The Questions We Keep Returning To

What happens when teachers have the time, support and expertise to investigate the questions that keep emerging in their classrooms? Redlands’ inaugural Action Research pathway explores how teacher-led inquiry can strengthen practice, collaboration and evidence-informed teaching.

There are questions in schools that seem to have a habit of resurfacing.

They appear during a meeting and then disappear beneath the business of the term. They emerge in a corridor conversation, reappear over coffee and return again when a new cohort arrives. Sometimes they relate to a particular year group, a task, a program or an aspect of student learning. Sometimes they are harder to pin down than that. There is simply a sense that something is not working as well as it might.

The challenge, of course, is that schools are places of action.

We are timetable builders, problem solvers, event organisers, lesson planners, curriculum writers, pastoral carers and decision makers. We are rarely short of things to do. The pace of school life rewards responsiveness. We adjust, adapt and move forward. Yet in the process, some of our most important professional questions remain only partially explored.

As one teacher reflected during a recent conversation about the inaugural Redlands Action Research pathway:

“So much of teaching is on the fly. You do these stop-gap measures all the time, and they’re actually time wasters, because you keep trying these half-hearted things that don’t go anywhere.”

It is a feeling many teachers will recognise. Something is not quite working, so we make an adjustment. We try a different resource, rearrange a sequence or introduce another scaffold. Sometimes the change helps. Sometimes it does not. Either way, the term moves on before we have really understood what happened.

The Redlands Action Research pathway began with questions already present in the work of our teachers. One participant saw it as:

“A vehicle for me to get the evidence behind something that I want to change.”

Another described the questions her team kept asking about their Year 7 classes:

“Sometimes I’d walk away questioning myself about these Year 7 lessons, thinking, ‘What’s going on?’”

Conversations within the team revealed that the experience was not confined to one teacher or one classroom.

“We’re all experiencing the same things. So, okay, we’ve got a problem. Let’s all come together and see if we can demystify it.”

Questions about research skills had been sitting with another team for years. Teachers could see that senior students were not always able to research independently or fluently, but the demands of Stage 6 meant that explicit work on those skills was repeatedly pushed aside. Each year, the same concern returned.

Working alongside Associate Professor Janet Dutton from Macquarie University, the teams were able to turn concerns such as these into inquiries. They identified problems emerging from their own practice, read relevant research, developed an intervention and gathered evidence of what followed. The work did not begin with a program to implement or an answer to prove. It began with something teachers genuinely wanted to understand.

Slowing Down: The Role of Action Research in Education

When the first cohort came together to reflect on their experience, they spoke often about time. They did not suddenly have an abundance of it. What changed was the expectation of what they would do with the time provided.

Teachers are used to solving problems quickly. We need to be. In schools, even a complex question can acquire a pressing answer because something has to happen before the next lesson, the next assessment or the next reporting period.

Action research required a different pace. Rather than trying another stop-gap measure and moving on, teams were asked to slow the roll. They had to define the problem carefully, examine what was already known, establish a baseline, decide what evidence they needed and resist reaching a conclusion before they had gathered it.

At times, some participants felt they were ahead of the process. They had identified the problem and already had ideas about what they might do. The research framework kept drawing them back. What exactly were they trying to understand? What assumptions were they making? What evidence would help them know whether a change in practice had made a difference?

One teacher described the opportunity as:

“That perfect nexus of opportunity and a bit of support, a bit of time, a bit of help from an expert that really forced us to confront this thing that we’d wanted to do for a long time.”

There is some honesty in that word forced. It is not difficult for teachers to generate important questions. It is much harder to keep those questions in view once the ordinary work of school gathers pace.

The structure provided a reason to remain with them.

Participants valued Janet’s role in that process. She brought research expertise, but teachers also spoke about her as a critical friend: someone who could sharpen a question, offer feedback and interrupt a team when it moved too quickly towards its first explanation.

The line that made everyone laugh during the reflection was:

“Janet’s coming. We’ve got to do it.”

There was accountability in the partnership, but not a sense that the inquiry had been imposed. One participant was particularly clear that the process had remained teacher-led:

“I never felt like it had been done to me.”

The teachers owned the questions and made decisions about their inquiries. Janet’s contribution was to keep testing the thinking around them.

The cohort also identified where the pathway needs to become stronger. Some participants wanted more explicit teaching of research tools, particularly approaches to data collection and analysis. As one teacher put it, there were moments when they “bumbled along” with what they already understood. If the pathway is to continue, it will need to preserve the agency and conversational quality that teachers valued while building greater confidence in the methods that support credible inquiry.

This is especially important if evidence-informed teaching is to mean more than reading research and applying someone else’s findings. Teachers need access to established evidence, but they also need the confidence and methodological knowledge to investigate what is happening in their own contexts. In action research, teachers are not only consumers of evidence. They learn how to generate and interpret it.

Learning Through Collaboration and Classroom Observation

The other idea that kept surfacing in the reflection was collaboration. Not collaboration as a scheduled meeting or shared document, but the experience of seeing how colleagues think and work.

One teacher described observing a colleague’s class:

“It was nice being in there and seeing how good your peers are.”

Another said:

“This makes me curious about what other people are doing, because we’re so isolated in terms of our practice.”

Schools are full of professional expertise, but much of it remains surprisingly difficult to see. Teachers may exchange resources or discuss students, yet rarely witness the small decisions another teacher makes across a lesson: how they introduce an idea, respond to uncertainty, change direction, gather evidence of understanding or draw a student back into the work.

The action research teams spent time in one another’s classrooms. They observed lessons, compared experiences and discussed what they were noticing. A question that might initially have felt like an individual difficulty became something colleagues could examine together. They were not simply sharing solutions. They were making their reasoning available to one another.

This changed the nature of the professional conversation. Teachers saw the strengths of their colleagues more clearly. They became interested in what was happening elsewhere in the school. Similarities began to emerge across subjects and year groups, even where the individual inquiries were quite different.

The completed projects will inform changes to practice, and several teams are already thinking about what they want to investigate next. But the first year of Action Research at Redlands has also shown us something about the conditions in which teachers learn well.

Building a Culture of Evidence-Informed Teaching

Teachers need serious questions, not predetermined answers. They need research expertise and practical support. They need colleagues who will think alongside them. Above all, they need the expectation that not every problem has to be met with an immediate solution.

The questions have not disappeared. They will continue to surface in classrooms, meetings and conversations across the school.

We are getting better at not letting them disappear beneath the business of the term.

Liz Green
Director of Learning and Growth