Unlearning and Relearning from Medical Education Research: Teacher Education Research in the Pursuit of Teacher Professionalism

Abstract

Educational researchers have increasingly paid attention to how practitioners can access and utilize research knowledge, but the field still has been unable to create a research tradition and corresponding diffusion model that directly and uniformly influences teachers' practice. One reason for this is the contested status of teaching as a profession and the competing interests, as well as clashing research assumptions, about knowledge in education. This article explores the field of medical education research to understand, from a comparative approach, how members of an established profession use research knowledge to increase expert practitioner skill. Based on a comparison that considers the fundamental differences in education and medicine, the article calls for the unification of a scholarly community that provides tangible theory and evidence that can be explicitly used by professors of education, student teacher supervisors, instructional coaches, professional development providers, and teachers to guide their daily work practices.

Conceptualizing school leadership in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cultures: Demarcating challenges for research

“…The implications of the above discussion for how we conceptualize educational leadership research in the region are many, but in this discussion we shall focus on just three—the dangers of policy borrowing (Harris, Jones and Adams, 2016); the need for translational research (Purinton, 2012); and a warning that researchers should be self-aware of how they themselves are being nudged (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009).…”

“…There is an acknowledged, international need for more translational research in education, research which has a direct and clearly demarcated impact on recommendations for educational practice (Purinton, 2012). We use this term to distinguish the challenge of putting theory to use in context (translation) from the challenge of taking applications from one context and using them in another (transferability).…”