By Dr Mary Woolley, Principal Investigator, Cultivating Deeper Interdisciplinary Dialogue

In January 2025 we launch a survey of secondary teachers across Wales as the first part of our TWCF-funded project, Cultivating Deeper Interdisciplinary Dialogue. As you can read in previous blogs, Wales is going through an intensive process of curriculum reform. We’re interested in the conversations about curriculum that this process promotes between secondary teachers, both within subjects and across traditional subject boundaries.  

As we begin recruiting participants to complete the survey, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of the principles that underly our approach to survey design and construction.  

First, why are we interested in teacher-teacher dialogue? 

I trained to teach history in England in 1998. I now work in teacher education. In fact, everyone on our research team at Cardiff Metropolitan University and Canterbury Christ Church University works in teacher education. We know how much secondary teachers value their subject communities and how excited teachers get when they have the opportunity to gather with other teachers in familiar areas and talk about what they’re teaching. Secondary teachers are passionate about the subjects they teach. As experienced teacher educators, however, we wondered what opportunities teachers were being given to talk about the topics they teach. This dialogue between teachers becomes even more important at times of curriculum reform. Curriculum for Wales emphasises interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary approaches to teaching. So, what does that mean for the conversations you have with teachers in other subjects? 

Second, what do we want to find out? 

The research question underpinning the survey is simply, what experience do teachers in Wales have of substantive disciplinary and interdisciplinary teacher-teacher dialogue? We use the word substantive, as we’re particularly interested in the conversations you have with other teachers about the topics you teach, rather than the conversations you have about behaviour or particular students. 

Third, why would we choose to employ a survey to explore teacher-teacher dialogue? Yes, we agree. Qualitative analysis is the best way to get into the intricacies of what teachers are saying to one another, how they’re saying it and what helps engage deeper levels of dialogue. We’ll be doing plenty of that later on in the project. First, though, we wanted to get a big picture of teachers’ experiences of curriculum conversations across the country. We were inspired by the work of Admiraal and Lockhorst (2012) to use a survey and their work on a ‘sense of community in school’ scale inspires some of the items on our instrument. 

What’s in the survey? 

The survey (there are Welsh and English versions) has 4 sections. The first asks for some demographic information, what you teach, where you teach and how long you’ve been teaching for, that sort of thing. The second section asks how often you have conversations about various aspects of curriculum with your colleagues, both those in your subject, your department and more broadly in your school. The third section asks some questions to explore your sense of the quality of the dialogue you engage in with other teachers and how supportive your school is of such conversations. The fourth section asks what support you would like to help encourage deeper interdisciplinary dialogue with your colleagues. A final section asks a few brief questions about your teaching of sustainability and climate change and the conversations you have with colleagues about that topic. The whole survey should take you less than 15 minutes to complete. 

What do I do next? 

If you’re a secondary teacher in Wales, please take the time to complete the survey. We would really appreciate it and we look forward to being able to share our findings with you, your school leaders and policymakers in Welsh Government once we’ve collected enough data. Once you’ve completed the survey, forward the link to a few teaching colleagues and ask them to complete it too. Thank you. 

If you’re not a secondary teacher in Wales, but you know people who are, please forward this on to them. Personal connections are always the best way to disseminate a survey. If you ask someone by name to complete the survey, hopefully they will do so! Look out for our postings on social media, comment on them and repost to all your teaching friends and colleagues. 

The survey links are here: 

Welsh: https://tinyurl.com/athro-deialog 

English: https://tinyurl.com/teacher-dialogue 

What will you do in return? 

We have £500 set aside to donate to a Wales-related charity of your choice. At the end of the survey you’ll get the chance to choose between these three: 

sizeofwales.org.uk work with Indigenous People and local communities in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia to secure and sustain an area of tropical forest at least the size of Wales, and grow millions of trees. 

• Sustainablewales.org.uk is a grassroots charity focussed on enabling sustainable lifestyles. They promote, encourage and enable community-base sustainable development. 

• Friends of the Earth Cymru is committed to protecting the environment and promoting a sustainable future for Wales. 

How can I find out more about the project? 

The survey is just the first stage of a 3-year project exploring teacher-teacher dialogue in Wales. If you’d like to see what’s happening, try our website, https://nicer.org.uk/cultivating-dialogue. There is a button on the right-hand side to sign up for project updates. 

If you have further questions about the survey or the wider project, please do get in touch!  

mary.woolley@canterbury.ac.uk 

References 

Admiraal, W., & Lockhorst, D. (2012). The Sense of Community in School Scale. Journal of Workplace Learning, 24.