SCDE Attainment Challenge, (seminar 1): Attitudes and understanding in data-informed decision-making
Channel: SERA - Scottish Educational Research Association
Date: 2021-04-25

Pedagogy in practice – Attitudes and understanding in data-informed decision-making



Seminar Overview

This Seminar is the first in a series drawing on the work of the Scottish Council of Deans of Education Scottish Attainment Challenge Project. https://www.scde.ac.uk/projects/scde-attainment-challenge-project/  The project, which involves eight universities across Scotland, is exploring the effective preparation of early career teachers to work in schools serving communities of high multiple deprivation. The seminar series aims to engage with a wide audience on five focus areas emerging from this work:


Pedagogy in Practice – becoming a teacher
Flourishing and Belonging – an ethic of care
Reframing Schooling – in and of the world
Social Justice – agency and respect
Theory, policy, experience – creating professional space
This first Seminar addresses the focus, under the National Improvement Framework, on early career teachers using data to inform their equity-related practice. Barriers to doing this successfully – relating to attitudes and understanding – appear mirrored by indications of reluctance among early career teachers to embark on numeracy-related interventions, even where their own in-class research highlights this as an issue. Variations in early career teachers’ access to data and their agency in developing alternative means of tracking progress are also discussed.

This relates to the project’s first focus area, Pedagogy in Practice, which considers how students and early career teachers can be best supported to bring equity-related theoretical, social and cultural knowledge to bear on their everyday teaching practice in schools.