Monday 7 October 2013

Researcher or teacher?

Dear blog, 

Sorry I haven't written much recently, I've been busy getting married. 

Around this time last year I had a piece in Modern English Teacher. About six months later Simon Andrewes wrote a critical response to my piece (I don't think it's online though you can see another of his articles here.) I'm pleased to announce that my response to his response is out in MET today. I'll probably put it up on the site later this year but this is just a short post with a couple of points.

First is a big thank you to Dave Francis who published the original article and the follow up. I don't know if I would have continued with this blog if it hadn't been for him. He recently told me he's resigning as the editor of MET and that October 2013 was his final issue. Thanks for all your hard work Dave!

Second is a quick point relating to the article. One of the themes is whether it's true in education that 'researchers are researchers and teachers are teachers and never the twain will meet.' It's an issue I touched on earlier in the year

Anyway, I'm currently writing a piece on student feedback for BALEAP in Oxford Brookes this year and during the research I came across this rather interesting paper. The authors attempted to find out if being a good researcher was in any way linked to being a good teacher. What's interesting is that they come at the research from a different angle, -namely, they were trying to discover if the myth of "good researcher = good teacher". I personally didn't know this a myth and always tended to hear the opposite in TEFL circles (including Andrewes article) namely researchers are clueless about teaching. 

As it turns out the researchers managed to find no relationship between being a good teacher and being a good researcher. some excellent teachers sucked at research and some poor researchers were also poor teachers and vice-versa. This result really shouldn't surprise us. A thoughtful and intelligent teacher can make a thoughtful and intelligent researcher or they may just be awful.  

Some musicians can also write songs, -some can't and some folks can neither play an instrument nor write songs. Surely no one would be surprised by this so why does the odd myth of the teachers and researchers being different species persist?