Using Evidence and Knowledge Management

A reflective practitioner who builds personal theory needs evidence to ground it. Three sources of evidence, used together, give the practitioner a fuller picture than any one alone. Beyond the gathering of evidence, the practitioner manages their own professional knowledge over time so that what they have learned does not get lost.

Three sources of evidence

Three kinds of evidence support reflective practice.

Evidence from students

The first source is the practitioner’s own students. This is evidence the teacher has direct access to and that no outside researcher could match.

The evidence comes in formal and informal forms. Formal evidence includes test scores, written work, project outputs, and survey responses. Informal evidence includes how students answer questions in class, what they ask, where their attention drifts, how they describe their own learning, and what they choose to do when given a choice.

Both forms matter. A teacher who only looks at formal evidence misses most of what is happening. A teacher who only relies on informal impressions misses patterns that formal data reveals. The combination is more useful than either alone.

Evidence of own practice

The second source is evidence of the practitioner’s own practice. This is what the teacher actually did, captured in some form.

Sources include lesson plans (showing what the teacher intended), lesson evaluations written shortly after the lesson (showing what the teacher noticed at the time), recordings or videos of lessons (showing what actually happened), peer observation notes (showing what someone else saw), and assessment design records (showing how the teacher tried to measure learning).

The connection back to evidence from students matters. Evidence of practice should be linked to evidence from students. What the teacher did and what students did need to be considered together. A lesson plan with no connection to student outcomes is incomplete data.

Evidence from others’ research

The third source is published research and professional literature. This is the broader knowledge of the field.

Research can serve several functions. It can provide concepts the teacher does not have. It can suggest hypotheses the teacher has not considered. It can give comparison points for what the teacher is seeing in their own setting. It can challenge what the teacher already believes.

The reflective practitioner uses research as one input among several, not as the final authority. Research from one context may not apply directly to another. Research that contradicts what the teacher sees in their classroom requires careful examination of both sides.

Beliefs, knowledge, and skills of reflective practitioners

Several attitudes and capabilities make a teacher better at using evidence well.

Inquiry habit of mind

The first is an inquiry habit of mind. The reflective practitioner approaches their work with questions, not just routines. They ask what is happening, why, and what could be different.

Inquiry is a habit because it has to operate by default. A teacher who only inquires when something goes wrong misses the patterns in normal practice. A teacher whose inquiry runs continuously notices things others would miss.

Evidence as information, not labels

The second is treating evidence as a source of information for teaching and learning, not as a way to label students.

A test result is information about what a student knew on that test, in that moment. It is not a label for the student. A teacher who reads the result as “this student is weak in mathematics” has labelled them. A teacher who reads it as “this student did not yet know the multiplication of fractions on this Tuesday” has used it as information.

The distinction matters because labels close off responses while information opens them. The labelled student is dismissed. The student whose specific gap has been identified can be helped.

Sufficient understanding to adjust practice

The third is enough understanding to make relevant adjustments to practice. Evidence is only useful if the teacher can act on it.

This requires that the teacher knows their subject and their pedagogy well enough to interpret evidence correctly. A teacher who does not understand why a student is making a particular kind of error cannot use the error as useful evidence.

A teacher’s professional development supports this. The more the teacher knows about how learning works in their subject, the better they can read evidence and respond to it.

Inquiry questions about students

A useful set of questions for using evidence from students.

What do the students already know? Evidence answers this. Without an honest answer, planning starts from the wrong place.

How adequate are the sources of evidence we have used? Some sources are better than others for different questions. The teacher checks whether the evidence they have actually addresses the question being asked.

What do the students need to learn and do? Evidence about current state, plus the curriculum’s destination, defines the gap.

How do we build on what they know? The strongest teaching builds on existing understanding rather than ignoring it. Evidence about what students know is the starting point for this kind of teaching.

Inquiry questions about own practice

A parallel set for the teacher’s own practice.

How have I contributed to current student outcomes? Honest accounting helps. The teacher’s role in the outcomes is not all of the cause, but it is part of it.

What do I already know that I can use to promote improved outcomes? Existing competence is the starting point.

What do I need to learn and do to promote these outcomes? The gap in the teacher’s own knowledge or practice has to be identified.

What sources of evidence and knowledge can I use? Other teachers’ practice, published research, the teacher’s own past work.

These two sets of questions, about students and about practice, can be run continuously. They support what is sometimes called the teacher inquiry and knowledge-building cycle: identifying what students know and need, identifying what teachers know and need, deciding what might be most effective, and checking the impact of changes.

The use of evidence for professional learning cannot be a single event. It pervades all aspects of the cycle.

Categories of knowledge

The reflective practitioner deals with three categories of knowledge, each with its own properties.

Explicit knowledge

Explicit knowledge is written, codified, and easy to transfer. Lesson plans, school policies, textbooks, research papers, and shared teaching resources are all explicit knowledge.

The strength is transferability. A new teacher can read a school’s documented policies and understand what is expected. The weakness is that explicit knowledge always loses something in the codification. The lesson plan is not the lesson.

Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge is personal, embedded in experience, and context-specific. The way a senior teacher reads a class, paces an explanation, or handles a difficult moment is tacit. The teacher could not write down everything they are doing.

Tacit knowledge is more powerful than explicit knowledge for many practical situations, but it is harder to extract and codify. Schools that lose senior teachers without capturing any of their tacit knowledge lose significant capability.

The SECI model covered earlier in this chapter is one way to think about how tacit knowledge can be partly externalised and shared.

Cultural knowledge

Cultural knowledge is specific to a school, a region, a language, a religion, or a nation. It includes what is taken for granted in a particular context: how parents are addressed, how respect is shown, what topics are sensitive, what stories are familiar, what humour works.

A teacher coming into a school from outside has to learn the cultural knowledge of that school, not just the explicit and tacit knowledge of teaching. A teacher moving from a Karachi private school to a rural government school has to update their cultural knowledge, even though their tacit teaching knowledge transfers.

The reflective practitioner who is aware of cultural knowledge as a category notices when their assumptions are not shared by their students or colleagues, and adjusts.

Knowledge management

Schools that manage knowledge deliberately do better than schools that do not. Knowledge management is the practice of tracking, measuring, sharing, and using the school’s intangible assets, including the teachers’ knowledge.

The basics of knowledge include information (data and facts), values (what is considered important), beliefs (what is held to be true), experiences (what has been lived), rules (codified expectations), and procedures (sequences of actions). All of these are knowledge in different forms, and all need to be managed for the school to grow as a learning organisation.

Three basic ways to acquire knowledge:

1. Discover. Through inquiry and direct exploration.
2. Study. Reading and learning from existing sources.
3. Communicate. Obtaining knowledge from others through dialogue.

A teacher who relies on only one of these is at a disadvantage. A teacher who uses all three has a richer source of knowledge.

The significance of knowledge management is that knowledge involves a higher degree of certainty or validity than information alone. Information is data; knowledge is data that has been processed, contextualised, and integrated into a usable form. Schools that turn information into knowledge can act on what they have. Schools that hold information without converting it to knowledge accumulate paperwork without much practical effect.

Flashcard

What are the three categories of knowledge a reflective practitioner deals with?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Explicit, tacit, cultural

Explicit knowledge is written and codified, easy to transfer but always partial. Tacit knowledge is personal and context-specific, more powerful but hard to extract. Cultural knowledge is specific to a school, region, language, faith, or nation, taken for granted by insiders and invisible until someone from outside encounters it.

Bringing it together

The reflective practitioner who uses evidence well and manages knowledge over time has built up a professional practice that is more than the sum of individual lessons.

They draw evidence from students, from their own practice, and from the broader research community. They treat evidence as information rather than labels. They have the inquiry habit of mind that runs continuously, not only when something goes wrong. They understand the difference between explicit, tacit, and cultural knowledge, and work with all three. They contribute to and draw from the wider school’s knowledge through SECI’s cycles of socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation.

This is what the rest of this study guide has been pointing toward: a professional whose reflection produces growing capacity, not only personal awareness. The methods, models, and theories in earlier chapters all support this end.

A teacher who reaches this point has built something substantial. The work of reflection has paid off in a deeper craft, more useful theory, and a fuller relationship with the wider school and profession.