Healing and Hacking the Research-Practice Divide
A Teacher's Guide to Educational Research
- Rachael Gabriel - University of Connecticut, USA
- Kate Roberts
Research should serve teachers—not the other way around.
Many teachers have experienced "the research" as something done to them rather than for them—findings handed down without context, mandates without mechanisms, tools that consume instructional time without improving it. Healing and Hacking the Research–Practice Divide argues that this situation isn't inevitable. Research can be powerful, humanizing, and liberatory—but only when it travels with humility, and only when teacher knowledge is recognized as evidence, too.
Rachael Gabriel and Kate Roberts offer practical tools, actionable frameworks, and honest analysis of how research moves through schools—and where it breaks down. Learn to evaluate studies, recognize their limits, and build inquiry practices that genuinely center your students, your context, and your professional knowledge.
This important guide offers tools teachers need to demystify research data and translate debate into informed practice. Inside you'll find:
- A definition of what "good" research is, what it provides, and its realistic limits
- Practical frameworks for evaluating research and integrating it into your teaching
- Tools for understanding why the research–practice divide exists—and who benefits from keeping it in place
- Actionable resources for collective classroom inquiry
The divide between research and practice isn't just a knowledge gap. It's a structural problem. This book gives you the language, the frameworks, and the confidence to name that gap, navigate it, and begin to heal it.
"At its heart, this book serves as both an invitation and a guide for educators who are looking for a way to elevate their practice by deepening their understanding of what research is (and isn’t) and how to use it to make schools better places for students (and themselves!). Research often seems out of reach for teachers who barely have time to finish their piles of grading, and so it becomes information distilled and provided to teachers, never to be questioned. Rachel and Kate reframe this approach, inviting everyone into the conversation and packing the chapters with practical strategies for how to “hack” the system in ways that value the expertise of educators, situate the work in appropriate research, and center students’ needs. They write in a way that uplifts teacher knowledge and experience and encourages using it as a conduit for conversations between research and practice. They prioritize fidelity to students, and work within a framework of what they call “hopeful realism.” Kate and Rachael put so much of themselves into this easy-to-read book, often using real-world metaphors as a mechanism for building new knowledge and insights around research and how it can help educators regain a sense of agency that seems to have been incrementally diminishing over the last 25 years. Reading this book feels like having a conversation with really smart and funny friends who are there to listen, understand, and help you find a path forward when you’re feeling a little lost in the chaos of an overwhelming education system."
"Few debates in education have grown as heated, or as hollow, as the ones we wage over research-based practice. Educators are urged to follow the evidence without ever being taught how to read it, question it, or disagree about it well, and so a profession full of thoughtful people keeps mistaking certainty for rigor. In Healing and Hacking the Research-Practice Divide, Kate Roberts and Rachel Gabriel do justice to both halves of their title. They tend to the real wounds this divide has left in our field, and they hand educators the protocols and tools to study what genuinely works in their own settings and to broker honest conversations with the colleagues who see things differently. The result is generous and clear-eyed, rich with practical guidance and grounded in deep respect for the people who will use it. I suspect this book will change how a great many of us think about evidence, and, perhaps more importantly, how we talk to one another about it. "
"While there has been plenty of ink spilled lamenting the theory/practice divide in education, few books offer such a powerful repertoire of resources, tools, and frameworks as Healing and Hacking the Research-Practice Divide in Education. As a teacher-researcher straddling that gap myself, I know firsthand how challenging that bridge-building work can be, and am confident that Gabriel and Roberts's book will be an asset for scholars and educators alike. Considering the rising tide of top-down policies, products, and programs being forced on teachers in the name of "the research," this guide couldn't be more timely."
"For educators whose heads are spinning from the various, sometimes-competing messages they receive across their days in classrooms, schools, professional development sessions, and research reports, this is the book for you. Part how-to guide and part therapist, reading this book is like sitting down with a wise and trusted colleague when you’re feeling mired in uncertainty or just need to talk through your ideas with someone else. While you will not come away with all the answers, you will see your uncertainty in a new light: as something to be shared and cultivated as part of what it means to be an educator and a person—to teach, learn, and reflect on common values in the company of others."
"Healing and Hacking the Research-Practice Divide is insightful, thorough, and an ease to read. I hope many schools will embrace the protocols presented here by Gabriel & Roberts. Teachers are already dedicated to methods and practices that move young people towards facility and problem-solving in all content areas. This book is a starting place for new research into those practices with a critical eye. For a teaching staff that wants to learn together and is open to questioning and clarifying what they think they know, this book will be read with wonder. Here is a way to discover answers together. This book is brilliant. "