For the second time, I shelled out some of my own hard-earned cash to attend researchED 2022. Instead of last year’s schlep to Stratford, this year was an 88 bus from Westminster straight to Parliament Hills Schools in Hampstead.
Arriving early allowed me the luxury of breakfast and coffee at a local independent deli, something I was thankful for later.
On entry you were given a swag bag, although no-one checked if I had paid for a ticket. Inside were about five sponsor booths, the best of which as usual was Teacher Tapp, whose user loyalty was so great that most ‘Tappers’ were far more interested in talking to the TT team about the number of questions they’d answered and the cornucopia of prizes on the table.
researchED’s biggest drawback is its success. With 138 sessions spread over the day, most attendees suffered from ‘choice paradox’ where consumers, when faced with too many options, are almost always disappointed with their decisions. This is the same at BETT and most events and I can’t help but think there is a missed opportunity running events in venues where session recording is the exception not the norm?
The highlight of my day was Andrew Old‘s Truth about Exclusions session, which combined forensic data analysis and interpretation with an excellent overview of policy, media hype (mostly from unqualified activist commentators) and the realities facing classroom teachers.
The lowlight was the lunch, a white bread ham sandwich, a broken cookie, a plastic bottle of tepid water and a small apple that was so hard it would have been safer to eat the water bottle.
To get home I made the mistake of taking the Northern and Victoria lines to Pimlico, an experience akin to being fully clothed in a low-rent sauna.
researchED is one of the most significant forces for good in edu that I have seen in my career. Its independence, a model of using only unpaid speakers and volunteers, is one that works despite the venom of its detractors on social media (let’s just call them edu trolls, which is what they are. I have yet to see one who has achieved 1% during their careers of what researchED has in just a few years).
