Teachers Investigate Their Work

An Introduction to Action Research across the Professions

Allan Feldman, Herbert Altrichter, Peter Posch, Bridget Somekh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315398808
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Now in its third edition, Teachers Investigate Their Work introduces both the theoretical concepts and the practical methods necessary for readers wishing to develop their action research.

Drawing from studies carried out by teachers and other professionals, as well as from the authors' own international practical experience, the book provides detail on multiple educational contexts from primary education to university training and beyond. It contains over 50 practical methods and strategies to put into action, and explores key areas, such as:

• the purpose, roots, and varieties of action research

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• collaborating with a critical friend, research participants, or your peers

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• choosing a data collection method

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• observing and documenting situations

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• making sense of your data

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• action research for professional development.

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This key text also provides crucial tools, such as:

• a simple 'quick start' nine step guide

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• a toolbox for producing written reports

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• a criteria for guiding the quality of action research.

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A concise yet thorough introduction to action research, Teachers Investigate Their Work is an essential, practical, and easily accessible handbook for teachers, senior staff, and researchers who want to engage in innovation and improve their practice.

Chapter 1

Introduction

What will you find in this book?

You have just opened this book, are slowly reading the first lines and starting to build up an impression of what may be contained in the following pages. How can we give you, the reader, an idea of the book’s importance for us, what drove us to devote much energy and time to writing the first edition, revising it for the second edition, and now rewriting it a third time? Wistful thoughts like these invade the consciousness of many authors sitting in front of a manuscript that has achieved a certain status—or at least size—through being written, rewritten, and finally polished. It is now to be given the last finishing touch: the introduction, which will introduce some key ideas and motivate you to read on.

In the first and second editions of the book, we recounted some personal experiences that convinced us of the importance of action research—specifically, research conducted by professionals in order to improve their practice, come to a better understanding of it, and share what they have learned and done with others. For the most part, we retain this same approach to the introduction, even though the events that we recount have slid into the past far enough so that they may have occurred before you were born. However, to us, they still resonate as the salient experiences that brought us to devote our professional work to the furtherance of action research.

In the early 1980s, three of us (Bridget, Herbert, and Peter) were strongly influenced by the work of the Teacher–Pupil Interaction and the Quality of Learning Project (TIQL) in which teacher-researchers investigated what it means to understand a subject or a topic and how students’ understanding can best be developed through classroom work (see Elliott, 1991). At that time, Allan was working as a high school teacher in Philadelphia in the US. While he was not aware of the language of action research, he engaged in reflective practice and wrote about his teaching (see, for example, Feldman, 1981, 1988). In 1989, he began to pursue his doctorate in education and was introduced to the literature of action research by his advisor, Mike Atkin, who was a friend and colleague of Peter and of John Elliott. During that time, he had the opportunity to serve as a critical friend to Bridget, Herbert, and Peter as they prepared the first edition, by ­trying out many of the strategies and approaches with the Physics Teachers Action Research Group (PTARG) that he was facilitating (Erzberger et al., 1996; Feldman, 1996). These projects were exciting because teachers investigated the development of students’ understanding in their own classrooms, shared their experiences, tried to identify and explain common and contradictory findings, developed and experimented with new teaching strategies, and wrote case studies of their work. Although we had different connections with these projects—as a TIQL Project teacher (Bridget), interested observers of TIQL (Herbert and Peter), and a facilitator of the PTARG project (Allan)—for each of us the experience was an important landmark in our professional development. The teachers’ research provided us with new insights into the process of teaching and learning: it paid much closer attention to details and practicalities than other kinds of research; and it probed the differences between stated aims and actual practice in a way that integrated teaching with research. To show you what we mean here are some examples:

In the TIQL Project, Carol Jones (1986), teaching a mixed-age class of seven- to nine-year-olds, investigated their understanding of their schoolwork. She kept notes of what the children did each day, the tasks she set, and anything special about the way in which they carried them out. She soon realized that the children understood the tasks in terms of their previous expectations, and had developed an idea of the sort of work she, as their teacher, would be expecting. Her research then focused on “the extent to which children operate according to criteria of their own, rather than according to the intention of the teacher.” She enlisted the help of an outsider who visited her classroom and interviewed the children. By transcribing and analyzing these interviews she found that the children’s criteria for judging the value and importance of their work were, indeed, different from hers. For example, when they were asked to observe Puss Moth caterpillars, and make drawings and notes of what they saw, they made a clear distinction between writing and drawing, “holding writing to be a more ‘worthwhile,’ or higher status task, than drawing.” In addition, because they were used to being given cards to help with spelling, one child had not understood that the work card gave instructions about how to observe the caterpillars, and instead said, “it just tells you the spellings.” These data suggested that the children were not engaging in the kind of observation and interpretation that Carol had intended, but instead had turned the work into “a routine writing task.” She also found that the children did not value working in collaboration as she did, but instead used the criterion of “liking to have your own ideas” and rejected sharing ideas, calling this “copying.”

In addition to developing their own teaching, some of the TIQL teachers worked in schools where a number of other colleagues were also engaging in research. Thus, it was possible to discuss what they were doing and begin to develop new-shared understandings. This kind of work can be a valuable professional development experience for many individual teachers, but in some schools, with the support of a member of senior management, teachers undertaking research can also make a significant impact on the development of the curriculum as a whole. For example, in a large secondary school, Brian Wakeman, one of the deputy heads, coordinated a group of teachers who all carried out research into aspects of their pupils’ understanding and in this way built up a picture of the kind of changes that it might be helpful for the staff as a whole to implement.

(after Wakeman, Alexander, Bannister, Nolan, & Aspray, 1985)

A few years later, Allan worked with PTARG, which was an example of a group of teachers who taught in different schools who came together to engage in collaborative action research on their practice as physics teachers. PTARG was formed in 1990 and met on a regular basis for three years. The teachers continued to meet occasionally through the year 2000.

Although the teachers helped each other with their research, each had his or her own focus. One of the teachers, Sean Fortrell, had as his starting point for research the dissonance that he noted between the students in two different levels of introductory physics. He found that those in the “Conceptual Physics” class put their effort into attempts to arrive at conceptual understandings of physics. Students in his other course, who he thought to be more able, were principally concerned with getting the correct answers to quantitative physics problems. When he talked about this dissonance at a PTARG meeting, one of the other teachers, Andria Erzberger, told of how she required her students to write down the “approach” that they used to arrive at a numerical solution. This idea, which she had got from a physics text, has the students writing down in words the way that they will go about solving a numerical problem. Sean began to have his students do the same on their homework so that they would begin by describing how they solve problems rather than by writing down equations.

At the end of the school year, Sean reported to the PTARG group what he had learned from the data that he had collected about using this method to encourage his students to think about a problem before attempting to solve it: “What I found was that some students were comfortable with this idea of writing down an approach and others were not. Those who were not generally did not do it very much. Those who were, I found, latched onto it and used it pretty much the year through, especially in test situations. Most of them used it when the problems were difficult and they were searching around for ‘How do I do this?’ They would really sit down and write out their steps. I’m not sure how well it necessarily helped them … For those students who were really reaching and trying to figure out in writing their approach, it would make very clear [to me] that they had no idea of what they were doing. They would write out an approach and you could see, ‘This is what they’re trying to do and it doesn’t make sense. That’s not the way it should be done.’ Very rarely would you find a problem where somebody wrote down an approach in full and then went through and did it all, and did it all right … And so, their approach didn’t describe how they would solve the rest of the problem. So, sometimes it really helped them, other times it just showed that they didn’t understand what they were doing.”

While Sean’s adoption of Andria’s technique did not necessarily give him his hoped-for results, as the year went on the other teachers became aware through their discussion of Sean’s project of a similar dissonance between their goals to teach conceptual understanding of physics and the students’ concern with getting the right answer. Ultimately, a concern for students’ conceptual understanding led the group to the agreement that their goal for the next year would be to develop teaching methods and assessment techniques that would encourage conceptual as well as quantitative learning in all students.

(after Feldman, 1993)

Looking back after all these years we are reminded of the deep impression these projects made on us from our different points of view.

•For Herbert and Peter, as visitors from Austria with experience in educational research and teacher education, it was important and unusual that the TIQL teachers not only saw themselves as “users of knowledge produced by professional researchers” but also did research themselves—producing knowledge about their professional problems and substantially improving their practice. In their developmental work the teachers sometimes made use of external support (for example, in-service training courses and external consultancy from the project team) but, on the whole, retained the initiative in the work themselves. It was impressive that the TIQL teachers were reflecting on their experiences and self-confidently discussing them in public, thus successfully overcoming the notorious disregard for teachers’ knowledge and the tradition of teachers working alone behind closed classroom doors.

•For Bridget, as a TIQL participant, it was an opportunity to stand back after 12 years’ experience as a teacher and analyze the complexities of teacher-pupil interactions and their impact on children’s learning. For the first time she described, and theorized about, her professional practice and found that others were interested. She realized that as a teacher she had insights into classroom processes that were of value in developing educational knowledge.

•For Allan, as facilitator of the PTARG project who had himself just recently been a high school physics teacher, it was an opportunity both to see how many ways in which teachers similar to him could work together to generate new knowledge about their practice and to learn about the practice of action research. As we noted above, Allan was at that time a doctoral student at Stanford University and was a student in a course on action research taught by Peter. In fact, Peter met with the PTARG teachers and helped them with the analytic discourse (M4.6), and provided the teachers with new ways to think about their learning. This can be seen in Sean’s comments about action research:

It reminds me of what Peter Posch was talking about last time, he impressed on me the idea that it’s often more useful, especially in this sort of stuff [action research], to not give the conclusions but to tell the whole story because you can glean so much more from somebody else’s experience hearing the whole tale than you can if you hear ‘I’ve found that this kind of student conversation is good and this is how you should implement.’ It’s kind of empty, it loses something.

(Feldman, 1993, p. 112)

In both of these projects, practitioners understood themselves as “teacher-researchers” and they are not alone. Through action research networks like the Classroom Action Research Network (CARN),¹ the Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA),² and many other around the world,³ and through our interactions with practitioners in many schools and universities, we have met enough individuals and teams working in a comparable way to understand why some people talk about an action research “movement.”

This edition of Teachers Investigate Their Work will be published more than ten years after the second edition and 25 years after the first, which was published in 1993. Since then there have been ups and downs of action research, and teachers and other practitioners have had to contend with shifts in policies and regulations that constrain their practice. However, when we wrote the second edition we noted that action research had become much more widely accepted among many professional groups as a methodology for supporting development and change. This trend has been sustained and therefore we will continue to include in this edition examples from a wide range of contexts and professions. Our experience has been that drawing on cases from different professional groups is enormously helpful in allowing us to better understand our own practice as action researchers. Differences destabilize our assumptions and make it possible to ask new kinds of questions about our own cultural norms. We invite you to explore whether this is also the case for you, by making conscious comparisons between your own professional workplace and those described in our examples.

In this book we attempt to collect and present in concise form the ­various ideas, methods, and strategies for research that have been developed by European and American action researchers in recent years—in particular, in the fields of in-service education...