At a recent University of Bedford Conference the Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) were asked about questions that they would like to see researched. A burning question which emerged was related to the speaker Gary Wilson’s delivery about boy friendly learning and asked “How can we utilise a “Lad Culture” within the classroom?

Others looked at “How would an early start to learning benefit children of all ages in that reflective learning works best at this time?” Also, “How does silence impact on learning to consolidate memory capacity in a knowledge rich curriculum?”

The premise for encouraging these questions among NQTs and among staff in our Trust Schools is to build up a Reflective Question Forum to share across the Trust.

Already this is in place under the leadership of Roisin Doran, Head of Maths at St Thomas More Secondary School as a Research Group. The hope is to generate learning questions among the staff and to encourage very small research grants to provide a lens for school development. These would culminate in a Research and Development Evening with a written research paper of no longer than 2 sides of A4.

This project is being sponsored by The University of Bedfordshire where there will be some training in Research Methodology, it is hoped that our classrooms can be “Living Labs”. In addition to this, the Trust will be reviewing the work of the Forest School Initiative to look at whether this would provide a different learning experience for our students.

If you would like to find out more or would like to contribute, please get in touch, we would love to hear from you!