Career story
What keeps you motivated?
Being an academic is a responsibility to students who trust us with their intellectual development, to the field that needs rigorous evidence, and to schools and children who ultimately benefit from our research. What motivates me is the challenge presented by these responsibilities - advancing knowledge, bridging research and practice, and striving for real-world impact.
What helps you find a research question or project idea?
There is no need to search very far! Each project or output generates more questions than it answers. But more specifically, I find the most compelling questions emerge at the intersection of three sources: what data unexpectedly reveals (e.g. through interview or unexpected statistical findings), what the field calls for (reading and engaging in other's work) and calls from outside the academy, though relationships with organisations, charities, and other stakeholders.
How do you choose the method to collect data?
My approach is grounded in pragmatism as an epistemological stance - the method should serve the question, not the other way around. This means I'm not wedded to either quantitative or qualitative paradigms; instead, I ask 'what will give us the most useful knowledge for practice?' Sometimes that's multilevel modelling to handle clustered school data, sometimes it's thematic analysis to understand teacher beliefs, and increasingly it's mixed methods to capture both the 'what' and the 'why.'
If you could tell yourself advice when you were learning about research what would it be?
I'm always hesitant to offer advice as if there's one path through academic life—what works for one researcher might be entirely wrong for another, and some of my best colleagues have thrived by doing exactly the opposite of what I'd suggest. That said, speaking purely from my own journey and what I wish I'd understood earlier: You're likely going to spend a lot of time feeling like you're behind—behind on readings, behind on methods, behind your peers. That feeling never completely goes away, but it does become productive rather than paralysing. The gap between what you know and what you think you should know? That's where good research questions live, and what you should be doing, rather than what you are not managing to do.