Cross-school ‘close-to-practice’ action research, system leadership and local civic partnership re-engineering an inner-city learning community

Peter Dudley,Helen Bruckdorfer,Martin Pratt,Jon Abbey,Jean Lang,Christine Gilbert

doi:10.14324/lre.18.3.05

Peter Dudley, Helen Bruckdorfer + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.14324/lre.18.3.05

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Abstract

This article presents two sequential case reports of how 60 schools in the London Borough of Camden used action research in three phases of development of their local school system reform, from a traditional council-led, top-down model of centrally based professional development and monitoring of schools, to one that is schools-led and ‘bottom-up’ in nature, but still in close partnership with its local council and community. The article uses a sociocultural lens through which to view this journey of self-reform, tracking change through three evolutions of the sociocultural model as professional learning becomes situated in classrooms and between schools in Camden, as motivations to develop and change become increasingly intrinsic and less driven by fear of failure or the consequences of failure. Of critical importance is the feedback-rich context created by adoption of enquiry- and coaching-based learning models at classroom, organizational and system levels. This both fuels and is fuelled by the strategic collaboration of head teachers and by system leadership also provided by middle leaders, whose increased cross-school agency builds improvement capacity and collaborative capital. The article does not report on the action research alone: unlike many accounts of action research for change, this account provides a narrative backdrop in which to locate both scientific and system developments. This is provided through three short vignettes that place the changes reported in a societal, political and community context, without whose energetic actors (in the form of local political and community leaders and school governors) the local ‘civic governance’ so strongly behind these reforms, would not have existed.

Highlights

This article seeks to do more than report an action research project
What we report here are two snapshots of a community of 60 schools in the inner London Borough of collaborative educational ecosystem in a defined locality (Camden)
Findings from the London Schools Excellence Fund (LSEF) mathematics project about the importance of exploratory talk in helping students to develop mathematical thinking had prompted widened interest among Camden schools in Mercer’s (2000) work on the power of ‘oracy’ to help children use talk effectively to communicate orally, to think and, as a result, to learn. (Professor Neil Mercer had been a member of the 2013–15 Cambridge team.)

Summary

Introduction

This article seeks to do more than report an action research project. It seeks to report on the role played by three consecutive programmes of cross-school, close-topractice uses of action research (Wyse et al, 2018) during the self-reform process of school and community-led educational development in the inner London Borough of Camden.Cross-school ‘close-to-practice’ action research, system leadership and local civic partnership 391All research happens in a context that is inevitably human and societal. This article seeks to do more than report an action research project. Theory (and the new knowledge theory establishes) suggest that when it is discovered that elements come together in ways that repeatedly change a prior reality to a new one, this happens as a result of some underlying nature in the situation under investigation. These underlying natures, or ‘lenses’ as they are sometimes called, acquire theoretical names with which social researchers are familiar, such as sociocultural learning theory, cultural historical learning theory or complexity theory

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