Working together: The importance of partnerships in programme development

Thank you to the BPS West Midlands Branch for supporting me to attend the 31st Annual Meeting of the Society of the Scientific Studies of Reading at Copenhagen, Denmark in summer 2024. This is a great, friendly conference for researchers who are interested in literacy research. Across the three days there were presentations from around the world. 

I was part of a symposium that shared the impact of peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) in reading for diverse learners in England and Iceland. PALS is a whole-class paired reading programme developed in the US, that is now internationally used to support children's reading outcomes. Intervention programmes cannot be assumed to translate from one school, one area or one country to another without consideration for the local socio-cultural and political landscape, and these presentations outlined the adaptations needed to make the programme work in the local context. 

All presentations highlighted the importance of working in partnership with educators to reach this goal. The philosophy of PALS is to test, revise and test the basic idea to reach a point where the programme is suitable with the core theoretically informed elements still present. We have been developing PALS for the UK context for 10 years and the recent results from the Education Endowment Foundation evaluation reported the programme to boost children's reading outcomes. 

PALS+: A direct instructional approach to the teaching of reading/Tier 2 vocabulary

In this presentation, I outlined an adaptation to the PALS programme with Aaron Jordan, deputy head at Millfield LEAD Academy in Leicestershire. In the presentation, I outlined how we have created a vocabulary programme for key stage two pupils. With this example we are moving away from the idea that researchers are the experts, instead we are all experts. The presentation outlined how co-production can have a transformational impact for all. This is important as we know not all teachers use academic research to inform their practice. In working together, Aaron and I are bridging the gap between research and practice. 

Tips for building partnership 

Tips for academics who want to build their skills in co-production: we would recommend you build a mechanism for teachers to provide feedback on the programmes you are developing, you need to acknowledge the role of the teacher/s and time commitment or develop a way of working that acknowledges the time commitment for both parties. Without building these partnerships we are missing an important link in our work. Aaron and I will be talking more about this on 6 February for the BPS East Midlands Branch, look out for information on social media. 

Resources

If you would like to read more about teacher researcher partnerships in the development of PALS, check out this paper - Vardy, E. J., Al Otaiba, S., Breadmore, H. L., Kung, S. H., Pétursdóttir, A. L., Zaru, M. W., & McMaster, K. L. (2022). Teacher–researcher partnership in the translation and implementing of PALS (Peer‐Assisted Learning Strategies): An international perspective. Journal of Research in Reading, 45(3), 517-526.  

Author biography

Emma is a senior lecturer in developmental psychology at Nottingham Trent University. Her research interests are in the area of psychology of education with an interest in children's literacy, specifically attitudes to reading, reading motivation and reading for enjoyment in primary and secondary school students. Recent publications include parental perspectives on the diversity of children's reading material and the inclusion of animals in educational settings. Dr Vardy recently produced a guidance document on implementation and process evaluation for TASO.