IOE Experts Discuss Resilient Schools at ECER 2018

Topics of resilient schools and how such L&D settings can be best created to empower less privileged student cohorts have recently piqued more interest among educational scholars and within broader public realms. Marina Pinskaya, Sergey Kosaretsky, Roman Zvyagintsev and Mikhail Goshin, experts at the IOE Center for Socioeconomic Aspects of Schooling, traveled to Italy’s Bolzano this September to take part in the 2018 ECER International Conference, where they presented about IOE’s research on resilient K-11 settings.   

Resilient schools are distinctive in their ability to effectively counter various adverse factors of the environments where they operate, and to deploy robust L&D settings where students can achieve strong academic outcomes despite less privileged backgrounds and other socio-economic challenges.   

IOE’s approach to exploring what lies at the heart of creating a resilient school has adopted an overarching analytical framework where various methods add up in providing deeper and more comprehensive insights into the subject research domain.

At ECER 2018, IOE experts presented both about what markers and elements of resilience can be captured through quantitative analysis as well as evidence of resilient school strategies that is drawn from multiple interviews with school staff and students themselves. This comprehensive framework has enabled identifying the following as the core elements of resilience in teaching and school administration: actively engaging student families in learning and other aspects of school life; exerting adequate academic pressures to foster student involvement and learning effort; the principal’s strong strategic acumen with priorities appropriately defined for both leadership and the teaching staff; high academic standards and expectations for the quality of education; etc.      

A presentation by Mikhail Goshin outlined the key findings from his study of the types and models of parental involvement. Exploring how parents in disadvantaged households in Russia participate in children’s learning & development will provide evidence to test the validity of what similar international studies have come up with.   

ECER’s special topics this year were ‘Inclusion and Exclusion in Education’ and ‘Resources for Educational Research.’ In between the Conference sessions, the IOE team held a series of meetings with colleagues from Turkey, Great Britain and Ireland to discuss prospective academic partnerships in studying school resilience.