Professional Development Through Action Research

International Educational Perspectives

Christine O'Hanlon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317827177
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written from various perspectives, this book describes ways of using action research to improve teaching and learning. It includes contributions about action research related to: political action; school inclusion; distance learning; feminism; and initial teacher training. The coherent theme of the book is the consistent appraisal of action research as a means of supporting the transformation of educational praxis through practical enquiry and reflexive practice.

Part 1

National Contexts in Action Research

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1 Reflecting Where the Action Is: The Design of the Ford Teaching Project

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John Elliott and Clem Adelman

In 1973, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, we began to set up an action research project into Inquiry/Discovery teaching with the cooperation of local authorities in East Anglia. What follows is an account of the project’s origins and design.

Origins

The basis for the project’s design originated in the work of the Schools Council Humanities Curriculum Project (HCP) under the direction of Lawrence Stenhouse (John Elliott was a member of its central team from 1967–1972). The HCP team faced the problem of supporting teachers who were experiencing great diffi-culty in implementing open discussion, aimed at developing adolescent students’ understanding of controversial value issues. During the experimental period in schools from 1968 to 1970 many of its resources were directed towards helping teachers to adopt and test strategies aimed at resolving some of the most persistent and general problems they faced.

The Evaluation Unit of the Humanities Project, under the direction of Barry MacDonald, completed its measurement programme (Hamingson, 1972) and found that teachers who had received some training and support in adopting and testing the project’s teaching strategies, tended to bring about results which were not paralleled among ‘untrained HCP teachers’ and ‘non-HCP teachers’ samples. These results — along such dimensions as reading, vocabulary, self-esteem, motivation, and concrete-abstract thinking — were such that teachers working in a variety of subject areas would find them desirable. They suggested four main implications:

1. That teaching strategies designed to give pupils greater independence from the teacher as a source of knowledge, and more autonomy over his/her own learning, (Inquiry/Discovery approaches), need not be responsible for a decline in educational standards as argued by the ‘Black Paper’.

Problems that teachers in other curriculum areas had experienced in attempting to realize similar aspirations were investigated. The HCP team felt that it was not so much the aspirations themselves at fault as the distorted processes which often misrepresented their realization.

2. It seemed that teachers trained to adopt the project strategies tended to promote generally desired, but largely unrealized, educational effects by implementing a classroom process which gave pupils greater independence and autonomy in the learning situation. This suggests that some of the strategies, at least, were control variables which generally prevented both the process and its effects from being realized. It pointed to the possibility of being able to identify problems and strategies which could be generalized across subject matters, classrooms and schools.

3. The majority of the project’s strategies rested on a diagnosis of classroom problems. These problems were connected with certain habitual and institutionally reinforced patterns of influence that teachers tended to exert on pupils. The project team found, for example, that teachers tended to foster dependence on the authority of persons rather than evidence and pressed for consensus conclusions rather than open discussion and an understanding of divergent views. Moreover, teachers were often unaware of the sorts of influence they tended to exert in classrooms.

Another implication of the measurement results showed that, since many of the problems faced by HCP teachers might be highly generalizable to other contexts, it would be reasonable to look in all contexts for a diagnosis in terms of general tendencies teachers have to exert certain types of influence on pupils.

4. The training and support the HCP team offered to teachers was aimed at helping them to gain greater autonomy in their situation by systematically reflecting on their own actions and then modifying them in the light of an awareness of their consequences. The team encouraged self-awareness as a basis for decision making rather than dependence on themselves as authorities on classroom matters.

The measurement results might be seen to indicate that the pattern of inservice training and support which fostered systematic reflection on classroom practice has a practical pay-off in helping teachers to narrow the gap between aspirations and realization.

The Design of Support for Teachers

These four implications of HCP formed the basis of the Ford Teaching Project’s design. We saw the tasks of the project and its central team in the following terms:

To Help Teachers already Attempting to Implement Inquiry/Discovery Methods, but Aware of a Gap between Attempt and Achievement, to Narrow this Gap in their Situation

We didn’t try to involve teachers who made no claims to be attempting this approach. Nor did we try to involve many self-styled ‘experts’ who felt they had little to learn but much to offer. In the end we involved fifty teachers from fourteen schools who seemed at the time to go some way towards meeting these criteria. Inevitably we have since discovered some who were suffering certain illusions about what it was they had been attempting. We felt these numbers were the maximum that three central team personnel and three local advisers (appointed by their Authority to take an active interest in the project’s work) could adequately support.

To Help Teachers by Fostering an Action Research Orientation towards Classroom Problems

There are roughly two alternatives open to external agencies wishing to make educational research relevant to particular classroom situations. One, increasingly advocated, seeks to bring teachers and researchers together in a cooperative enterprise. It involves different personnel with distinct but complementary kinds of expertise. The teacher is the expert in classroom policy making, but in order to function in this way he requires the systematic diag-nosis of his situation, which only the researcher can supply. So the teacher gives the researcher access to his problems and classroom. In return the researcher provides him with a diagnosis as a basis for decision making. This conception of action research has its practical limitations. It can only have a limited application in the absence of enough competent people in the field of applied educational research to meet the likely demand for adequate research support. Also, most action researchers have probably been trained in pure research and are based in academic institutions. They are prone to the temptation to sacrifice the practical requirements of action for ‘academic standards’ and ‘research purity’. Since, for teachers, understanding is necessarily instrumental to action, they require research support which is prepared to sacrifice methodological purity to the needs of action. However, to date we have little experience of developing research methods and instruments which furnish teachers with quick but worthwhile diagnoses. The most fundamental problem goes beyond the merely practical. The ‘cooperative view’ of action research seems to us logically to imply dependence by the teacher on others for reflective analysis. Surely, this is inconsistent with placing great importance on the teacher’s power to perform his role autonomously and responsibly.

The degree of autonomy and responsibility a person exercises in his situation, the extent to which he is able to control the consequences of his actions, depends on three main conditions:

1. That he is aware of his own future actions; of what he will, or will not attempt to bring about. This awareness originates in a practical decision to do or attempt some things rather than others, and not in a prediction based on theoretical knowledge about his tendencies to act in certain ways in certain circumstances.

2. That a wide range of possibilities are open to him in a situation of which he is aware. Autonomy is restricted both by the extent to which choice is actually restricted and the extent to which his beliefs about his situation make him unaware of possibilities.

3. That he is aware of his potential relationship to his situation in the natural course of events; of his tendencies to influence his situation in certain ways. This is not to be equated with practical awareness (1) because it originates in detached reflection on the consequences of action rather than in a decision.

For the rest of this article we shall refer to these three conditions of autonomy as practical awareness, situational awareness, and self-awareness. Without spelling out for the moment the way these three forms of awareness relate to foster autonomy we would simply assert that the ability to act autonomously depends on the degree of awareness at each of these three levels.

The activity of teaching necessarily implies that the agent possesses the power to act autonomously. Inasmuch as it involves the attempt to bring about some kinds of learning rather than others, the first condition of practical aware-ness is present. One couldn’t attempt X without having formed the intention to attempt X. Also, X couldn’t be sincerely attempted if a person held no true beliefs about his situation and his own relation to it. Could a madman who seriously believed his pupils were stone carvings and himself to be their sculptor be seriously thought to be in a position to teach them? If the power to act autonomously is at least to some extent a necessary condition for teaching to take place then there is a sense in which a concern for a truer understanding of situation and self — which not improperly could be described as a research attitude — is a latent if not manifest aspect of the teacher’s role.

The fundamental objection we have to the ‘cooperative’ view is the fragmentation it implies between practice and theory, and action and reflection on action, and the teacher’s uncritical dependence on the researcher’s expertise in the area of theory and reflection. This necessarily makes it impossible for the teachers concerned to develop the research function which is a latent and integral function of their role, thereby limiting their capacity to act autonomously.

In the Ford Teaching Project we opted for an alternative conception of action research where action, and reflection on action, are the joint responsibilities of the teacher.

To Support Classroom Action Research in the Area of Inquiry/Discovery Methods

This support would be offered, firstly, by creating the beginnings of a shared tradition of thinking about teaching which would transcend such established educational frontiers’ as subject divisions, classrooms, schools, and the primary and secondary sectors.

With this in mind we set corporate research tasks for our teachers which we hoped would set their situation-specific reflection within a wider context of mutual support. The tasks we set were as follows:

1. To specify the nature of Inquiry/Discovery teaching.

2. To identify and diagnose the problems of implementing Inquiry/Discovery methods, and to explore the extent to which they can be generalized within the project.

3. To decide on strategies aimed at resolving problems, test their effectiveness, and explore the extent to which they can be generalized.

We also established, and have a responsibility for maintaining and adapting an organizational framework which would facilitate the execution of these tasks. First, we got our teachers to agree to meet regularly in school-based teams to compare and contrast experience. Then, we asked headteachers to appoint one member as team coordinator, responsible for convening meetings, liaison with us, and supporting the team’s work in the school generally. Third, we arranged for school teams within easy reach of each other to meet regularly at a nearby Teachers’ Centre. These meetings were convened by a local adviser and we did not attend unless invited. This enabled teachers to criticize our work with them freely and the adviser to report problems which may not have been aired in our presence. Fourth, we arranged for all the teachers involved to meet three times during the two years of the project at 3–5 day residential workshops. The first ‘launching’ conference was held during the Easter vacation.

The tasks set and the support framework outlined are based on a certain assumption which we believe it is our responsibility to test: This is the assumption that it is possible for a group of teachers working in different contexts to produce generalizations about problems, explanations and strategies.

A second method of supporting action research would be by helping teachers to be more aware of the consequences of their actions by systematically monitoring pupils’ accounts of them (Adelman and Elliott, 1973). Accurate self-monitoring by teachers is an important aspect of classroom action research for two reasons. First, teachers need to know whether or not the strategies they decide to adopt produce the consequences intended. If they are ignorant in this respect they are not in a position to identify and resolve obstacles in their path. Secondly, we assume that many of the most persistent and generalizable problems in the area of Inquiry/Discovery teaching can be diagnosed in terms of teachers’ tendencies to influence their situations in ways of which they are largely unaware. In spite of what is being attempted a teacher’s actual performance may bring about unintended effects which ensure failure. If he is to be in a posi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: National Contexts in Action Research
• Part II: Action Research and the Development of Contexts
• Part III: Action Research and Individual Learning
• Notes on Contributors
• Index