Researcher Spotlight: Alex and Stephen Campbell

How do educators at Pymble bridge the gap between pedagogical research and classroom practice? The Pymble Institute supports teachers using evidence to support the decisions they make about teaching and learning within their classrooms. We also recognise that there is value in having such a diverse staff body, as our teaching staff bring research experience from both Australia and from other international contexts, in turn enriching the educational experience of our students.

In the next profile in this series, meet Alex and Stephen who, whilst working in the UK, started considering how to use research to guide whole-school decisions around pedagogy and school culture, which were embedded over time.

Alex Campbell is an English teacher at Pymble Ladies College, joining our staff in 2024. She is an experienced educational leader who believes that a culture of deliberate practice, reflection and collaboration in schools ensures that students achieve the very best outcomes. She seeks to build resilience in her pupils, along with their ability to think both independently and collaboratively.

Stephen Campbell is the College’s Chief Strategy Officer. He joined us in 2024, coming from England and a career in state, independent and international education. Stephen is a member of the Senior Executive team. He believes in the power of education as a mechanism for making the world a better place.

As part of their research, they identified that the development of oracy, the process of learning to talk and learning through talk, would be a high-impact intervention that would support both the academic progress and the wellbeing of students. Additionally, they also found that effective oracy interventions have a disproportionately high impact on students whose voices might otherwise be minoritised, a significant point to consider in the context of girls’ education.

Between 2020 and 2023, Alex and Stephen led a change management process that sought to embed a culture of oracy within classrooms. Their intention was to create dialogic spaces in which all student voices were heard, and in which understanding was developed and consolidated through structured discussion.

In order to facilitate such whole-school change, they turned to academic research to help inform their decisions. Working alongside academics from Cambridge University who had 30 years of research experience in this area, they built a compelling case for the implementation of oracy, seeking to convince teachers that this was a mechanism that was worth investing in, and something that could change their teacher beliefs.

Having created a strong belief in the power of oracy, the next phase of implementation saw a structured, coherent building of knowledge across the teaching staff, such that all teachers understood, and could implement, highly effective classroom practice that developed the voices of learners in their classrooms.

Finally, Alex and Stephen leveraged the power of action-research methods to structure the intentional practice of oracy techniques across the teaching staff. They invited teachers to work in groups of three to undertake collaborative projects to explore the power of oracy in the classroom. This mechanism empowered teachers to form their own enquiry questions and develop their own approaches to deploying the oracy techniques that they had been learning about.

Alex and Stephen shared their research and their process of strategic change at the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools Symposium in Auckland, New Zealand, and at the AISNSW Evidence Institute Conference in Sydney this year.

Interested readers can connect with Alex and Stephen through the Pymble Institute at pymbleinstitute@pymblelc.nsw.edu.au. Readers can also subscribe to the free weekly newsletter that Alex and Stephen publish, in which all things oracy-related are discussed, by clicking here.

Pymble staff at the ICGS Conference in Auckland: Angela Thorne, Stephen Campbell, Alex Campbell, and Meagan Bartlett.