MESH Guides

"In many countries, education is still far from being a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are not yet being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of those practices..." (OECD, 2009, p.3).

The OECD identify a global challenge facing education today, as the need to create "knowledge rich, evidence based education systems", making relevant research on transformative learning and teaching accessible. International studies (OECD:TALIS 2009, Barber and Mourshed 2009) indicate that improving the quality of our educators is more important than increased financial investment. The OECD challenges governments, academics and practitioners to adopt new ways of sharing and building knowledge. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals.and Education 2030 plan require collaborative effort to achieve the challenging goals of quality education for all.

Existing models for system improvement assume that educators and teacher educators have easy access to a high-quality professional knowledge base. Professional pedagogic knowledge which provides the foundations of practice is treated as a ‘magic ingredient’ which does not require discussion, systematic management, renewal, coordination, resources or support. MESH addresses this gap.

MESH aims to support the UN's SDG 4 by:

• providing teachers and other educators with quick access to summaries of specialist knowledge, based on research, to support their professional judgement.
• providing a place where teacher-research networks and academic researchers are able to disseminate their research in forms accessible to practitioners, teacher educators and policy makers
• providing a means for identifying research questions that teachers and other educators want answered and communicating this with researchers
• signposting current research and gaps in the research base so as to help avoid duplication
• invite critical scrutiny of current research.

MESH is a translational research project initiated by the Education Futures Collaboration with the goal of creating a joined up education profession, linking pockets of excellence in teaching, research and evidence based practice and supporting professional judgement with evidence through giving access to transformative diagnosis and intervention strategies.

MESH Guides are quality assured and tested with teachers, providing advice linked to research and evidence.

MESH, when fully developed, will use digital technologies and an innovative knowledge mapping approach to provide personalised research based advice and just in time learning to support teachers in extending and deepening their professional knowledge.

MESH uses online graphical flowcharts/mind maps or pathways (MESHGuides) to present complex knowledge. Research and evidence links are provided with the summaries for those who want to gain in-depth knowledge. Such specialist knowledge and links might include video links to teachers’ explanations of complex concepts as well as to questions, modelling, simulations, assessments and interventions to improve understanding.

New ways of working: Professional knowledge is not static but there will never be enough additional funding to keep professional knowledge up to date unless we harness energies and resources already in the education system such as the research that is undertaken for masters thesis and PhD and EdD theses together with the work of teacher-researcher networks. MESH as a system is designed to engage educators in building and updating the evidence base for practice.

We ask

• governments, charities and policy makers to:
  • value/require/encourage/co-ordinate MESHGuide research summary production
  • join the MESH Advisory Board to share your country’s knowledge mobilisation strategies and benefit from others
• universities to build MESHGuide contributions into Masters and PhD theses and staff research expectations
• individual educators/professional associations to use/contribute to MESHGuides as teachers, teacher-researchers, teacher educators and to train student teachers to be research users and contributors
• potential funders to fund research networks to pool knowledge in their areas of interest.

Developing research informed practice is a challenge for educators not least because published educational research is rarely focused on the knowledge teachers need to improve educational outcomes.  MESH is an example of ‘translational research’ in education – translating research-based concepts into classroom practice. MESHGuides may be helpful for teachers who need to demonstrate that they meet Professional Standards.

Much research based knowledge is currently buried in theses, held by individual academics and teachers or published in academic journals and reports, which are not easily accessible to teachers. MESH provides a way for teachers to access this knowledge so that it can be leveraged to improve student outcomes. MESH provides the e-infrastructure to support worldwide collaborative work between those who want to strengthen the educational evidence base and support teaching becoming a strongly evidence-based profession.

We recognise the challenges involved in applied educational research and making findings accessible and applicable to practitioners. However, we are prepared to work with these uncertainties to see what we can create together. We invite you to join us if you too are prepared to try out this way of working in education. Publishing of MESHGuides, working with the toolkits, together with the partner online collaboration project MESHConnect provides a way for practitioners, teacher educators or policy makers to engage with educational research and pedagogic strategies in ways that are useful to their practice. Specialist groups produce specialist MESHGuides.

References and Further Reading

Background information and references which give information about the foundations on which MESHGuides have been built are included throughout this site.
See the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4.
Barber, M., and Mourshed, M., 2007. How the world’s best-performing school systems came out on top’ McKinsey and Co. [online]. Source. Available from: http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Best_performing_school.aspx [Accessed 18 June 2012].

OECD (2009) Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First results from Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) www.oecd.org/edu/school/43023606.pdf Accessed 30th August 2013