Theory to Practice

In this episode of The Learning Curve, host Dr. Shannon Babbie joins Dr. Archie Graham to discuss the transition from "Theory to Practice". As a senior lecturer and Director of the Postgraduate Research Programme, Dr. Graham explains how theory serves as a practical "tool" for solving real-world classroom problems rather than just an academic concept.

The discussion explores the Florian and Black-Hawkins framework for participation and an organizing grid designed to manage classroom complexity through social, cognitive, and linguistic lenses. Dr. Graham also highlights his research on preparing teachers for high-poverty contexts and his current project reimagining global teacher preparation. Learn why research-active universities are essential for understanding knowledge production and how theory helps new educators navigate the "complexity of the classroom"

What is The Learning Curve?

The Learning Curve Podcast, a feature of the School of Education at University of Aberdeen.

Welcome to The Learning Curve, the official podcast of the University of Aberdeen’s School of Education. Join us as we go beyond the syllabus to explore the bold ideas, high-impact research, and personal ambitions of our staff, students, and leaders.

Every episode features candid conversations with experts in areas ranging from Early Years Education and Outdoor Learning to Inclusive Practice and Leadership Development. Whether you’re a prospective student seeking career paths, a teacher looking for CPD, or an academic tracking the latest insights in STEM and Digital Pedagogy, The Learning Curve is essential listening.

Subscribe now to connect with a world-class educational community and discover what makes the future of learning happen in Aberdeen.

The Learning Curve
Season 1, Episode 3: Theory to Practice

Host: Dr Shannon Babbie: The theme for season one is The Future of Education. So far, we've explored the history of the School of Education and the role of technology. Today, we're bringing it all together by looking at how the research we've been discussing actually makes a difference in the classroom. Joining me today is Dr Archie Graham. Thanks for being here.
Dr Archie Graham: Thanks for the invitation, Shannon. It's really good to be here,
Shannon: Archie, please explain to the listeners who you are and what you do here at the university.
Archie: My name is Dr Archie Graham. I'm a senior lecturer in the School of Education. I'm also the Director of the School of Education Postgraduate Research Programme; I lead the School of Education teacher Preparation Research Group, and I'm co-lead with for the new School of Education Network on Learning, Pedagogy and Professional Practice.
My undergraduate work is within the initial teacher education. I spend a lot of time preparing teachers how to teach maths in the primary school, and teaching about inclusion from a human rights perspective. I also have a role in assessing student teacher student practicum. My current research centres on preparing student teachers for working in schools located in high poverty contexts.
Shannon: Archie. The title of this episode is From Theory to Practice. Could you start by telling us what that phrase means to you in the context of your work here at the School of Education?
Archie: Yeah. Great question, Shannon. And an important question. Firstly, there are many interpretations of what theory means. There's a great paper by a Gary Thomas from 2011. It can be found on the website. In that paper, Thomas highlights the multiple meanings of Theory and he asks a really important question: “Is theory a product or is it a tool?” And in a lot of my work, I use the idea of theory as a tool. So I'll give you some examples of what I mean by that.
So when I'm working with my undergraduate students, I try to help them to see theory as tools for thinking with, and tools for solving, problems of practice. So theory becomes a very practical thing, which is often misunderstood by students. Many students think, you know, theory is something we do at university, and practice is something that happens out in schools. But trying to just to show them that actually a lot of what we're teaching them in the university classroom is very practically orientated, is a big part of what I try to do.
So, just by way of illustration, when we're teaching students to plan for the inclusion of all children when they're out in school, experience one of the theoretical models that I like to start them off with is Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011) framework for participation. And in this framework there are four concepts. These are diversity, access, collaboration and achievement. Now, diversity is recognizing that all the kids in the class are different. You'd be hard pressed to find a student that doesn't know that. The point is, it's not enough to know you've got to be able to do something about it.
So, if you're recognizing diversity at the start of a lesson, then you're trying to do something about it. So, that's where Access kicks in. Concept of access. Again, it's quite slippery because as student teachers become more skilled, their interpretation of what access means becomes more sophisticated. But they have to start somewhere. So, as they begin to think about access, the question I encourage them to ask themselves is, “How do all these diverse kids access the planned learning at an appropriate level of challenge?”
And that becomes really important question to get them all thinking. That then leads us into the concept of collaboration. And we know that we learn in social and cultural environments. Therefore, the whole concept of collaboration is around who gets to learn with whom, and under what conditions, so that it's really starting to tend to the relational nature of the classroom space. And, the final concept there is Achievement. And Achievement is much broader than Attainment; it encapsulates attainment, but it goes much broader.
I mentioned that one of the things I teach is how to teach maths in the primary school classroom. And one of the messages we give our students is that to assess a child in maths, you need to listen to what they're saying, and you need to observe them. It's not about taking in the jotters or the worksheets and marking those. It's what the kids are saying and what they're doing. So, thinking about achievement: If a child is explaining how they got their answer, but maybe they got the answer wrong, we can really celebrate their capacity and their willingness to share with us, because that allows us, as the teacher to help them. So, that would be an example of where the emphasis wasn't so much on the correct answer, it was on the child articulating and sharing that.
Now, we've got those four concepts. I've come from a theoretical perspective and we have to operationalize them. So that's where we couple that with or encourage them with an organising grid. And that grid again comes from twenty years ago and it was done by the Scottish Executive as it was then in 2005. And it was to do with learning in two plus languages, ensuring the effect of inclusion of bilingual animals. But what it did and what I think it becomes really helpful for operationalizing. Framework for participation. Is it disaggregates the complexity of the classroom into categories of. The social, the cognitive and the linguistic.
So if you imagine a matrix or a grid where you've got Social, Cognitive and Linguistic down the left hand side, And then to the right of that, Your first column is ‘What do the children bring the learning experience?’ The next column asks, ‘What are the demands of the task?’ And the third column asks, ‘What's the additional support you're going to put in place here?’
What do the children bring the learning experience? What are the demands of the task? What's the additional support you're going to put in place here?
Social
Cognitive
Linguistic

So when you start to think about that, you take the first one in terms of, ‘What the social demands of the task you get the student teachers to think about?’ Here's the task. ‘What's the learning I want to develop here?’ ‘So what's the social elements of that?’ And it could be anything from, ‘Do the children have to work together.? Do they have to take turns? Do they have to work on their own?’ You can think of lots of different social configurations. And then they're asking themselves, ‘What are the kids bringing to that?’ And so you get a situation where they might know that someone likes to dominate in a group, or someone won't participate, you know, unless they're sitting beside their friend or something like that. So, they compare and contrast the demands of the task with the social. And then that helps them work out what additional support they'll put in place.
Similarly, at the cognitive level, they start to think about ‘What are the demands of the task?’ So if we use an example from maths, it might be that the Learning Intention is to support the children to develop non-count-by-one strategies. So, an example of that would be ‘four add three’ okay. So, it's the ability to hold four in your head and count on three. That's a non-count-by-one strategy, as opposed to counting: ‘one, two, three, four;’ ‘one, two, three;’ ‘one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.’ So, that would be the learning.
So, they then they just look at their assessment of the children. ‘What are they bringing in the compare and contrast?’ Now this is where Access starts to kick in, I mentioned that. So, they're looking at that to then think about, ‘How do they ensure that all the children are going to have access to that planned learning at an appropriate level of challenge?’ because some kids will need to be challenged more; others will need the task simplified so that they can participate, and others will probably have got it quite right. So, they're asking those questions all the time, in terms of how Access is kicking in.
They might have to then draw on Collaboration because they might think, ‘Well, actually, a potential additional support here is to regroup the children.’ Or perhaps they want some of the children to come and work with them as the teacher. So it's going back to that relational thing. ‘Who works with whom, and under what conditions?’ That could be an element of the additional support that goes in place there. And, then, if you take the linguistic demands, now there are two parts in the early stages. It's recognising that the instructional language around what to do, but, there's also the content language as well.
So, again, we're asking the students to think about what are the children bringing this vocabulary and understanding of what needs to be done. Compare and contrast. So they begin to operationalize the diversity that access to collaboration. And then as they're putting that into practice, they are then using the concept of Achievement to think about what do they want to privilege in terms of their classroom ethos? Do they want to privilege people talk and celebrating that? Or are they going to be more reductive? So we're trying to get them to be more expansive in that particular context.
So in that example there, you see Theory coming in a very practical way of reducing the degrees of freedom around the complexity of classroom as a place to start. And then, what happens is over time, the students realize the limitations of that because that's just a starting point. And, so, if we go back to the, ‘How do you ensure all children are being challenged at an appropriate level of challenge?’ After a while, the students begin to realize the importance of questioning.
So, one of the things (from an inclusive perspective) we're trying to do is not to stigmatize and marginalize children. We would like the children, as a class community, to all be on the same topic; albeit they could be different levels of challenge within that topic, but nobody's marginalized from the class discussion. They can all contribute by doing something else. So, that idea about realizing the limitations of that. They might think, well, they look to something like Bloom's Taxonomy, and all of a sudden they've now got another tool. So, they bought that one, and then they might realize, ‘Well, I need to understand collaboration more.’ So they start to look at more Theory. So all of a sudden the toolkit starts to grow and develop, and it becomes a very practical set of tools to get them up and running.
And there are similar things for master's level teaching and for doctoral teaching, where again, the theory becomes tools for thinking. It could be to help with data analysis or to help to make sense of a review of literature and of course, a master's thesis or a doctoral thesis. There will also be the other side of the coin where it becomes knowledge production. But primarily for me, the notion of theory to practice is a practical one.
Shannon: Aberdeen School of Education has a reputation for research that directly impacts teaching methods. What are some examples of this, and how do you ensure that your findings are not just published, but actually used by teachers in the field?
Archie: So, as mentioned previously, much of my current research centres on the preparation of student teachers for teaching in schools located in high poverty contexts, or in schools where there is a high percentage of the pupils who are from low SIMD areas, particularly SIMD one to four.
So, in that group, we research student teachers’ and probationer teachers’ experiences of practicum and induction year. So, what we're particularly interested in is in trying to find out what's possible to become an inclusive teacher and inclusive practitioner. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot a lot of experience required. It's very nuanced. And while students will buy into that quite quickly, it can be overwhelming for them to think about how do they progress to that stage.
So our work has been to try to find a pathway through that for them, by looking at student teachers who are undergoing practicum school placement in a high poverty context, where the school is located, and to go into the classrooms, observe what's happening there, interview them to find out what types of inclusive strategies they are able to operationalize at that stage in their career. So we're getting concrete examples of what's possible. Similarly with the probationary year. So in Scotland we have what's called induction year. And that's where the student teachers who have exited initial teacher education go into their one year occupation. And in that setting we've looked to see what was possible there.
So again, the idea was if we can see what probationer teachers are able to do, we can work backwards and feed that into our program. So from those types of studies, we've collated our findings. We've had them published, but other colleagues who teach on IT programmes then use that information to feed that back into the programme, so that there's a relationship between the work that we're doing directly impacting on our teaching, and it just helps us to bring to life and show a possible pathway. Because if we've got examples of student teachers who are able to enact inclusive strategies in a particular setting, then there's no reason why any of our other students at that stage can't do that as well. And similarly with your examples that come from there, that's a really important element of what we do, is just trying to research and support our students to become inclusive teachers.
Shannon: Thinking about our listeners who are prospective students, why is it so important to choose a university where research is directly connected to teaching and practice? In other words, how does this benefit students in their own educational journey?
Archie: Well, that's another great question, Shannon. And for me, this question really speaks to the production of knowledge. When students work with staff who are research active or who are undertaking scholarly work. The students can benefit from learning about how knowledge is produced. And so the university is a site of knowledge production through research activity. But there's also members of staff who don't publish papers, but they engage in a lot of scholarly work and participate in teams as well.
So one of the things that comes out of that is really understanding how knowledge is reduced. So everything from how do you undertake a review of literature, but how do you do that and how do you do it in a meaningful way, in a robust way? And how do you make sense of it? How do you progress from that to maybe developing a research question? What is a research question? What does that look like? And it's more nuanced than just a qualitative research question or a quantitative research question. There's a lot of nuance that goes into that. And research active staff who are involved in that and are working with colleagues and then giving feedback to students who are writing assignments or undertaking projects.
You start to see a really beneficial relationship between that. I work with a number of colleagues around research capacity building within the school, and often you get anecdotal things coming back saying, oh, I've just been using that in my teaching to give feedback to the students so they're able to really get underneath that level of knowledge production and the nuances within it. And that takes a long time and it takes a lot of conversation to build that up. But I think if you're in a research active university, then that's the type of benefits that it can provide for students.
Shannon: Archie, what kind of exciting projects are you focusing on right now?
Archie: I'm currently working with a group of colleagues on a really interesting project reimagining teaching teacher preparation for schools located in high poverty contexts globally, in schools located in high poverty contexts often face systemic challenges limited resources, high teacher turnover. Pupils experience compounded disadvantage. It's recognised internationally, and if teacher preparation ignores this reality, it just risks reproducing inequality rather than addressing it. And so our project is a desk based project.
We've looked at qualitative, empirical research studies across the globe to try and find out one, how these different jurisdictions conceptualize poverty and disadvantage, and then what the privilege in terms of what they focus on teacher preparation, and then the types of topics they then enact for research and publish. You end up with a very disparate view of or different things. Get privileged into different parts of the world. So we're currently working with that, with a view to synthesizing that, to create a framework that helps us to understand all the nuances in a more holistic view than looking at individual studies. It just gives us a broader picture. And through that, then what we're hoping to do is then reimagine if we can learn from everyone else and what's happening there. Does that start to highlight gaps, or does it highlight silences, or does it suggest that we can synthesize things in a different way? That's what that project is all about just now. It's been really engaging and really interesting.
Shannon: I would love to know what you wish I had asked you today, and what the answer to that question would have been.
Archie: I'm not sure. Perhaps if you'd asked me how theory helps in practice. Okay, my answer would have been that the right theory helps to reduce the degrees of freedom to enable student teachers to focus on what's important at specific moment in time. So the complexity of the classroom environment is such that many student teachers can be overwhelmed in the early stages of teaching journey, and a good theory helps key aspects of practice to stand out and other aspects to recede into the background, making the situation or the dilemma of practice more manageable for the student. So I hope our students can see the practical application of theory, and will continue to engage with more theory as they realize its potential as a tool to respond to problems of practice.
Shannon: And that's a perfect note to end on. Today, you heard how the School of Education's research is making a direct impact on the classroom and shaping teaching methods. Thank you for joining me today to discuss this. That's great. Really enjoyed the opportunity to be here.
Archie: Thanks, Shannon, and thank you for listening.
Shannon: Next week, we'll begin a new section of our season focusing on the specialized areas of learning here at the University of Aberdeen. You won't want to miss it. So until next time, keep learning.