TL;DR: Probably. And absolutely certainly if you’re a teaching & learning geek.
Tickets on Quicket here.
On Saturday 12th September, after a seven year absence, Bishops College is hosting researchED Cape Town– a one-day teaching and learning conference that’s set up to explore the question of ‘what works in South African classrooms?’.
What is it?
The researchED concept has been around for over ten years- the first version being held in the UK in 2013. Since then, events have been held the world over, including in South America, Asia, Europe, North America and, of course, here in Africa.
It’s been described by some as ‘TED talks for teachers’, which isn’t an entirely unfair comparison, though I would add a couple of caveats: firstly, it’s not just for teachers; and secondly there’s a particular emphasis on speakers justifying their claims using evidence or research as an underpinning.
Why is it?
The underlying rationale for researchED events is fourfold:
1. Advocating for the evidence
researchED emerged as a means of advocating for teaching practice to become more evidence-based and underpinned by research. Its explicit aim is ‘myth-busting’ in a world that is not short of theory or ideology. As within all spheres of life, discredited, outdated, or ‘lovely-in-theory’ ideas are quick to spread and take hold in educational circles.
The goal of researchED in this context has been to help share research and spark debate as to ‘what actually works?’. It asks the question: ‘is there evidence that [idea X] makes a difference?’.
Take, for example, the idea that teachers should teach to a learner’s particular ‘learning style’- a view that is exceptionally common to come across in South Africa. Only last week I heard a teacher describe the importance of knowing and adapting lessons to each learner’s preferred style. In 2025, the UK-based Education Endowment Foundation reviewed the evidence and concluded:
“The number of high-quality studies of learning styles is extremely low. As a result no impact is displayed…Learners are very unlikely to have a single learning style, so restricting pupils to activities matched to their reported preferences may damage their progress”.
2. Making space for busy people to engage with the evidence
Secondly, researchED exists because even for those who are committed to classroom practice that is shaped by evidence and research, many of us are frequently too busy doing what matters most (being in the classroom- helping learners to learn) to spend much time attempting to penetrate the dense world of academic journals in order to find out what’s emerging in the field. As a result, it’s difficult for new ideas to disseminate, to be trialled, and for people who are out there doing it in real classrooms (not just the academics) to report back on what they are finding works.
So researchED events exist to give space to those with busy working lives to hear about and engage with these thoughts and emerging findings. This is the main reason researchED events are always on a Saturday.
3. Making the evidence concrete and accessible
There are other conferences you can choose to attend- and please feel free to do so- but my experience of academic and policy-style conferences is to walk away feeling:
a) Exhausted & frustrated- having just waded through a lot of dense academic jargon, technical terms, or intricate methodological discussions in order to figure out what the relevant point is. Or,
b) Mildly enlightened- having a wider understanding of the global context or the national picture on a particular issue, but no practical take-aways as to what that means in the classroom.
Understanding how many learners take pure Maths nationally helps to set up a problem to solve, but doesn’t lead to many practical takeaways for how that might be achieved or what any given Maths teacher might do differently on Monday.
At researchED, the focus is on the evidence around what works (or explicitly doesn’t work) in the classroom. This means sessions actively try to avoid the jargon and less practically relevant technical details (though these should be on-hand if asked!) and instead looks for the directly applicable actions emerging from research.
The goal is to translate what are often pretty dense and dry findings into more digestible and concrete formats that can have immediate benefit for teachers and those who work with schools.
4. An unapologetic focus on teaching & learning and the classroom
Lastly, researchED is explicitly set up to focus on classroom level actions. There are occasional wider-looking sessions that look at the policy environment or curriculum context, but these always have a teacher and school-leader facing perspective: what do these things mean for the classroom?
Other conferences are better placed to pick apart the social, economic and political context that (significantly) impact what is possible in the classroom.
researchED doesn’t ignore this context, because it clearly influences many aspects of what is practicable in a classroom (indeed some sessions will look explicitly at low-resource settings), but it’s not the main thing for this conference.
So, should I come?
Simply put, it’s for anyone who works in, or with schools, and wants to:
- hear about research and evidence-informed ideas from people doing it on the ground and in the classroom
- take-away practical ideas underpinned by research & evidence
- debate the concept of ‘what works’ in education- and in South Africa
- be part of building and creating a community of like-minded teaching & learning enthusiasts across Cape Town & South Africa.
We hope to see you there.
More event info on the website here.
Tickets on Quicket here.
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