I had been working my way through Robin Alexander’s A Dialogic Teaching Companion as preparation for a research project. There’s a moment early on where he writes about dialogue being ‘the true foundation of teaching and learning’. I keep coming back to that, particularly as I think about the HMC Action Research Hub and what it means to be a practitioner willing to look closely at your own work.
When I started my Chartered Teacher Programme research back in 2018, I wasn’t thinking about dialogue as a foundation. I was thinking about a very specific problem in my Year 8 music classroom. My students weren’t always confident composers. They’d sit in groups, play a bit, laugh, play some more; but there wasn’t much talk about what they were making or why. I wondered if I could change that by introducing a simple composing talk tally; essentially a prompt sheet to encourage them to talk more intentionally about their work.
It was small study, with fourteen Year 8 students, two groups with the tally, two without. I recorded their rehearsals, transcribed what I heard, coded the language they used. Nothing earth-shattering but something shifted in my practice during that process.
When You Start Looking, You Can’t Un-See
There’s something unsettling about turning the lens on your own practice. Suddenly you’re listening to recordings of your students and noticing all the moments where they’re playing over each other’s voices, where one student is leading and the others are following without real discussion, where musical ideas are being accepted or rejected without any reasoning. You’re asking yourself: is this what I want? Have I even thought about what I want?
I wasn’t just testing a small intervention. I was learning what it means to be thoughtful about teaching; to move from doing it to understanding it. And I think that’s the hidden power of practitioner enquiry that we don’t always talk about. It’s not primarily about proving something works or gathering data to share. It’s about what it does to you as a teacher.
During the Chartered Teacher Programme, I was reading widely; Alexander on dialogic teaching, Mercer on classroom talk, the Education Endowment Foundation research. I was writing a literature review that an academic actually read and gave me feedback on. I was having to articulate why my question mattered. My thinking became visible, challengeable, defensible. I became someone who knew things about my own practice, rather than someone who just hoped things were working. That matters more than any intervention. That’s when you stop implementing and start leading.
It’s Bigger Than the Classroom
But – and this is what I want to think through here – practitioner enquiry doesn’t stay contained in the individual classroom. I’ve seen it expand in all sorts of directions. Around the same time I was investigating composing talk, I was also working with Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Professor John Sloboda, Dr Karen Wise, and I were curious about how young people form relationships with classical music. We set up something called ‘Understanding Younger Audiences’; six sessions with Year 10 students from my school working alongside Guildhall musicians, ultimately curating their own concert. The research question wasn’t mine alone. It wasn’t even the musicians’ alone. It emerged from what we all wanted to understand.
I remember sitting with the girls as they decided where to place the piano quartet in the performance space. They moved chairs around, experimented with different arrangements, noticed how it changed the sound and their own experience as an audience. That’s not just pedagogy. That’s collaborative enquiry. That’s multiple perspectives – students, teachers, professional musicians, researchers – all genuinely invested in understanding something together.
When I think about what that project was, I think: this is what practitioner enquiry can become. Not just one teacher in one classroom asking one question. But genuine partnerships where the research emerges from real problems, real contexts, and real stakes.
And that’s exactly why I’m interested in what HMC is doing with the Action Research Hub. They’re trying to dismantle those barriers. They’re providing the structure, the mentoring, the academic rigour, the community. They’re saying: your question matters. Your context matters. We’ll support you to investigate it properly.
What strikes me is how the Hub respects teacher agency. The research questions aren’t handed down from on high. A teacher at Tanglin Trust School is asking: how does explicit teaching of oracy affect engagement in GCSE classrooms? A teacher at Bristol Grammar School is wondering: how do students’ perceptions of their ability influence their intention to study physics? These are their puzzles. That’s the opposite of a top-down initiative. That’s teachers reclaiming authority over their own knowledge-making.
I was preparing some sessions for early career music teachers a few years ago, and we were working with a chapter on pedagogy from Cooke and Philpot’s A Practical Guide to Teaching Music in the Secondary School. They write about pedagogical fluidity; the idea that you don’t stick to one approach for all children all the time. You’re responsive, adaptive, thinking on your feet. But here’s what I noticed: the trainees found that unsettling. They wanted to know what to do. They wanted frameworks, structures, clear approaches. And I wondered: is that because teacher training often emphasizes delivery of pedagogy rather than thinking about pedagogy? Are we training teachers to implement rather than to inquire?
Practitioner enquiry is the antidote to that. It says: don’t just implement someone else’s framework. Look at your context. Ask your question. Read the literature; yes, Alexander, Mercer, research on oracy and dialogic teaching, all of it. But read it as a practitioner, asking what it means for your students, your classroom, and your understanding. When you do that, reading becomes thinking.
When I was President of the Chartered College of Teaching, I was constantly struck by the fact that individual teachers doing this work (researching their own practice, reading widely, thinking critically) were actually changing how their departments thought about teaching. One teacher’s enquiry into classroom talk would ripple outward. A department would start discussing: how are we using talk? Are we giving feedback on how students speak, not just what they say? Are we modeling the kind of talk we want to see?
That’s how culture shifts. Through thinking teachers who are genuinely curious about their own work and willing to share what they’re learning. The HMC Action Research Hub is creating the conditions for that to happen at scale. Teachers from around the world, supported by academics at Warwick, working on questions that matter to them. A repository of their findings will be published for others to learn from. That’s not just individual professional development; that’s the profession thinking about itself, and learning from itself.
For teachers considering applying: I’d ask yourself, what’s a puzzle you carry in your classroom? What’s something you’ve wondered about but never had time or support to really investigate? That’s your research question waiting to happen. And the Hub provides the structure and the community to make it real. For school leaders: teachers who do this work don’t just improve their individual practice. They become thought leaders in your school. They read more deeply. They think more systematically about improvement. They’re more engaged, more reflective, more invested in the profession. That matters.
I don’t know where my small research on composing talk ultimately matters. Maybe my findings were too context-specific, too small-scale to influence anyone else’s practice. But I know that doing the research changed me. It gave me language and frameworks for thinking about what happens in music classrooms. It gave me confidence in my own observations and judgments. It made me someone who could have meaningful conversations with colleagues about pedagogy, not just about logistics.
And when that multiplies across a profession – when more teachers are given the time, support, and respect to inquire into their own practice – something changes. The profession becomes less about implementing policy and more about generating knowledge. Less about compliance and more about expertise.
That’s what I was working toward at the Chartered College and that’s what the HMC Action Research Hub is building. It starts with one question, one teacher and one classroom. And teachers willing to look closely and ask why.
Steven Berryman 
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