Don’t reinvent the wheel: Write a one-page research summary
This 1-hour activity will save you a WORLD of pain
I recently wrote a miniseries of four posts on how to choose your focus when everything feels like a priority. Here’s a poster that captures the key points:
In this post, let’s assume you’ve chosen your focus. You’ve identified a gap you want to close and started thinking about possible strategies. Before we go any further, there’s a crucial question to ask:
What is already known about this issue?
If you want to think critically and creatively about something, it helps to know your onions. After all, knowledge is the stuff we think with. So before you get stuck into the ‘how’, it pays to spend some time on the ‘what’.
This post will show you how to produce a one-page summary of what’s known about your chosen area of focus – including what strategies are out there and what might help improve outcomes. There are two big reasons to do this:
You’re more likely to succeed. You’ll be making decisions from a more informed position. Why reinvent the wheel when the truth is (probably) already out there?
You’ll help your colleagues get up to speed. A one-page research summary is a powerful onboarding tool, especially in schools where staff turnover is high. With a clear, shared understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve and the strategy you’re using to do so, everyone will be pulling in the same direction.
Three guiding principles
As you go about building your knowledge base, three principles will help you along the way:
Park your hunches (for now)
Adopt a scout mindset
Spread the load
Let’s look at each in turn.
1. Park your hunches (for now)
In education, there are countless ideas flying around about ‘what works’. But here’s the problem: what works is a bad question.
Nothing works everywhere. And everything works somewhere. You could stand at the front of a classroom reading from a textbook in a monotone and still – somehow – some pupils would learn something.
It all depends on what you mean by ‘works’. Take Tom Sherrington’s reflection on his best-ever GCSE results:
“My best ever GCSE results […] came after a mad cramming dash to the finish in a reduced-time situation where every lesson featured past paper questions. Teaching to the test to the max. It worked. A*s galore. Physics take-up at A-level – not good. Did they enjoy it? No. Were they better at physics? No.” 1
So, did it ‘work’? If you measure success by exam results, absolutely. But if you care about A-level take-up, enjoyment, or deep understanding – not so much.
Even if you do equate ‘works’ with ‘better exam results’, we still have a problem: what works in one context often doesn’t work in another. As Kirschner and Surma (2020) remind us:
“What works for one teacher may not work for another because teachers differ qualitatively... What works in a lesson today won’t necessarily work in the same lesson this afternoon, tomorrow or in three months.” 2
All of which means: if you’ve already got a preferred intervention in mind – a reading scheme, coaching model, or peer tutoring programme – put it to one side for now. Avoid becoming a ‘hammer in search of a nail’.
Instead, commit to finding out what’s already known. And that means shifting into a different mindset.
2. Adopt a scout mindset
In her brilliant book The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef contrasts two ways of thinking:
Soldier mindset: motivated reasoning, defending what you already believe
Scout mindset: truth-seeking, trying to see the world as it really is
The scout’s job is to map the terrain – to find the water supply, locate the enemy, and report back what’s actually there, not what they want to find.
Galef defines a scout mindset as:
“The motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.” 3
Soldier mindset isn’t always bad – it can bring comfort, identity, and belonging. But when we’re trying to make sense of a complex issue, it’s not helpful to be stuck defending our prior beliefs. We need to remain curious, open-minded, and alert to the limits of our knowledge.
Here are some practical ways to adopt a scout mindset in your school improvement work:
3. Spread the load
If you tried to read all the education research published in a single year, you’d be crushed under a stack of paper twice the height of the Shard. The sheer volume of research is overwhelming – and that’s before you factor in books, grey literature, blogs, and social media.
That’s why your slice team needs to work smart. The key is to spread the load. Each person does a little, so together you achieve a lot.
Here’s how.
Exercise: The one-hour lit review
This is a brilliant way to produce a research summary without burning out. Each team member commits one hour. Here’s how to use it:
Step 1 (10 min) – Search a range of sources:
ERIC, Google Scholar
EEF guidance reports
News sites like Schools Week, TES
Social media searches
Open a new tab for anything that looks promising.
Step 2 (20 min) – Skim-read and narrow it down:
Close irrelevant tabs
Keep three articles per person
Step 3 (3x10 min) – Summarise your top three articles:
3 bullet points each
Include useful quotes or stats
If six people do this, that’s 18 papers summarised in one hour. Not bad.
Next time you meet, go round the table and share findings. Use questions like:
What is known about the problem we’re trying to solve?
What approaches have others tried?
What worked? What didn’t? Why?
What’s controversial? What’s agreed on?
How strong is the evidence base?
From this, draft a one-page research summary. Then share it with colleagues across the school. Use it as part of your onboarding process. Most importantly, include this scout mindset caveat:
This is a summary of our current thinking, based on the available evidence. Should new evidence come to light, we’ll update the summary accordingly.
Final thoughts
If you want to make change stick, you need to build it on solid ground. That means resisting the urge to rush in with your favourite strategy, and instead doing the slow, steady work of building a shared understanding of what’s known.
So, park your hunches, get into scout mode, and spread the load.
Because the truth is (probably) out there. You just need to go and find it.
Sherrington, T. (2013). Some Knowledge-Skills Interplay. Teacherhead. Retrieved from: https://teacherhead.com/2013/07/02/some-knowledge-skills-interplay.
Kirschner, P. & Surma, T. (2020). Editorial: Evidence-informed pedagogy. Impact (10): Autumn. Retrieved from: https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/ evidence-informed-pedagogy.
Galef, J. (2021) The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. Piatkus.
