so including motivation. So the late sultan derney from Nottingham University, for example, has been leading the field on foreign language motivation, the importance of students being able to project themselves as foreign language users. So if they believe that all of what they're doing is not actually going to help them to communicate later on, or it's all so hard that they're not going to be effective communicators later on. It was really demotivating for them. So it's important to build on their previous knowledge, to provide them with opportunities, but also to challenge them so that they see that they're developing and they're learning something that is relevant to. What we could learn from that vast body of knowledge as well is how not to do things. So we've been through different trends in language learning and we've got lots of evidence, especially in studying English as foreign language in other countries. We've had things like the grammar translation method, which focused a lot on accuracy and learning a lot of vocabulary and grammar and translation. So that's typical if you've studied Latin, that's the method that's typically still being used to study Latin, we take a text and we translate it. So that can be very effective if you want to create really good translators. It does develop a really good vocabulary knowledge, grammatical knowledge, but actually if you want students to get to communicate, it doesn't get you very far. Okay, so then there was a trend that was sort of the more an audio lingual method where you set students in in front of computers or in films in kind of language labs, where they were exposed to lots of content and they were repeating it back. So that had a positive impact on their language skills, not so much on their written skills. Alongside that, we also developed a much better understanding of how learners learn at different ages. So we now know that younger students tend to need a lot of exposure. They learn better kind of implicitly and when they're exposed to lots and lots and lots of foreign language content, we very often hear about children being sponges, right? Children who grow up with two languages tend to, if they get enough exposure of both of them, tend to get quite good at speaking both of them. But actually so explicitly teaching them about grammar tends to work less well than exposing them to lots of language. But that shifts with puberty. So that's quite interesting that later on actually if you have a minimal input setting, it's better to use that to have some explicit instruction and also give them opportunities to communicate because they can use that they have a more abstract understanding of language that they can use and develop. And actually if they don't get any structured inputs around vocabulary and grammar, they all the language learners can reach a point of what's called fossilisation, which means that they that they keep mistakes they've acquired through a lack of understanding of the underlying structure simply by being exposed to the language. You'll quite often see that in immigrant communities, for example, who didn't get structured exposure to the grammar and knowledge of a language. So what I'm trying to say is that in applied linguistics we've had a look at different approaches. We've studied how to teach knowledge and the necessity to develop skills because essentially if you only focus on developing children's vocabulary and grammatical skills in writing and give them the few opportunities to actually apply that in speaking, they then struggle to do that. You need to give them the opportunities through group work and pair work to actually apply that knowledge. And I think we can draw parallels to other subjects from that. So I think there is that that body of knowledge that we could really use that's been that's had so so much evidence behind it so that we know what we and there is a lot we can learn in terms of what to do but also what not to do given the evidence there is. And I think it could help us also with moving away from the dreadful knowledge of us as skills debate and this idea that it's either or when really it's a combination. And of course you need the knowledge again going back to language learning. You can't speak a language unless you know the words and you know something about the grammatical structures although that knowledge can be implicit it doesn't necessarily have to be explicit. But if you don't get any opportunities to actually use that language in writing and in speaking and developing it, we miss out on that. And that leads us to another huge body of research which focuses on on bilingualism and bilingual the effect of bilingualism on our cognitive development which highlights that there are actually cognitive changes happening in the prefrontal cortex as a result of being exposed and using and switching between two or more languages on a regular basis which can even have an impact on how at what point people develop Alzheimer's. So that's quite interesting in terms of our debates around cognitive load because essentially you could argue that being a bilingual is constant cognitive overload because you essentially always have one language that you're not using at the moment and that you need to sort of keep out so that you can focus on just the one language you're currently speaking. So what does that mean in terms of our understanding of cognitive load and how we how we try to diminish common flowed, what cognitive load do we try to diminish and when? So I think that could lead to really interesting debates in that space. Yeah, yeah. So thank you for that. And particularly thank you for that you know passionate argument for getting into the world of applied linguistics which is a world that I do not know much about. I must admit and I but I think you know that this sort of the message that seems to be coming through from what what you're saying there is that is about have you know kind of walking together, walking a middle path in this and seeing you know like it's it's not knowledge versus skills, it's knowledge then skills and building together and I would argue actually it's knowledge and skills and then judgment and the situational stuff that allows us to to operate in the deeply complex world that we all end up in. That it's not just about it's not you're not arguing I'm not arguing to you know take all the cogsized stuff and just go you know that was last decade let's move on like that's irrelevant now. No we have it. Yeah it's important we know it's working we're using it so now that we feel confident about using that let's build on it let's develop other things that we know we maybe have neglected due to the focus on this but there are other areas in teaching that are equally important. We know that we're struggling at the moment a lot with student attendance for example so we need to un-pick why that is happening and what body of research we could pull on to try and address some of the issues that we that we are facing there. And there is such good stuff that it's not just that it exists right now but if there's as you'll know I you know research evidence go back decades and sometimes more that can help us to understand something about this like you know one of the the turning points for me when I when I was learning about motivation was reading a line in a paper by I think it was Roy Baumeister and it just said something like you know motivation is want and I started thinking oh okay like what do I want to do what do I not want to do and then you get into like the the idea of controlled motivation and autonomous motivation right I will I will do this thing or I'll not do this thing because I either want to avoid the punishment that's going to go or like the shame that might come from doing so I'll do the thing because I'm avoiding something bad versus you know I'm doing this because I want to do it I choose to do it and and I and I feel like it's interesting enjoyable or it helps me it lines with my values my goals things like that and there's a whole world of of research evidence around that that then has I think will merit and value by joining up with all of that stuff around cognitive science around you know like cold calling right cold calling is a great technique to get everybody thinking in the classroom but can you use cold calling in a way that also promotes feelings of learner motivation in the classroom and absolutely yes you can but why would you do that if you if you hadn't even thought about all like what is motivation why is it important and how could I adapt this great technique that I've got to you know to this other sort of purpose where there's some of the like drive going on in there so absolutely and it's complex simm because exactly and like what you said there about what do I want what motivates us can be quite different and one of my colleagues runs ultra-marathons I will not run further than to the bus stop to catch my bus but I do other things I do Zumba I do other things to keep fit because they make me happy and I enjoy them and that's how I like to spend my time and I think it's just what I'd like to bring this back to is to say just because I think we made maybe as an education community in some places a bit of a mistake at some point in response to as a set the the body of research that showed just because students are engaged and not necessarily learning and took that to mean that them being engaged isn't important for them to learn but those are not the same things and I think we need to now reflect back on that and say okay so what do we know about motivation where it comes from how we can support it and without taking away anything from the cognitive signs and the great strategies that we've developed there but just to expand on that and see how we can make it work and make it work for different students and because you mentioned cold calling there for example it would also provide us with the opportunity now that we have developed this good understanding this basic understanding of different strategies to say okay so how are these strategies working for different learners because we know that something like retrieval practice even if it's if it's very light touch and and low stakes it can still be stressful for some students students some neurodivergent students definitely not all of them but some so we just need to consider that as well that complexity behind some of the strategies and how they work for our students which leads us nicely back to teacher agency and that need for adaptation and critical reflection and critical engagement I think we are we know a lot we've already made a lot of progress in evidence-informed education it's great to see how much progress we've made but now we can build on that and continue and just develop a more nuanced understanding of the vast bodies of literature that are out there and that are relevant for us as a profession I think that it has to be our next step right in this as as a profession to you know not throw the baby out with the bath water but to say like we have made some some big strides here with you know teaching knowledge, teaching skill in classroom practice and that's you know to be to be cherished but then move on and ask that question about you know the the adaptation about you know okay if if if I know that the the the the co-calling has has merit in helping to create the conditions for everybody to think really hard about an answer and I want everybody to think hard but I know that some children will you know not be able to do that or find that incredibly difficult because of the way that I've practiced doing it how can I adapt how can I change the the means in which they participate the means in which they engage and still get them to do that to to think hard to be able to do that but maybe I I need to you know to develop my expertise my knowledge and skill and then but have the judgment but also be trusted to make the judgment in the moment that means I go off script and change something and that that is actually you know seen as the lifeblood of successful teaching not just a bug to be ironed out and you know and and and got rid of I think I've I've massively enjoyed talking to you today I think I think we could do like several more hours of this to be honest with you and maybe we should do that but I think we should we should draw it to a close for now for anybody who's who's listening and is keen to learn more about the charter college of teaching or maybe even join the charter college of teaching because that's a good thing what should they do now so I'm sure we can add a link to the description so you can find out more about the charter college you can also nominate a colleague to become a fellow of the charter college which is an accolade to recognise highly achieved professionals in in education so we can link to that as well and you can subscribe to our mailing list if you think oh this is interesting I'd like to hear more but maybe I don't want to commit to joining just yet we you can do that as well and then you'll find out more about upcoming events any research papers and anything else that is going on at the college and any of of the content we we provide including our impact journal. Amazing and as a fellow of the charter college of teaching I would like to say that it's well worth joining and becoming part of the community and so on on behalf of everybody who joined today I was listening to this I want to say thank you Lisa Maria for sharing so generously today and helping us to think a little bit about you know where do we go from here in terms of ensuring that we have a workforce of highly expert teachers who feel that true sense of agency that really supports them as professionals I think that's what we're all aiming at thank you for your time today thanks everybody for joining us for this episode please tune in for more on the eb website and you can find us all over social media as well wherever you get to your podcasts thanks very much thank you so much you