From the Director of the Pymble Institute
With the 2025 school year underway, I am sure you are also in the throes of new projects and initiatives. It’s made me think about the role of researchers in schools and how we know what to research and how to do it.
For colleagues embarking on action research in 2025 you will draw from a question of practice, and for those in the midst of formal research you’ll know that the process of developing a research question is an ongoing conversation between student and supervisor. But what of the school-based researcher investigating school-based initiatives? How do we research new initiatives in schools?
I’d like to share a few tips which I’ve learnt from some of the Pymble Institute’s very own projects. These are based on trial and error because there have been times we haven’t got it right and we’ve learnt so much! We’d love to share these with colleagues who find themselves in the same position so you can have a head start.
Tip #1: Welcome the unknown
One of the most challenging, and beautiful, aspects of educational research is the act of stepping into a project with an open mind. This is where the educator in you must genuinely admit to literally not knowing what to do and not knowing what will be found. It is often an uncomfortable place for educators who are used to problem-solving at speed. Questions you may have include:
What is the question? What do we want to achieve? How long will it take? What will the research be used for?
These are all great questions but cannot always be answered as both the initiative and the research plan get underway. You may be working in the team responsible for the project, and you for the research as well, and some separation may help. Embracing the uncertainty can feel disconcerting when everyone in the team wants the project to succeed, but you-as-researcher will bring so much more by remaining objective and curious, as well.
Tip #2: Being present at the start
Researchers in schools are in an enviable position to hear about projects from their earliest stages. This may be via staff briefings, calls for volunteers or announcements in school newsletters. Periodic meetings with key senior staff can also surface projects they are working on before official announcements are made. If your spidey senses are tingling, you can always ask whether there is interest in exploring whether the project would benefit from being researched from ground level.
The Pymble Wise Phone project was one example of this (you can find more information here). Walking alongside colleagues initiating the project saw us brainstorming the pros and cons, attending staff meetings where information was shared, collecting parent communications and helping out at the events where parents were given the phones and their daughters handed their old phones to their parents to collect the Wise Phone. By joining planning sessions and offering an extra hand, trust-based relationships are built between researchers and colleagues. This insider view is invaluable for understanding how and why plans may change at the last moment and why ‘it depends’ is often a very truthful answer to the researcher’s question. Researchers gain a more holistic understanding and can, therefore, help build momentum for the best possible outcomes.
Tip #3 Look in other places for insights
The implementation team will be focused on making progress towards their goal and, while they will have explored many inputs at the beginning, once their course is set they probably won’t have time to keep exploring alternative approaches. This happened recently with Pymble’s Wise Phone project which was scoped out and confirmed at the most senior levels. The question of what other schools were doing with their phone policies and practices was highly relevant in the early stages, but the time came when the implementation team needed to focus on the confirmed path.
Researchers, however, can continue exploring the territory and investigating what other schools are doing to respond to the same challenge – even though our own school’s response was well underway. We recently attended an excellent online conference with The Heads Conference, United Kingdom, where speakers brought fresh eyes to the question of, ‘What is the place of smartphones in schools?’ Although we had our own ‘answer’, as expressed in our Wise Phone initiative, it was invaluable to listen to academics and educators discussing the topic. This brought new resources to our awareness and helped spotlight factors in our school’s response which we had taken for granted due to familiarity.
The journey of researching new initiatives is both exciting and humbling. We don’t know exactly how Wise Phones – or any other project – will pan out, but that’s what makes research so vital. By honouring the ‘not knowing’, embedding ourselves early in the life cycle of new ideas and seeking knowledge beyond our own context, we’re committed to playing a part in contributing to learning initiatives that can make a difference in education.
