Time for a reminder

I think it is time to remind ourselves to put our citation at the back of the sentence, and avoid, in the immortal words of Professor Pat Thomson, writing a 'laundry list' (2017; and read my take on that here). A student recently asked for feedback, when they had written:

Research by Aubusson et al. (2009) indicates that teacher professional development, supported by a positive school culture, leads to correlations between teachers who actively engage in their learning and development with positive student outcomes. Further research by Alton-Lee (2008) highlighted that when senior leaders actively participate in and lead professional development alongside teachers, they enhance their pedagogical knowledge and understanding.

The student knew this was an "X says, Y says" format, known as a laundry list (Thomson, 2017), but wanted help in transforming this. I suggested a simple reword to bring the topic to the fore, and push the author into the shadows:

Research shows that teacher professional development, if supported by a positive school culture, links teachers who actively engage in their learning and development with positive student outcomes (Aubusson et al., 2009). When senior leaders actively participate in and lead professional development alongside teachers, they enhance their pedagogical knowledge and understanding (Alton-Lee, 2008).

We can see that first sentence still talks about research. We could also start with "Studies show that..." or "A meta-analysis of 150 research projects found that..." or similar. Getting to the 'what' and the 'why' in quickly holds our reader's interest. The 'who' can trail in last 😉

We can also usually save a few words by writing with the topic at the front and the author at the back of the sentence. The laundry list paragraph was 60 words and my edited version was 52. Further, this way of writing has an added bonus: we can group multiple authors evidence on the topic together, and pop in a multiple works citation at the back of the sentence.

While we are getting our heads around writing with the topic first, we begin our draft with notes in the 'X says' format, then, once we have written enough topic fragments accumulated, we can turn our sentences around. But after a while we should get used to writing topic-first from the outset, and save ourselves lots of time 🙂

Sam

References:

Alton-Lee, A. (2008). Designing and Supporting Teacher Professional Development to Improve Valued Student Outcomes [paper]. Education of Teachers Symposium at the General Assembly of the International Academy of Education, Limassol, Cyprus 26 September 2008. https://thehub.sia.govt.nz/assets/documents/42443_Designing-and-Supporting-Teacher-Professional-Development_0.pdf

Aubusson, P., Ewing, R., & Hoban, G. F. (2009). Action learning in schools: reframing teachers’ professional learning and development. Routledge.

Thomson, P. (11 September 2017). Avoiding the laundry list literature review. https://patthomson.net/2017/09/11/avoiding-the-laundry-list-literature-review/