Enhancing Practice through Classroom Research

A Teacher's Guide to Professional Development

Caitriona McDonagh, Mary Roche, Bernie Sullivan, Máirín Glenn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138394575
• eBook ISBN: 9780429684661
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Offering updated references, questions for reflection, the latest case studies, and current advice relating to data protection and storage, this second edition of Enhancing Practice through Classroom Research provides an accessible introduction to understanding and improving teaching and learning through a process of reflection, research, and action. Divided into five parts, this self-study action research approach emphasises the positive aspects of enhancing practice and reflects how this can lead to higher levels of teacher autonomy and agency.

With the addition of a chapter dedicated to the links between action research and well-being, this book provides a step-by-step guide to beginning your own research and covers topics such as:

• Identifying an area of professional concern or interest
• Exploration of educational values
• Developing a better understanding of practice
• Thinking critically about educational practices
• Finding a research methodology

Drawing on the authors' new experiences of working with second level, third level, and postgraduate educators, as well as their work designing postgraduate programmes in the field of critical reflection and self-study action research, this friendly guide provides a straightforward approach to classroom research. It is the perfect resource for all student and practising teachers looking for support in classroom research, as well as those wanting to pursue effective professional development or further studies in an area of interest.

Part 1

Thinking professionally

Reflecting on practice

Mary Roche

In this part I invite you to reflect on your practice. This is being done with a view to enhancing it, or developing a deeper understanding of what you do, or maybe even improving an area of practice that bothers you in some way. Reading this book in itself could be seen as evidence that you are interested in professional development and that you care about your work. I could also assume that you care because you know that what you do on a daily basis has profound influence on the lives of others, particularly your students. You might be the kind of teacher who is always on the lookout for anything that will help you to be a better teacher – because of your sense of care and professionalism. Perhaps you are engaging in a postgraduate degree or some other form of academic accreditation so as to advance further in your career in education. You may now wish to research an area of your practice and are looking for some ideas about doing action research. This, too, shows care. In fact, we could say that ‘caring’ is one of your educational values and is already visible. In the next two chapters, we will explore ideas like these further. At this point, I invite you to provide yourself with a notebook or copybook that can be used as a reflective journal. As you read, write down any thoughts, ideas, comments or questions that strike you. Use the journal as you work through the various reflective activities throughout this book. This journal can count as a data source as well as a tool for reflexivity – if and when you reflect on your reflections.

In Chapter 1, I use some reflective questions to guide you through the process of identifying some values for yourself so as to help you identify a research topic that will engage you or that you might even be passionate about. This chapter will examine how it is possible to hold values and yet deny or ignore them in practice. If the latter is the case, it may be giving rise to some tension or concern about your practice. I describe how this was certainly true for me and how I began to get to grips with it.

In Chapter 2, I show how my concern about my practice was located in wider conceptual frameworks of care, freedom and justice. Using case studies from my practice, I take ‘care’ as an example and show how I researched the concept in order to get a better understanding of it. I provide you with reflective questions and activities that will help you begin identifying the conceptual frameworks of your study for yourself.

Chapter 1

Identifying an area of professional concern or interest

This chapter explores:

• Identifying an area of professional interest or concern
• Researching one’s practice: self-study action research
• Exploring values: a look at what I did and some guidance to help you identify an area of interest or concern in your practice
• How professional reading and reflection can help you to identify key questions about your research

Identifying an area of professional interest

It is a difficult process to identify one’s educational values. To help with this, I explain how I went about it. I hope the reflective activities in this chapter will give you an opportunity to think about my story and that they will provide guidance for you as you begin your research. Having critically thought about what is important as a professional, I invite you to further reflect on a form of research for exploring one’s practice – a self-study action research approach.

Your enquiry into how you can enhance your practice is, perhaps, being driven by a sense of curiosity or even of dissatisfaction with some aspect of your practice. It may be that your values and your practice are in tension. We (you and I) need to establish why you are curious about this aspect of your work and what might be at the root of that sense of dissonance. This is one of the first steps you need to take in order to develop your understanding of how you might become the kind of teacher you would like to be. This means that you will be beginning a highly authentic and relevant form of professional development. We can assume that underpinning your enquiry is a wish to change or improve so as to develop both what you know and how you teach. Perhaps you also wish to understand more about education in general. Your enquiry will help you to develop a rationale for why you do what you do and how you might learn to do it better. You may well have identified two further educational values – intellectual curiosity and professional integrity. Your intellectual curiosity is evident in your wish to understand more and your professional integrity is shown in your wish to enhance your knowledge of your practice.

If you are reflecting on these matters and are open to the possibility of change, then reflection could also be identified as another positive aspect of your professionalism, as could open-mindedness – a core value for improving practice. Similarly, being open to change is essential when aiming to enhance one’s practice. As we said in the introduction, Dewey (1933) identified open-mindedness, whole-heartedness and intellectual responsibility as qualities of reflective practitioners. I would add intellectual curiosity to Dewey’s list also. That, after all, is what is at the root of a research process to enhance practice.

You might like to begin to articulate some more of your intuitive values about education and the underpinning epistemological and ontological stances that inform them. These terms will be discussed in more detail later. For now, let’s just say that your epistemological stance is to do with how you view knowledge, knowledge acquisition and knowledge generation; your ontological standpoint informs how you view the nature of being – your understanding of how you are in relation to others. Identifying and articulating these standpoints will be a key part of your process of self-study action research.

When I began postgraduate study, I remember being intrigued by a question posed on the first day by our supervisor who asked us to explain what we understood by the words ‘education’ and ‘schooling’. Because we were all teachers, I was sure our answers would be very similar. They were not. They varied hugely and I was aware, for possibly the first time, that assumptions need to be examined in order to uncover taken-for-granted understandings about the world of teaching and learning. It seems crazy to me now, to think that I could ever have been that naive. I had never really given any thought to what education was about or what constituted intelligence, learning or teaching. I must have sat in a little fog as the lecturers’ words washed over me in Foundations of Education lectures at college. I remember having to memorise huge swathes of text about Piaget and Hedge Schools and Plato’s Cave. None of it really resonated with me or excited me. By the time I started my research two decades later, I knew better. And yet, my postgraduate tutor’s question about education and schooling and the subsequent range of different responses made me marvel. For the first time, I realised the world of education was a lot more puzzling than I had assumed.

As you embark on your classroom research you may also begin to feel that education is a very complex and political area with many contested terrains and zones of competing interests. In fact, you are probably coming to see that your place in the world of education is extremely value-laden. Education is never neutral or value-free – we all have ideas about it, although we may not ever have articulated these ideas, even to ourselves. The area of educational research is equally complex and also intricately woven through with a variety of values and assumptions, which again depend on the researcher’s epistemological and ontological stances. In later chapters, you will be guided through a process of critical interrogation of some of these issues. I will also refer to some of them here.

Being professional and developing professionally involve constantly monitoring one’s practice and questioning oneself. This was not always considered to be a feature of teachers’ professional development. Baldan and Güven suggest that:

teachers should be involved in activities aiming for the improvement of their professional competencies … from their initial years to their retirement … [The] continuous professional development of teachers has been adopted as one of the major strategies in enhancing the quality of educational services by many countries.

(Baldan and Güven 2018: 2)

Matherson and Windle (2017: 32) state that teacher professional development can no longer be restricted to what they call the ‘sit and get’ model of the past. They argue that teacher professional development must be imagined so that it must transform to a succession of opportunities offering a myriad of possibilities aligned with the desires of teachers. They conclude that teacher professional development should be just as dynamic as the education its participants are expected to provide. Citing Evans (2014) they add:

Professional development is multidimensional. To gain the most from [it] as well as to impact the learning of students and pedagogical and personal practices, teachers must continue to change their attitudes, intellectual capacity, and mindsets.

(Matherson and Windle 2017: 32)

Johnson and Golombek (2002: 2) stated that, for teachers to develop as professionals, there must be ‘a process of reshaping teachers’ existing knowledge, beliefs, and practices rather than simply imposing new theories, methods or materials on teachers’. I now show how I began this process of reshaping my practice for myself. I hope you will be able to benefit from my ‘wisdom of hindsight’ as I point out some of the errors I made. Here is a synopsis:

A look back at my practice:

I began teaching in the early 1970s. Despite the focus on child-centred learning in the ‘New Curriculum’ (Ireland 1971), I still believed that teaching was largely about transmission of knowledge. I was putting my ‘apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie 2002) into practice. Borg (2004: 274) explains such an apprenticeship as ‘the phenomenon whereby student teachers arrive for their training courses having spent thousands of hours as schoolchildren observing and evaluating professionals in action. This contrasts with novices learning other professions, such as those of lawyers or doctors’.

In the mid-1990s, however, I began to change my practice from a didactic one to a more inclusive, dialogical one that recognised my students’ capacity for dialogue and critical thinking. I began to study that transformation in the late 1990s through a self-study action research approach. I changed hugely because of this process of enquiry. I went from being the kind of teacher who followed templates created by others – worksheets and teacher manuals – to a more creative and autonomous practitioner who took responsibility for how and what I taught. As I transformed my practice, I became a critical thinker too, helped along by discussions with my students. These discussions were initially based on analyses of children’s traditional stories and led me to new and exciting critical engagement with the canon. Because I was studying for my master’s degree by then, I would often present my data in tutorials and the questions asked by my study group and critical colleagues were hugely beneficial for helping me refine my understanding. Likewise, my tutor’s critique was invaluable.

Throughout the first part of my career, I generally stood at the top of the class and ‘talked at’ the children. That’s what I thought teaching was all about. From the mid-1990s onwards, though, having begun to question my didacticism, I introduced classroom discussion into my timetable. Initially, these sessions were limited to discussing traditional stories, like Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella, in picturebook format. Lobel’s (1971) Frog and Toad series was a firm favourite also. As my students and I talked about stories together, I began for the first time to wrestle – along with my seven- and eight-year-old pupils – with questions such as: Was Jack brave or foolish? Was he actually a hero? (Shermis 1992) What is a hero? Why are the female characters in stories always so passive? Are beauty and docility rewarded by marriage? When H (aged 9), newly arrived from another country, said: ‘courage is wearing clothes your mum buys in charity shops’, I found myself rethinking the concept of bravery. The discussions were amazing and no-one was more amazed than me. I realised that I was developing as a critical thinker too, helped by my students (Roche 2015).

Suddenly, I was questioning everything – institutional practices, uniforms and workbooks, timetables, even the curriculum! And then I realised that the questions raised by our classroom discussions couldn’t be corralled anymore into a weekly hour. They spilled over into every area of the classroom. Children regularly challenged me and each other, courteously agreeing or disagreeing, or asking for further clarification. It was exciting and my teaching methods were now changing. The classroom dynamic was different, it had begun to transform from monologic to dialogic; my relationship with my students – and theirs with me and with each other – was different. I felt happier.

The process as outlined above seems simple. How difficult could it be to engage students in discussion and critical thinking? It looks straightforward. On the contrary, however, it was often fraught because it took me a long time to see that all I had to do was relax and see my students as the people with whom I worked. I frequently felt that, like Sisyphus, I was rolling an enormous boulder up a hill.

Researching one’s practice: self-study action research

It might be good to point out at this point that although critical reflection into one’s practice is difficult, it can also be a very positive experience and can contribute to professional and personal well-being, which we will discuss in Chapter 9. I now explain how this may occur as part of a self-study action research process. This approach to research is grounded in particular values about the nature of knowledge, the nature of research – particularly educational research – and the role of the researcher. As I mentioned earlier, we (authors) call these epistemological values (and you can read more about this concept in Chapters 3 and 4). You...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: Thinking professionally: Reflecting on practice
• PART 2: Critical thinking about practice
• PART 3: What to do about the questions identified
• PART 4: Generating evidence from data: Making meaning
• PART 5: Action research and well-being
• Bibliography
• Index