Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning

Strategies and Tools for the Inquiry Process

Christine Pappas, Eli Tucker-Raymond, Christine Pappas, Eli Tucker-Raymond, Christine C. Pappas, Christine C. Pappas, Eli Tucker-Raymond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136861123
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Designed to facilitate teachers' efforts to meet the actual challenges and dilemmas they face in their classrooms, Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning:

• provides background information and key concepts in teacher research
• covers the "how-to" strategies of the teacher research process from the initial proposal to writing up the report as publishable or presentable work
• illustrates a range of literacy topics and grade levels
• features twelve reports by teacher researchers who have gone through the process, and their candid remarks about how activities helped (or not)
• helps teachers understand how knowledge is constructed socially in their classrooms so that they can create instructional communities that promote all students' learning.

Addressing the importance of teacher research for better instruction, reform, and political action, this text emphasizes strategies teachers can use to support and strengthen their voices as they dialogue with others in the educational community, so that their ideas and perspectives may have an impact on educational practice both locally in their schools and districts and more broadly.

Part One: Defining, Planning, and Starting Your Teacher Research

This part of the book covers the first phases of teacher research. Chapter 1 defines teacher research and offers rationales for such inquiry; it describes the nature of teacher research, placing it within the umbrella of qualitative research by distinguishing this approach from quantitative research; and it outlines the validity and reliability aspects of qualitative teacher research. In this chapter and subsequent chapters in this part of the book (as well as the rest of the book), the voice of the teacher researcher is emphasized. Chapter 2 covers the first, critical step of teacher research: identifying your research questions. It discusses a range of strategies for finding your inquiry questions, including the role of initial fieldnote-taking in this process. Chapter 3 describes how to plan your inquiry—how to create a research proposal, decide on possible data collection techniques to use, and consider the potential ethical issues in your study, including how to prepare participant permission/consent forms. Chapter 4 involves developing a preliminary literature review for your study. It presents strategies for finding, reading, and writing about the published work of others on your inquiry topic in ways that enable you to retain your voice as a teacher researcher. It also shows you how to follow APA (American Psychological Association) citing conventions in composing this literature review.

In the above chapters, when relevant we use examples from the work of our collaborating teacher researchers to illustrate aspects of this early phase of teacher inquiry. Moreover, we offer suggested activities that provide a means to incorporate feedback from a colleague in these early experiences of teacher research.

Chapter 1: So, What Is Teacher Research Anyway?

• What is teacher research exactly?
• How does teacher research relate to quantitative and qualitative research?
• What do concepts of reliability and validity have to do with teacher research?

WHAT IS TEACHER RESEARCH?

Teacher research can be called by different terms, for example action research, teacher reflection, or practitioner research or inquiry. In this book, we mostly use teacher research or teacher inquiry, although we may sometimes refer to these other terms. Also, although the book centers on teacher research on aspects of literacy teaching and learning, this chapter provides background on teacher research more generally.

Teacher research enables teachers to explore the underlying assumptions, biases, values, and ideologies that are inherent in their curriculum and pedagogies. Teachers are seen as knowers, deliberate intellectuals who constantly theorize about their practice as part of practice itself. Although the purpose of this book is to help beginning, novice teacher researchers, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) argue that teacher research develops a worldview and habit of mind that they call inquiry as stance. Such a perspective is a way of knowing and being in the world of educational practice that is found across educational contexts and teachers’ professional careers, one that connects them to other groups and social movements that attempt to challenge inequities that are perpetuated by the educational status quo. Thus, your individual beginning efforts in conducting teacher research on literacy topics, which we hope this book facilitates, represent some of your early steps in this lifelong journey of professional inquiry.

In the Preface, we defined teacher research as intentional, systematic inquiry conducted by teachers in their classrooms or schools that privileges their own voices and points of view (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). It is systematic in that there are ordered ways of gathering and documenting information or experiences in written form (or other multimodal ways such as video images, pictures, or drawings), as well as recollecting, rethinking, and analyzing classroom events. Although useful insights can always be gained through more spontaneous teaching– learning activities, teacher research is an explicit, intentional, and planned enterprise. Finally, it is inquiry because it emanates from, or generates questions about, classroom events, and involves teachers’ reflections as they make sense of their experiences. As such, teacher research is similar to what Langer (1989), a scholar in “positive psychology,” calls mindfulness: paying attention, consciously looking for what is new and different, reconsidering what we know by questioning preconceived ideas. Mindfulness, thus, is the essence of teacher research, one that promotes a distinctive way of knowing of teaching.

Rationales for Teacher Research

Another way to define teacher research is to outline some of the major reasons for it. That is, what are the benefits of teacher inquiry?

• Often, teachers are required to implement school-, district- and state-initiated reform efforts. Yet, the proposed reforms do not address the agendas and prior knowledge of the given teacher on the topic, and therefore, because they are context-free recommendations, are not always successful or sustained. Teacher research asks practitioners to investigate the practical issues or concerns that arise when teaching within a particular social context; it enables teachers to better understand the concepts and ideas of the curriculum as they relate it to particular circumstances. Thus, teacher inquiry helps teachers to implement and sustain reform curricula.
• Teacher research enables teachers to analyze all kinds of data. In addition to their consideration of their students’ standardized test outcomes, teacher research offers the opportunity to gain insight into the features of student learning as it takes place, thereby making possible reflective, data-driven instruction. It can yield insight into the educational experiences of students from diverse ethno-linguistic backgrounds. It allows teachers to identify their own characteristic ways of interpreting students’ behavior, so that they are able to discuss their ideas with students, parents, and other school personnel. It helps teachers to envision complex systems of concepts and data (formative and summative), and situates them in an ongoing and evolving teaching–learning process.
• Teacher research is a way for teachers to come to know their students in more intimate, human ways. It brings teachers closer to their students, not only as learners but also as people. In doing so, it enables teachers to better recognize and teach to their students’ strengths. By focusing on puzzling concerns or tensions in practice, teachers can better think about how their teaching is or is not reaching the people in their classroom.
• The curriculum is always changing, always requiring new concepts and understandings for teachers and students to learn. The best teachers are those who can change and adapt, those who have an inquiry stance toward teaching and learning. Moreover, good inquiry consists of explorations with no predetermined correct answers but with answers that are questioned again and again as new perspectives are utilized.
• Finally, teacher research does not merely improve the lives of participants in the present or near-present. It also contributes to the long-term intellectual and professional develop-ment of the participants and to the general knowledge base in the field. The practice of research cultivates tools and habits of mind necessary for effective teaching, thereby making them empowered professionals. And, because teachers include particular contextual information in their research, others can evaluate the relevance of the findings to different situations.

Cycles of Action Research in Teacher Inquiry

In teacher inquiry, teachers engage in spirals or cycles of observation, reflection, and action for the purpose of developing their own understanding and improving their practice and student learning. Wells (1994) outlines the four recurring major activities of this action research:

• Observing: making systematic observations of particular, relevant aspects of classroom life to determine what is actually happening.
• Interpreting these observations by reflecting on why things are happening as they are. For both things that are working well and those that are not in the situation, teachers attempt to discover the factors that seem to be responsible.
• Planning change by constructing hypotheses for what changes might bring an improvement for the unsatisfactory aspects of the current situation. They consider how one or more of these changes might be undertaken and plan how to implement it.
• Acting out the planned change. They try out a new way to approach their practice.

Integrally related to these components of teacher research is the teacher’s personal theory. A teacher’s interpretative or conceptual framework is critical in teacher inquiry, for it informs and is formed by the cycles of action research; his or her theory becomes a living theory for practice (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006). Adopting a mindful, reflective stance, teacher researchers make the connections between theory and practice more explicit. Their theories are grounded by their practice, and vice versa, and in this reciprocal process teachers are able to develop a more conscious understanding of the underlying basis of their actions.

Subsequent chapters in this part and the next expand the above cycles of action research, including how considering the ideas of the work of others—theoretical and practical ones— supports the teacher research process.

TEACHER RESEARCH AS A QUALITATIVE ENDEAVOR

Teacher research falls under the umbrella of qualitative research. ¹ It is “qualitative research conducted by insiders in educational settings to improve their own practice” (Zeni, 2001, p. xiv). Thus, comparisons of qualitative research versus quantitative research offer further clarification of what teacher research involves. A major goal of qualitative research is to study and understand the research from the inside, via what is called an emic perspective (Burns, 1999; Schwalbach, 2003). Moreover, this view argues that what happens in the social context of research cannot be seen as fixed and quantified; rather, knowledge created in it is diverse, changing, and socially constructed. Thus, instead of pursuing objective facts via 5 testing and confirming or disconfirming a priori hypotheses, qualitative researchers, using a range of tools to collect data from multiple sources (which is called triangulation), offer descriptions and interpretations of the behavior of participants in the naturalistic social context of the research site, the classroom. Unlike quantitative research that controls variables that are set at the onset of the study, qualitative research looks for unseen, unexpected variables that may operate in the research context. As a result, research questions are open-ended and may change during a study if the circumstances warrant them. Also, procedures may alter to collect different data, whereas quantitative approaches tend to follow predetermined research procedures. Finally, the goal of qualitative research is to construct local knowledge, providing extensive explanations and details of outcomes regarding the context and the behavior of the participants. In contrast, the purpose of quantitative research is to outline the outcomes that are seen as general knowledge. Table 1.1 provides the major comparisons of the two research approaches (Burns, 1999; Johnson, 2008; Parsons & Brown, 2002; Schwalbach, 2003). In the next section, we describe other characteristics of the two research modes, ones that are related to those noted in Table 1.1, that aid understandings of what teacher research consists of.

Table 1.1Comparisons of qualitative and quantitative research

FURTHER DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS OF TEACHER RESEARCH

There are other characteristics of qualitative research (as opposed to quantitative research) that further explain the nature of teacher research. These have to do with the concepts of validity and reliability. Because the central purpose of the educational research process in teacher research is to empower the voice of the teacher, traditional concepts of validity and reliability have to be reconceptualized (Gitlin et al., 1992; Mills, 2007).

Validity has to do with how we know what we have collected is accurately representing what we think it is. How do we show that any conclusions we can come to are accurate? In quantitative terms, are we capturing what we purport to measure? Traditionally, it has been believed that validity or “truthfulness” of the data can be guaranteed only by the quantitative researcher who has followed a set of consistent, controlled set of research procedures. However, because teacher research recognizes the systematic inquiry of practical knowledge, where data collection and methods emerge in the naturalistic research site of the classroom, other ways of looking at validity, informed by qualitative research, have been developed (Altrichter, 1993). Table 1.2 summarizes some of the major ones for validity (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007; Guba, 1981; Lather, 1986; Maxwell, 1992; Mills, 2007; Whitehead & McNiff, 2006; Wolcott, 1982, 1994).

Catalytic validity has to do with the ongoing impetus of teacher researchers to study what is really happening in their classrooms—to be persistent in their actions as they gain insights into their underlying assumptions of their practice and better understand complex teacher– student and student–student interactions (Lather, 1986). It also means that, on the basis of what they learn in their research, teachers transform their practice. They change what they do not find useful in their teaching, and further practice what does work. A study has catalytic validity to the extent that it caused a teacher to take action.

Table 1.2Constructs of validity in teacher research

Process validity, then, has to do with the suitability of data that are collected—whether they reflect the questions of the research that is being undertaken (Anderson et al., 2007). This means that it is important that the teacher researcher is consistent in gathering all data that are relevant, whether they are good or bad (Mills, 2007). It means not working to avoid discrepant or “uncomfortable” events but, rather, embracing them as learning opportunities (Wolcott, 1994).

Closely related to process validity is descriptive validity, which underscores the authenticity of the data (Maxwell, 1992; Mills, 2007). It emphasizes that the descriptions of what actually occurs in the classroom should be detailed and factually accurate, making sure that readers “see” for themselves what happened or what was said (Wolcott, 1994).

Interpretive validity is how teacher researchers ensure that their interpretations or claims are based on the descriptions they have collected in their inquiries—that they rely on the actual wordings and doings of participants and do not gloss over the perspectives of participants (Maxwell, 1992; Mills, 2007). In addition to remaining close to the actual words spoken or actions taken, interpretive validity can be achieved through sharing data with a critical friend, or even the students or teachers who are being studied. That is, after deciding what they think is happening, others can be consulted to see whether they come to similar conclusions or not. This can be another way to involve the people you are studying in your research.

Outcome validity addresses specifically how observations and interpretations in one cycle of action research lead to useful insights for the actions of the subsequent cycle of research; it generally deals w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part One: Defining, Planning, and Starting your Teacher Research
• Part Two: Enacting, Analyzing, and Writing up your Inquiry
• Part Three: Teacher Researcher Reports
• Epilogue: Further Reflections and Possibilities
• Appendix A: General Peer Conferencing Form
• Appendix B: Common APA (American Psychological Association) Citing Conventions
• Appendix C: Reminders Regarding Grammatical and Other Language Usage