How teachers can shape group work in secondary English classes

Research in the current climate is often focused on looking at precise, well-defined actions or initiatives, subjecting them to randomised controlled trials and then evaluating how far they can be proved to have impact. Actions are deemed to have impact if they perform well in these trials and can be proved to ‘work’ in a range of different contexts. The testing is large scale, to prove merit and there is external evaluation. The actions tested are often aspects of generic pedagogy that can be applied across subjects – such as ways of offering feedback, setting homework, providing ‘catch-up’ and so on. There are benefits to this kind of model but it also has some limitations. The actions tested have to be stand-alone, separated out from all others, to test their efficacy in ways that aren’t contaminated by a range of extraneous factors. This might work in medical research (although even here there are voices of doubt), but in education, where human agency, expertise and