As an outcome of great interest in the ELLI research, a group of professionals with training and education backgrounds formed what became the ELLI Research and Development Team. Many ELLI R&D projects have been created over the past few years, each in a setting which was enthusiastic about using ELLI and which added a new dimension to the research.
The projects have their own research questions and methodologies and have so far reached out into five nursery or infant schools, nine primary schools, seven secondary schools, one secure young offenders' institution, one regional training programme for hard-to-reach NEET (not in education, employment or training) learners aged 16-18, and a unique collaboration of twelve universities. Lasting between nine months and three years and generally involving from 10 to 20 staff and anything from 150 to 1500 students, they are producing new and interesting data about how ELLI is best deployed in different settings and what happens to learning power in different groups and cultures.
Much of ViTaL's work has involved designing and managing these ELLI R&D projects, providing the school-based training, consultations, evidence-gathering, data-analysis, oral feed-back and report-writing involved. Through the ELLI R&D programme, students, practitioners and researchers are all learning together.
In this way, ViTaL forges links between research, policy and practice in education: making research practical and accessible to teachers; bringing evidence of resulting good practice back into the academy; disseminating findings and building a case for influencing policy, by demonstrating the positive impact of life-enhancing values on teaching, learning and shared educational, political and social goals, such as 'Every Child Matters'.
If you are interested in using ELLI in your place of learning, please contact us.