Publish with Camtree

What does Camtree publish?

Camtree publishes reports of close-to-practice educational research in the Camtree Digital Library. Our aim is to make it easy for you to share your work, so we provide tools, examples, and e-learning to support you – and we are developing more!

A research report might be the result of an individual curriculum innovation, a programme of continuing professional development, or a taught course or research project. What is important is that it is based on inquiry in a classroom or educational setting, and that it discusses implications for practice – your own practice, or that of other educators.

Camtree research reports are a way to celebrate and share educators’ practice, bring ‘tacit’ knowledge to the surface, and equip and inspire other educators to reflect, innovate and carry out their own studies.

What is a Research Report?

Scope and Focus

Reports need to describe an innovation or inquiry carried out in an educational setting – not necessarily a classroom.

Reports should have a focus on practice and discuss the implications of what you have done or discovered, in a way that would make it possible for a reader to try something similar.

Reports need to provide enough context and background for readers to understand why you did what you did, and to understand how they might need to adapt your practice to their own setting.

Length and Style

Research reports are typically between 1800-5000 words long. Any shorter than this and they are unlikely to have enough detail to be useful for other educators.

We will take longer reports, but we’ve found that these have less of an impact with busy teachers!

We are happy to take work written as personal. reflective accounts – you don’t have to write in academic language (though you are welcome to). We are more concerned with receiving authentic accounts of educators’ innovations and insights.

Format

Our preferred format for reports is a narrative account with clear aims, description of activities, findings and implications. If you have compiled a portfolio of work (for example) we can give you some guidance on how to turn this into a research report.

Reports can be submitted with other materials – resources you’ve created, examples of learners’ work, or data you’ve collected.

They do need to be accompanied by a structured abstract and some keywords. This makes them ‘indexable’ in the Camtree library.

Report Templates

We have developed a. set of report ‘templates’ which are designed to help you plan an inquiry and write a research report. There’a a generic one and another designed to report on Research Lesson Studies. These are available to download in the Resources Area. We are currently developing new templates for other models of inquiry. There’s also a general ‘stylesheet’ for report which don’t fit the templates available.

If you are a member of a Camtree partner organisation, you may be provided with and alternative template for your report.

The templates and the sections within them are for guidance – inquiries and the reports that result won’t all have the same structure. As long as your report addresses the quality criteria and is accompanied by a structured abstract, your report will probably be publishable in the Camtree digital library.

Peer Review and Quality Criteria

All new submissions to the library are peer reviewed against a set of quality criteria. These are shared with authors and reviewers, and underpin the advice and prompts in our report templates.

In the library we have two main kinds of collections:

General Collections – for individual report submissions; these are peer reviewed by trained Camtree reviewers – these, you submit directly to Camtree using the submission form.

Partner Collections – for report submissions from Camtree partners, peer reviewed by trained reviewers from the partner organisation and Camtree reviewers. You may submit your report to a facilitator within your organisation for initial review before it is sent on to Camtree.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about publishing with Camtree. If you have other questions, please get in contact and we’ll do our best to help.

We are interested in hearing from teacher trainees and students who have carried out close-to-practice research as part of their initial training programmes or a Masters’ degree. If you have completed a thesis (typically 7000 words or more at undergraduate level and often much more than this at Masters’ level), we can publish this along with a shorter research report with a focus on the implications of your research for practice.

We’ve developed a version of our report template specially for authors who want to write a research report based on a dissertation or thesis. This is available in the resources area.

If you have completed a PhD or EdD thesis, then we would be interested in receiving a research report with a focus on practice, although the thesis itself will probably have been archived in a university research repository. We would recommend you referring to the full thesis and providing its URL in your university repository in the text of your Camtree research report. If your university does not currently publish theses online, then get in touch with us and we may be able to help.

If you’ve built up an e-portfolio, or a ‘scrapbook’ as part of a course or professional development programme, you may have all the components of a research report. We can’t publish the whole portfolio, however. But we would be very happy to give you some guidance on how to restructure it into a report.

Yes, absolutely! You can include these as appendices with the report or separately from it. These are very valuable for any educators who might want to learn from your experiences and try something similar. You can also include presentations or training materials you’ve used to share your findings with colleagues.

We know that many professional development programmes require participants to develop a new resource, learning activity or ‘artefact’ and then write an evaluation or reflective commentary. We’re very happy to publish these if they meet our quality criteria. But we don’t accept learning resources or lesson plans alone, without the evaluation or commentary.

You can find report templates and other materials in the resources area.

You can find the quality criteria and some examples of how they were applied to reports on this page.

And the Camtree Digital Library has examples of reports.

No. We will accept reports in any language as long as the structured abstract is in English (as well as the original language).