A beginners path to reading educational research

How I started, lists of my favourite journals and best papers from last year

Apr 01, 2024

A clueless School Leader steps into the intimidating world of Educational Researchers

One of my personal development goals last year was to read more educational research.

After a decade of reading blog posts, books and reports, I decided it was time to take the plunge and go straight to the source myself.

I was pretty clueless about how to access educational research - Where do I get it? How do I read it? What will I do with it?

If you are like me,
a school leader/ teacher who is clueless about navigating the world of educational research
but also very keen to tap into high quality scholarly research,
then this blogpost is for you!

This post has
- A beginners advice on getting started
- A beginners list: my most-valued journals
- A beginners list: my favourite articles from 2023-2024

A beginners advice on getting started

Here is what I did:

Goal:

In Jan 2023, I made a goal - I would read 100 educational research papers by the end of the year.

Searching: How do you find the research?
1. I randomly searched for international educational journals and subscribed to many, many journal alerts. I did not know which ones were great (though I did know that the higher the journal ‘impact factor’, the stronger the reputation).
2. My email inbox was flooded with journal alerts. I put them into a folder for reading at some point.
Reading: Making the time and taking the effort
1. I decided to wake up 30 mins earlier every day and read just one paper each day. This is me channeling ‘Atomic Habits’ and making it doable.
2. I could not access all the papers, so I read most of the ‘Open access’ ones and if I really wanted one of the others I would write to my research team to see if they could help me access this. (When I got into the Klingenstein Heads of School Program I got Columbia University Library Access back for a year woohoo so now I can access all papers)
3. Then I just read. Some papers inspired me, even though I couldn’t be sure that I was interpreting the papers correctly. Many papers felt like greek to me. I googled and chatGPT’ed my way through many interpretations. I was genuinely curious to learn and I think this helped me overcome the effort that I needed early on.
Capturing: Keeping the good stuff so you can come back to it
1. After about a month of doing this, I realized which papers were useful to me. As a practitioner I found myself going to (a) the reviews - for good mental-models (b) similar contexts - If there was a paper from India or similar asian context I read it, though there were very few) (c) area of interest - I read areas that I was interested in more thoroughly.
2. After 2 weeks I realized I should capture the good papers somewhere, so I created a google sheet and started to populate it with links to the good papers - link, title, name of journal, publish data and summary or key take-aways.
3. As my list grew, I found I needed to further organize my papers in order to be able to find what I was looking for at a later time. So I created tabs for different purposes - some tabs for specific school teams and some for personal use like my blogs.
  My google sheet for organizing my reading
Sharing: Sharing learning can motivate you to do more
1. I found it useful to take good articles to our learning communities in school or summarize a few for my blog (not as many as I’d like though). When I share my learning with more people it makes my investment in learning more impactful and motivates me to stay consistent or do more.
Iterating and Sustaining: Turning an experiment into a regular habit
1. Over the year, I found more efficient ways to read journals. I also realized which journals were my favourites and which kinds of papers I preferred.
2. Also, the journals themselves started sending me recommendations based on my past searches. This was AMAZING. I find the recommendations to be super valuable.
3. I still need to wake up 30 mins earlier in the morning to make this happen. I will not be able to sustain this if I try to fit this into my work day. But I find it worth it, so I am optimistic about sustaining this momentum.

First Success:

Around November 2023, during our annual self-development reflection process at school I looked back on my goal to see if I was going to meet my target of 100 papers by the end of the year. It turned out that I had already captured close to 150 papers by then! I was thrilled, but more importantly I realized that this habit is now a part of my practice as an educator. Something I will continue to sustain and grow.

A beginners list: my ‘most valued’ Educational Journals

These are the journals that I found myself going back to the most, particularly for their Research reviews or meta-studies. They also align well with my current areas of interest - systems change, leadership, teacher education, curriculum, teaching, educational psychology, data in schools, educational technology.

A beginners list: my favourite papers from 2023 - 2024

You will find summaries of a few research papers on this section of my blog

My final words of advice:

If you are a school teacher or leader with a similar goal, just do it!

Set a goal, commit to it by putting in regular time and effort
keep going ahead bit by bit for at least 6 months and you will have found your flow
Find out that this was all completely worth it :)

All Things Learning

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