The HMC Action Research Hub is a professional learning initiative run by HMC in partnership with the University of Warwick, with Dr Nomisha Kurian, Assistant Professor in Education Studies, as lead researcher. Over twelve months, teachers from HMC schools around the world are supported to design and carry out ethically robust, evidence-informed action research into their own classroom practice; through training in research design and methods, personalised mentoring from Warwick academics, collaboration with peers, and opportunities to showcase and publish their findings. Since launching in January 2026, the Hub has supported twenty-five teachers internationally, with projects spanning areas such as assessment and pedagogy, pupil wellbeing, and equality, diversity and inclusion. My career has been imbued with connection with research, from my time completing a PhD during my early teaching career to my connections to the Chartered College of Teaching and universities; the HMC hub is the ideal contribution to the work of the College and others in making our profession evidence and research informed. I’m thrilled to see this hub evolve, and exciting for us as a school to be involved in the future.
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. A second research project, undertaken during my time as a Visiting Research Fellow at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, I explored student engagement with chamber music. This project involved observing student interaction with an early career chamber group; the findings revealed that students had greater care for elements beyond the music including the performers’ family life, choice of clothing and the chairs used for concerts. These findings were enlightening, particularly as we were spending so much effort on music choice when the research project helped us recognise there were other important elements to how young people were engaging with classical music.
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.
At Sir William Perkins’s School I lead staff professional development, and have advocated for colleagues to pursue the Chartered Status routes from the Chartered College as part of a broader commitment to all colleagues being interested in developing as teachers. Our range of professional development activities across the year – including learning lunches, teachers exploring their teaching in small groups and having access to platforms of CPD content – enable everyone to reflect and refine their practice.
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, or even the musicians’ alone, but emerged from what we all wanted to understand.
And that’s exactly why I’m interested in what HMC is doing with the Action Research Hub. They’re trying to dismantle barriers by providing the structure, the mentoring, the academic rigour, the community. They’re saying: your question matters, your context matters, and we’ll support you to investigate it properly.
What also strikes me is the respect for 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.
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. 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 and think more systematically about improvement. They’re more engaged, more reflective, and more invested in the profession. That matters.
[A blog written for HMC]
Steven Berryman 
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