The paper reads like a twitter fight dressed up as ethnography (which is useful in sociology). The paper is trivial until the end, when I think the author touches on the read anxiety (it is not @tombennett71 ). 1/ https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/berj.3664#.Xx6FkMHD8V0.twitter

The authors specifically link randomised control trials (RCT) and encouraging teachers to understand research with populism, "trads", Gove, and Research Ed. I am a psych to ed academic transplant directly for this reason. 2/

There is a misunderstanding of RCT in the paper. If an RCT shows a synthetic phonics works, that means it works better than other strategies at the population level for the population tested. No RCT researcher would say it will work best for ALL students. 3/

In the paper, the author suggests that 'trads' use data to ignore the needs individuals and cite tweets to as evidence. This is a wilful misunderstanding of what an RCT can offer. We can all agree that twitter encourages binary, polarised debate. Nuance is hard here. 4/

The old school, sociology influenced arm of scholarly academia is experiencing changes in terms of REF scores and research funding.I think this paper captures the anxiety of neoliberal universities but is pointing the gun at ResearchEd.

ResearchEd is much more accessible to teachers than BERA and therefore a good straw man for the larger changs in university academia.

What we need is a thoughtful discussion of competing methodologies and data to inform how we can design teaching strategies that are best for our children. Elevating twitter dichotomy "progs" vs "trads" to pseudo-scholarship reduces us all. End.

Apologies for all the spelling and grammar errors in the thread. I got a bit carried away with tweeting at breakfast time, and my 3 year old daughter was literally hanging off my neck shouting "tweeting sounds like cheating"