A Visit to ResearchED

We’ve travelled a whole mile away from campus for this episode, for the very first ResearchED Cymru event. ResearchED is an organisation aimed at bringing educational research to teachers in a way they can use, promoting the idea that knowing about the clues to ‘what works’ that current research gives us as teachers can save us chasing myths or getting stuck in practice that’s not the best for our pupils.

ResearchED events happen on Saturdays, and this year the organisation came to Wales for the first time. There was a star-studded list of speakers for teachers to choose from… and us!

While we waited to give our presentation on cross-curricular pedagogies in the expressive arts (see episode 2 of this season of the podcast for details of what we were talking about), we attended some interesting presentations, watched a video message from the mighty Dylan Wiliam, and grabbed some informal interviews with some of the big-name speakers.

Now we’ve glued it all together, along with an interview with Gareth Rein who organised the event, and our own musings on the day, to give a flavour of ResearchED to anyone who hasn’t managed to attend the real thing.

Our grateful thanks to everyone who contributed to this episode, and to ResearchED for inviting us to speak!

Our contributors this episode, in order of appearance:

• Gareth Rein (Headteacher of St Joseph’s RC Primary School, Penarth)
• Dylan Wiliam (Emeritus Professor of educational assessment at UCL, co-author of the seminal Inside the Black Box and AfL guru)
• Mary Myatt (author of The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence)
• David Didau (author of Making Kids Cleverer: A Manifesto for Closing the Advantage Gap and loads of other books)

We also feature a blog post by John Tomsett, headteacher of Huntington School in York, which you can find here.

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Recorded at Cardiff High School on 29th February 2020