Last month, AARE released a blog post with a shocking revelation: teachers aren’t reading academic research. Groundbreaking stuff. I haven’t seen such a pointless discovery since someone realised toddlers aren’t into Nietzsche or that cats don’t follow instructions. Apparently, classroom teachers, you know the ones that are overworked, underpaid, and one broken photocopier away from a nervous breakdown, aren’t curling up with the Journal of Cognitive Semiotics on a Tuesday night. Who knew?
Well… anyone who’s ever worked in a school, for starters. Or tried to get a teacher to read more than the top bullet point in a faculty meeting agenda. Or anyone who teaches teachers, and has watched them glaze over at the mere mention of the word “theorise.” So, to my esteemed colleagues in the academy who are shocked that the classroom crowd isn’t devouring your 9,000-word opus on critical post-structural reconfigurations of pedagogical identity formation, I have two words: no shit.
Let’s stop pretending this is a mystery. The reasons teachers don’t read academic research aren’t hidden in some dusty data set. They’re obvious to anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in a staffroom, trying to explain anything that isn’t directly related to surviving the next week of teaching.
Teachers are drowning in work, and let’s be honest, your article is not the life raft. Teachers are already triaging their professional lives like battlefield medics. Between planning lessons, marking essays, attending meetings, wrangling teenage hormones, calling parents, and deciphering contradictory emails from four layers of middle management, you’ll have to forgive them if “reading a journal article” is not topping their list. Oh, I forgot to mention trying to go to the bathroom once a day, between recess and lunch duty.
Teachers are exhausted. They don’t have the time or headspace to read research that doesn’t make a clear, immediate, visible impact on tomorrow’s lesson or next week’s chaos. Unless your paper comes with a ready-to-use lesson plan, a foolproof behaviour chart, or a magic worksheet that keeps Year 9 from staging a classroom coup (and isn’t hidden behind a $47 paywall), it’s not getting read. Teachers aren’t browsing JSTOR between yard duty and their fifth coffee; they need practical help, not gated theory wrapped in jargon.
The dirty little secret is that academic research is (mostly) written for other academics.
This isn’t just a teacher problem, it’s a university problem. And I’ve said this before, in several flavours:
- In The Publish or Perish Paradox, I wrote about how universities reward volume, not value. You get a pat on the head for publishing, even if no one reads it (except your mom, maybe).
- In A Call for Meaningful Academic Contribution, I called out the academic self-referential circus, where we write papers to cite each other and get promoted.
- And in Beyond Rejection, I pointed out that resilience in academia has come to mean tolerating meaninglessness as long as it leads to a Scopus badge and a Q1 ribbon.
The point is: we’re not writing for teachers, even when we say we are.
Academic writing is for promotion panels. It’s for grant reviewers, ranking committees, and ERA audits. And, as a result, much of it is written in a language that even English teachers don’t recognise. We stuff our papers with big words, obscure theories, and convoluted frameworks, not to illuminate, but to signal that we belong in the club.
You want teachers to read your work? Try writing like you’d talk to a human. Or, radical idea: write a short version. Write a blog. Post a summary on LinkedIn. Make a TikTok. Do anything other than dumping a PDF on ResearchGate and expecting busy professionals to wade through it like it’s a page-turner.
Another hard truth: your research (and mine) just isn’t that useful. This is the hard truth that the AARE post dances around: a significant chunk of published educational research is not useful to classroom teachers (or anyone, for that matter). Some of it is so abstract or narrowly focused that you’d need a decoder ring and a sabbatical to figure out how it applies to teaching Year 7 English. Too many papers are just recycled common sense in a lab coat – lit reviews posing as revelations, or worse, stuff teachers figured out years ago, now buried under buzzwords and bar graphs no one asked for.
You want to blow a teacher’s mind? Don’t tell them that feedback is essential. They know. They’ve read Dylan Wiliam (or at least had him quoted at them during professional development). Show them how to make students actually use feedback (see my last post for some ideas). Or help them design an assessment that isn’t a soul-crushing 45-minute essay followed by six hours of pointless marking. In other words, give them something they can use, not just something to cite.
Perhaps the most important and least discussed issue: teachers don’t believe academic research will help them. And can you blame them? Most of the time, reading an academic paper doesn’t lead to more time, better results, or less stress. Worse, it often feels like another demand from people who’ve forgotten what teaching actually looks like. “Here’s my 10,000-word study on reflective praxis in trans-modal literacy ecologies. Please embed it in your next unit.”
Why would teachers invest in reading research when nothing in their environment incentivises it? They don’t get paid more (academics do). They don’t get promoted (academics do). Their school doesn’t give them extra time or reduce their teaching load (the academy does). If anything, for teachers, it’s just another thing to do on a Sunday evening. For academics, though, it makes perfect sense to pump out papers no one reads. Citations build careers, journals chase metrics, and climbing the ivory tower doesn’t require your work to actually matter in a classroom
If you want research to matter, make it matter. Here’s a crazy thought: if we’re serious about research impacting teaching, we need to design research differently, communicate it differently, and incentivise it differently. Teachers don’t need 40-page papers. They need infographics, videos, blogs, conversation starters, toolkits, and summaries. They need researchers to visit classrooms, run workshops, co-teach, or better yet, collaborate. The good news? Some excellent researchers are doing this already. There are great examples of research-practice partnerships, embedded researchers, and teacher-led inquiry models (Q-Project, Teachers and Teaching Research Centre and others). But let’s not pretend this is the norm. Right now, the incentive structure in universities pushes in the opposite direction.
We say we care about impact, but we measure publications. We say we want to reach teachers, but we write for each other. We talk about knowledge mobilisation, but don’t build the relationships or platforms to make it happen.
Final word? We knew this already.
To those academics gasping at the revelation that teachers aren’t reading your work: Welcome to the real world. It’s not that teachers don’t care. It’s that we haven’t made it worth their while.
So maybe the next time we write a grant application, or design a study, or polish a manuscript, we ask a better question than “Which Q1 journal should I submit to?” How about: Will this help anyone teach better tomorrow?
If the answer is no, that’s fine—write it anyway. But don’t be shocked when teachers don’t read it. They’re too busy doing the actual work.
And here’s the uncomfortable bit: I’m not exempt. I’m part of the same system—publishing, presenting, playing the game. I can talk all I want about relevance and accessibility, but I’m still submitting to Q1 journals and refreshing my Google Scholar profile. So no, I’m not standing outside the problem wagging a finger. I’m in it, boots and all.
The difference is, I’m not surprised no one’s reading my stuff. I’m not crying into my pillow about being irrelevant. I know the kind of research I write won’t stop a Year 9 meltdown or make tomorrow’s lesson plan any easier. And I don’t pretend otherwise.
But maybe, every now and then, I write a blog post that can speak to people who do the work. I don’t get citations for it. I don’t earn points on my next performance review. But it’s the one thing I do that might matter to someone outside the echo chamber. Not because I’ve got the answers, but because I’m willing to admit I don’t, and I know you don’t have time to wade through a paywalled, peer-reviewed thesis on “pedagogical scaffolding in post-industrial contexts” just to find that out.
Maximising Student Potential 