Bloomsbury CPD Library: Research-Informed Practice

Jennifer Ludgate is in her sixth year of teaching at a large comprehensive school in Hampshire. She has been Pedagogy Leader in the Teaching and Learning team, a tutor, Head of Key Stage 3 English and Head of Research, and is currently Head of English. In her role as Head of Research, Jennifer redesigned the training programme for second-year teachers to include a year-long evidence-based project. Since 2013, she has run the annual Teaching and Learning Takeover (TLT) conference, which has provided CPD for vast numbers of teachers from across the country. Follow Jennifer on Twitter at @MissJLud.

Like the other titles in this brilliant Bloomsbury CPD Library series, Jennifer Ludgate's Research-Informed Practice is immensely practical in nature and bursting with advice if your intention is to become more research-informed but you are not sure where to start. Using the helpful structure of Part 1: Train yourself and Part 2: Train others, Jennifer's infectious enthusiasm guides you through this exciting professional learning, identifying a key shift needed towards thinking more proactively about our decision-making processes. The book comes with an array of questionnaire, templates and PowerPoint presentations, whilst at the heart of it, Jennifer provides us with a great Research Starter Toolkit in which she summarises for us the key learning points from some seminal research papers and reports. This does not lessen the impact of her advice on developing the ability to critically evaluate research evidence. The absolute joy of the book is in the way it empowers professionals to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This will be a genuinely great addition to schools' CPD bookshelves and I strongly recommend engaging with it.