FINAL REPORT SUMMARY

The Influence of Christian Ethos

on Teaching and Learning in
Church Secondary Schools
RESEARCH TEAM
PROFESSOR TREVOR COOLING

Canterbury Christ Church University (Principal Investigator)

DR ELIZABETH GREEN

Liverpool Hope University

DR LYNN REVELL

Canterbury Christ Church University

With grateful thanks to our sponsors

The Jerusalem Trust
Culham St Gabriels Trust
Hinchley Charitable Trust
Hockerill Educational Foundation

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION RESEARCH

ABOUT THE RESEARCH PROJECT

What If Learning is a pedagogical approach designed to support teachers in creating a learning
environment that is framed by a Christian ethos. Both the Church of England and the Catholic Church
aspire that their state-funded schools offer this. The purpose of this research project was to investigate
the influence of What If Learning, working with teachers as co-researchers, on their approaches to
teaching and learning in their classrooms.
What If Learning was developed by an international team of American, Australian and British
educationalists and has the following features:
Premised on the assumption that no
classroom is belief-neutral.
Committed to the purpose of Christian
education as shaping the development
of Christian character
Focused on pedagogy as the prime
responsibility of teachers.
Based on the belief that Christian learning is
primarily a matter of how the curriculum
is framed rather than the content of the
curriculum.

Draws on the work of Etienne Wenger

(1998) and David I. Smith and James K.A.
Smith (2011)1, who have all highlighted the
importance of the practices used by teachers
in shaping students imagination as to the
ultimate purpose of their learning
Provides a three-step approach which
enables teachers to frame their pedagogy
in terms of Christian virtue development
and to design the learning practices of their
classrooms to promote that.

Full information is available at www.whatiflearning.co.uk

1
Etienne Wenger, (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press and David I. Smith and James K.A. Smith, (2011), Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping
Faith & Learning, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: Eerdmans.

OUR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Our primary research question was:
Can What If Learning be seen to lead to a more distinctively Christian pedagogic approach and the
distinctive Christian formation of students in a church school?
We employed a case study approach with 14 classroom teachers from three state-funded, church
secondary schools in England between September 2012 and July 2013. The three researchers made 5
separate visits to each school during the year, spending 11 days in each.
The main features of the research were:
The intention of this qualitative research was
to provide conclusions that are indicative of
the challenges and opportunities revealed
by the 14 teacher case studies rather than to
offer conclusions that are representative of
the situation in church schools generally.
The 14 teachers were co-researchers and
conversation partners in the research rather
than the objects of the research. The research
team were not making judgments on their
performance, but were rather working with
them in investigating the research question.
The subject specialisms represented were
English, science, mathematics, history,
computer studies, geography, physical
education, modern foreign languages and
religious education.
In each school, the teachers were introduced
to What If Learning through a brief training
session. Then each teacher designed and
taught lessons using the approach. The
researchers provided tutorial support.
Each teacher was interviewed three times.
These interviews were focussed on (i) their
initial perceptions, (ii) their final reflections
and (iii) their judgments of the training
required if teachers are to be able to frame
their classroom work within a Christian ethos.

Each teacher was observed at least once

teaching a What If Learning inspired lesson
and was asked to keep a reflective log during
the project.
Pupil focus groups were run after the
majority of the observed lessons.
44 lecturers responsible for teacher education
in three Cathedral Group universities (one
Catholic foundation and two Church of
England foundations) were interviewed
to ascertain their response to the teacher
education needs that emerged from the
research with the teachers.
Audio-recordings of the interviews and
focus groups were transcribed and lesson
observation notes and reflective logs were
typed-up and the resulting data were
uploaded into data analysis software and
then coded and analysed to identify key
themes
Informed consent was obtained from all
participants and all data were anonymised
in accordance with the ethics approval
obtained through the Faculty Research Ethics
Committee at Canterbury Christ Church
University.

OUR FINDINGS
The key findings reported by the teachers were that they:
1. Were able to significantly reframe their pedagogy in response to their encounter with What If
Learning. Students were subsequently able to identify a change in their classroom experience.
Three examples are given at the back of this leaflet;
2. sometimes felt that their attempts at reframing their teaching from within a Christian ethos were
weird. Phrases like levering and strong-arming in Christian ideas were used;
3. occasionally expressed concern that the What If Learning approach was not Christian enough, as
encapsulated in this observation from one teacher: theres a sense in which anything that doesnt
see people becoming Christians isnt fulfilling the ultimate mission;
4. found that the pressure to prepare students for their GCSE exams often dominated their
pedagogy;
5. struggled with the demands of a crowded curriculum and finding the time and mental space for
the planning work that What If Learning promotes;
6. relied more on the training, the tutorial support and conversations with colleagues for their access
to the approach than spending time on the website;
7. hankered after off-the-shelf examples in preference to creating their own bespoke learning
experiences;
8. found it easier to tell the students about Christian ethos rather than to design practices which
enabled them to experience that ethos;
9. lacked the opportunities to work as teams on developing their own understanding of Christian
ethos in teaching and learning; and
10. reported that they had never before experienced a focussed opportunity to develop their expertise
in this area, either in their initial training or in continuing professional development.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

On the basis of these findings, our recommendations are:

1. For the Church of England and the Catholic Church
What If Learning can support the development of a distinctively Christian learning culture when
introduced and used thoughtfully. However, there is a key contextual challenge to be addressed
in that most of the teachers had never come across a theological approach which supported
them in integrating their professional work within a Christian ethos. There is an urgent need for
the development and dissemination of a Christian theological understanding of teaching and
learning which overcomes both the sense of weirdness and the sense of not being Christian
enough identified by our teachers when trying to integrate Christian ethos with learning across the
curriculum subjects. This is a task for the two Churches.
2. For Higher Education Institutions and other Teacher Educators
Our participants identified a lack of educational spaces where teachers can develop their expertise
in framing pedagogy within a Christian ethos. They needed contexts where they can work with
colleagues, with the support of expert guidance, on this task. Creating these spaces is a task for
those responsible for leading initial teacher education and continuing professional development.
3. For School Leaders
A National College publication states that in church schools school leaders are the interpreters
of faith to the community3 . Our teachers reported many pressures that hinder their aspiration
to frame their classroom work within a Christian ethos. They need targeted support in integrating
theological and professional concerns. As the interpreters of faith, school leaders hold the
responsibility for creating strategies that will achieve this.
4. For Classroom Teachers
The main barrier to using What If Learning in the classroom was the tendency for teachers to
resort to telling students about Christian content rather than reframing their students learning
experience within a Christian ethos. In the end it is the classroom teachers responsibility to make
this transition, with the support of the two Churches, teacher educators and school leaders.
Further Planned Work
As an outcome of this research, the What If Learning website will be redesigned and a Toolkit will be
included to support schools in using it.

We intend to address these in greater detail in the book arising from the project. This is scheduled to be published
by Peter Lang in their Religion, Education and Values series in late 2015. The provisional title is Conversations with
Christian Teachers: understanding the place of Christian faith in Church school classrooms.
3
Leadership and faith: working with and learning from school leaders, 2011, NCSL
2

THREE TEACHERS STORIES

THE RE TEACHER
Angela teaches religious education (RE) and in her lesson focussed on her Christian ethics course. She
taught her students to produce answers that would score well in the externally-set exam. Her lesson
was focussed on end of life issues. She explains her thinking:
So I kind of sat down with what Id normally do which at the end result was very much fors and
against abortion, euthanasia etc (but) what would I really want to say as a Christian about these
topics? .. a Christian wouldnt necessarily sit there and go fors and against.
Previously her classroom practice meant that students experienced Christian ethics as a conflict
between two opposing sides; in effect they were being inducted into seeing Christian ethics as
primarily concerned with winning ethical disputes. Angela decided to reframe her pedagogy in
line with the notion that the primary obligation in Christian ethics might be to show love to ones
opponents rather than to win an argument.
She tried a new approach on the topic of assisted suicide by introducing the class, through storytelling and pictures, to an energetic rugby player and sky diver with an active family life. The students
were then asked to engage in learning activities which explored his quality of life. Then she told them
his name, Tony Nicklinson, and the story of his stroke in Athens in 2005 which left him, at the age
of 50, with locked-in syndrome. He subsequently became a high-profile campaigner for the right to
die. In the light of this new knowledge, the class returned to their consideration of his quality of life.
Eventually they had to distil three arguments for and three against assisted suicide as required by the
exam and to offer what they understood as a Christian response.
In this example Angela has redesigned her pedagogy to offer a formative experience which nurtured
virtues of empathy, openness to ambiguity, listening etc. rather than perpetuating the adversarial
approach of fors and againsts that is embedded in her GCSE syllabus and which promotes the
notion that Christian ethics is mainly about winning arguments.

THE PE TEACHER
James is a physical education (PE) teacher who is troubled by the culture of popular sport and its
influence on boys. In particular he is concerned by the predominance of a win at all costs mentality,
which he sees as particularly transmitted through football. His vision is that the experience of learning
in PE will form an alternative character in his students, the vision of which derives from the schools
Christian ethos. He described his aim as love within a team framework. One thing that he was
very clear about was that he didnt want to compromise the curriculum by using PE as a vehicle
for Christian sermonettes or epilogues. He had decided that his approach to teaching would be to
emphasise learning to coach, rather than winning with its association of attaining personal glory.
The PE focus of the observed lesson was learning the push-pass in hockey. Certainly the idea that there
is a Christian way to do this would seem very weird to most PE teachers. In the lesson James first
demonstrated the components of a good push-pass, then he split the class into pairs and they had to
perfect their technique together. When asked subsequently what they thought they were learning in
the lesson, the students said straight away that they were learning how to be an encourager. The
reason for this was that the focal task of the lesson had been to coach their partner in the skill of the
push-pass and to record what techniques were used in encouraging them in their skill development.
James comment on this lesson was that without the challenge to reframe his teaching within a
Christian ethos, I would have just taught the push-pass and individually as performers, so the thing
that definitely had to change was that there was a coaching element.

THE MATHS TEACHER

Julie entered teaching following dissatisfaction with a career in banking and its shift from a service to
a sales culture. She had a strong sense of vocation, which embraced both a love of maths in its own
right and a sense of responsibility for herself as a role model for the students. At first her perception
was that incorporating Christian ethos into maths meant putting a big chunk of something into the
lesson, which she found difficult to conceive of. In discussion with the research team, she took up the
idea that the Christian ethos could be about the sort of mathematician that emerged from her lessons,
rather than her as teacher talking about Christian chunks of something.
For the observed lesson, Julie decided to redesign her approach to a revision lesson on averages. The
students had previously learnt about the different types of average and in the observed lesson were
asked to calculate the average price of a shopping basket for four different supermarkets. The task
was to work out which was the best supermarket. Once the calculation of mode, mean, median
etc. were completed, Julie led a carefully scaffolded discussion where whole class teaching was
interspersed with small group work. In this students were asked to consider the truthfulness of the
different supermarkets use of averages in their advertising. Her aim was that her students did not
just treat maths as a tool for generating answers required by the answer book, but as an aid in the
making of virtuous decisions. Learning maths in the context of a Christian ethos in Julies class is, then,
about making virtuous judgments and may involve challenging the prevailing consensus (as she did in
discussions of the cheapest deal). It is about, for example, making virtuous judgments when we shop.