13.1 Appendix b: deciding for yourself about the research  (Page 19/20)

Questions

Our questions focus on part of each assumption.

References

Fuhrman, S. H. (2004). Introduction, In S. H. Fuhrman&R. F. Elmore (Eds). Redesigning accountability systems for education . (pp. 3-14). New York: Teachers College Press.

The reflective practitioner: action research as a way to deal with the isolation of teaching

Observers of education have sometimes noted that classroom teachers tend to be isolated from each other by the very nature of their work (Lortie, 1975; Zeichner, 2007). A teacher may be constantly surrounded by students, but chances are that no colleague will be there to witness what the teacher does in class. Conversation about classroom experiences do happen, but they tend to happen outside of class time—perhaps over lunch, or before or after school. This circumstance does not prevent teachers’ from sharing experiences or concerns related to teaching altogether, but delaying conversations probably makes them less frequent or likely. Fewer collegial conversations, in turn, can limit teachers by reducing their opportunities to learn from each other—or even to realize many of the instructional options open to them.

Action research addresses teachers’ isolation because it promotes not only reflection on practice, but also collaboration and sharing (Hayes, 2006). The benefits of sharing may be the most obvious when an action research project is actually published for a wider audience. Over the past 20 years, numerous teachers and other educators have published studies of their own teaching or their own students’ learning. There are now entire books compiling such accounts (for example, Samaras&Freese, 2006; Tidwell&Fitzgerald, 2006), a comprehensive handbook discussing aspects of teachers’ studies of their own teaching (Loughran, et al., 2004), several journals whose purpose is largely or solely to publish examples of action research (one, for example, is called simply Action Research), and a variety of blogs and websites that post action research projects. Collectively these publications are a rich source of practical wisdom from which individual teachers can learn and think about their own teaching.

But an action research project does not have to published formally in order to promote collaboration or sharing. The benefits can happen locally—even within a single school building—whenever a teacher plans, carries out, and talks about a research initiative. A teacher named Betty Ragland, for example, described how this happened in her highly unusual teaching situation, a juvenile correctional facility (Ragland, 2006). The facility functioned somewhat like a prison for youth convicted of various crimes. As you might suppose, Ms Ragland’s students experienced behavior problems and conflicts more often than usual in schools, to the extent that teachers sometimes felt physically vulnerable themselves, as well as isolated from help if serious conflicts developed during class. To deal with these stresses, Ms Ragland initiated a self-study of her practice in which she wrote and thought about her experiences and her reactions to the experiences. She shared the results, both in writing and through meetings, with fellow teachers. In the course of doing so, she developed a number of insights which colleagues found helpful in formulating their own thinking: