An Even Better way to Update the Blog: Leading by Reading!

Now I'm ahead on my main blog with three weeks of pre-loaded posts, pre-written and ready to go, it's given me enough of a buffer to focus on updating one particular topic-area.

I've opted to update the 'Education' topic area first, which is one of nine major topic areas I intend to update on a three-year rolling cycle - 4 months per topic area.

I think for sociology a three year update cycle is realistic, I mean ideally once per year would be better but TBH society doesn't generally change so fast for that kind of pace to be necessary, and if there are any especially significant events that demand a particular area requires updating I can always jiggle things about as necessary.

Fortunately for me I wanted to start with Education because that's usually topic number one in the two year A-level sociology specification and the chosen governmental response to the pandemic in the form of lockdown and several months of closures to schools does mean this area is the most in demand of an immediate update - especially now that the first cohort research is coming out analysing the effects of lockdown - primarily for me in the form of some excellent longitudinal research from the Sutton Trust.

My new read and research first approach - defo more productive!

I've only been doing this for two days now but I like it.

I opted to spend money just looking at one area: perspectives on education and all the various claims different theories make about the role of education in society, and then thinking through the kind of evidence I could look at to evaluate these claims and just simply jotted down some key words to look up.

But before I started on the key words I decided to do a deep-dive into some of the research of some major organisations that focus on education - Sutton Trust being one, and a few others (such as the IFS)
and then simply read and summarise the research, which in some cases yielded me some tasty new blog posts in their own right, but then I also started doing a simple table summarising the research and then noting down which concepts the research either supported or criticised.

For example the Sutton Trust research shows that kids from Independent schools were much less disrupted during lockdowns than the kids from state comprehensives - unsurprising I know, but this research operationalises and quantifies how - for example private school kids report doing 7 hours more study per week than state comprehensive kids.

And so this research is against the Functionalist idea that schools function as a meritocracy it's also against the idea that policies promote equality of opportunity - and it's agains the postmodern idea that Home Ed is a good idea - so one piece of evidence I can use to update at least three posts (probably more, I've yet to go through and check thoroughly.

This makes my life a lot easier than what I'd been doing before - looking at one post and then researching the evidence and then updating - now I've started to accumulate the research, and I'll carry on for the rest of December, maybe even January, exhaust my sources and summarise as I go, then I'll drop in the updates on the various posts I've got during February or even March.

I probably won't do a whole three months of reading before updating, I'd go nuts, I'll split the cycle into two or three, it's good to keep updating on a regular basis for SEO purposes.

And in the meantime, I get some nice juicy new posts too - some of the heavier pieces of research are posts in their own right!

And this is making me feel like I'm doing a pretty thorough job which is nice!