A new way to encourage teachers to try out your product

The Guardian this week carried a story about a simple but brilliant piece of hospital research.  The researchers wanted to know if an incredibly simple modification to what people in hospitals do when working with intravenous drips could cut infection rates.

Please don’t give up on me at this point - there is a real educational issue here - and this is not about some complex medical procedure.  All the researchers instituted was a tick list.  The research set out to prove whether there were less infections when the medical team had a tick list covering all the basics - such as wash your hands, put on the gloves, and so on.

The result of the research was amazing - in a period of 18 months the level of infections dropped by 75%, 1500 people lived who (by the results being obtained before) would have died, and over £100 million was saved in terms of further medical intervention.

All from a simple tick list reminding people to do the obvious.

Now in schools we don’t deal with saving people’s lives, but we do have to deal with public (or in the case of private schools) parents’ money.  Just imagine what impacts we could all make through such tiny changes as this.  

There is just one problem.  While, in the medical sphere, there is a tradition going back hundreds of years of experiment and  research on the job, this is not the case in schools.  Of course I can’t talk about your school, and I’ll be delighted to receive your comments telling me I am wrong, but my experience in general is that very few teachers, administrators and managers actually do any research in schools at all.   The only exception I know about are those people working on M Phils and PhD degrees.

Maybe its because “research” sounds too grand.  But as the tick box story (which is quite real - page 16 Guardian, Feb 23) shows simple ideas can be tried out to see what effect they have as long as the results are measured.  And no one can say, “you can’t do that with children’s futures” - the example we are drawing from was an experiment with people’s lives.

My personal view is that we could all make a huge difference to schools if we just said to ourselves - I wonder if things would work better if we did this….  Let’s try and encourage teachers to treat our products as a test - or indeed let’s offer our products to teachers to test them out, and then get the results back.  

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Tony Attwood

This entry was posted on 26/02/2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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