In April 2019 I was invited to speak at my local ResearchED at Durrington High School with Lisa-Maria Muller from the Chartered College of teaching. It was only a year ago that I attended my first ever research event so I was delighted to be asked and ever so slightly terrified. The theme of the talk was education myths. To prepare I read lots of excellent articles from Impact, The Chartered College journal and also carried out some additional reading. Lisa-Maria was keen to include learning styles in our presentation which I was initially resistant too as I thought that as a profession we had moved on a long way from that. Then I looked back at my students reflections after their first term of A level and discovered that one of them had referred to her preferred learning style ( I work in a 6th Form College so all of our students are new to us in year twelve). So we did include learning styles along with IT myths and some cognitive load theory.

The great thing about ResearchED is the wide variety of presentations and presenters that take part. I had time in the morning to hear from Emma McCrea who has just written Make Every Maths Lesson Count and Prof Stuart Kime talking about teacher self regulation. It was also great to hear from Phil Stock about his work on the ultimate independent study, so much of his presentation resonated with work we are carrying out with our A level students.

And then, it was our turn. At first it was rather quiet and the the room started to fill up. I think we had around 50 people attend in all but have to admit my attention was rather drawn to Prof Daniel Muijs who is the Deputy Director of Research for Ofsted. It suddenly dawned on me that we were talking about research in front of someone who knew a lot about research. I was proud of not adjusting what I planned to do and felt that we got good audience participation during the session. Some people came up to us at the end and shared how useful that had found it.

So, it turns out that a classroom teacher like me has got something to offer at ResearchED. Overall, it was a really positive experience and I would recommend all teachers to think about participating if they get the chance.