CHAPTER FOURTEEN

PRACTITIONER RESEARCH

Chapter Objectives:

• Understand how practitioner research differs from professional, academic

research

• Understand the roots of practitioner research and current iterations

• Understand the three types of practitioner research

• Understand the steps in the action research spiral

• Understand how teacher research was defined by Cochran-Smith & Lytle

• Understand the Cochran-Smith/ Lytle typology of teacher research

• Understand how inquiry as stance is different from teacher research

• Understand the meaning of inquiry as stance and its goals

Overview

 

Research Perspective

Practitioner research focuses on issues that arise in professional practice

and is designed and implemented by the people who are most likely to

use knowledge for the benefits of their students.

Practitioner research traces its roots to the work of Kurt Lewin, a psychologist

and social reformer who believed ”Research that produces nothing but books

will not suffice (1946).” Many researchers have adapted Lewin’s central idea

under a variety of descriptors such as ‘action science’ (Argyris, 1985) ,

‘participatory research’ (Freire,1970), and ‘collaborative practitioner research’

(Heron, 1996 ). Since its introduction, the idea of practitioner research has

gained recognition and legitimacy. It is published nationally and internationally

and has generated its own peer-reviewed journals, such as Action Research,

Educational Action Research, Invitational Theory and Practice, and Networks: An

Online Journal for Teacher Research. The nation’s premiere professional

education research organization, the American Research Association has

recently established a Special Interest Group devoted to it.

Practitioner research invests in practitioners the authority usually reserved for

professional researchers to identify a problem or question, to decide on methods

of data collection, and to analyze and interpret results. Privileging collaboration

over individual authorship and craft knowledge over abstract theory, practitioner

research has a twofold purpose: to deepen understandings of practice and to

promote actions that lead to change, improvement, and --in some cases-- social

transformation.

Comparison to Traditional Research

Proponents of practitioner research offer it an alternative to traditional

professional research, which they view as being externally driven, motivated by

institutional and professional interests, and “ being in the hands of a ‘monopoly’

of expert knowledge producers, who exercise power over others through their

expertise” (Gaventa & Cornwall, 2006, p. 206). The table below highlights some

of the differences between professional and practitioner research

Professional Research Practitioner Research

Is conducted by professionals who are

located in universities and centers

Is conducted by practitioners in their own

settings

Generates research questions from

the academic disciplines or the

literature in a field.

Generates research questions from the

realities of practice.

Views professional researchers as the

legitimate producers of knowledge and

practitioners as consumers of

knowledge

Views practitioners as legitimate producers

as well as the consumers of knowledge.

Findings are useful to other

professional researchers and policy

makers

Findings are useful to practitioners and

may become part of a social movement for

school transformation.

Depends on traditional data collection

and rules of evidence

Depends on both traditional & innovative

data collection and rules of evidence

Table 1 Practitioner and Professional Research Compared

Approaches to Practitioner Research

In order to navigate the wide landscape of practitioner research practices,

we have found it useful to focus our discussion on three current approaches:

action research, teacher research, and inquiry as practice

Inquiry as stance is “ a continual process of making current arrangements

problematic; questioning the ways knowledge and practice are constructed,

evaluated, and used; and assuming that part of the work of

Action Research

Action research is “comparative research on the conditions and effects of

various forms of social action and research leading to social action (Lewin,

1946, p. 206).”

Kurt Lewin’s l definition of action research continues to serve as the prototype

of a genre of practitioner research that is oriented toward problem-solving and

improvement. It utilizes a six step process called the action research spiral that

is represented and described below.

Figure 1. The Action Research Spiral

1. Identify the Question/ the Problem: The first step is for the action

researcher to identify a problem that is important personally and

professionally, is of interest to other practitioners, and needs to be solved

in order to improve practice and educational outcomes.

2. Collect initial data: The next task is to collect baseline data that are

directly related to the problem and that can be compared to data that will

be collected after the intervention or action. Data may be qualitative, in

the form of interviews, documents, or observations; or data may be

quantitative in the form of surveys and tests; or data may combine the two

methods.

3. Design a Plan of Action: In designing a plan of action, the researcher

has to choose an intervention that has some likelihood of solving the

problem. There are basically two sources for this information: research

reviews of promising practices and consultation with colleagues. In action

research, both sources are considered legitimate and of value. This is in

keeping with the view expressed by Corey that ” the consequences of our

own teaching is more likely to change and improve our practices than is

reading about what someone else has discovered of his teaching. (1953, p.

70)

4. Implement the Plan of Action: The researcher carefully implements the

action or intervention and documents the process.

5. Collect and Analyze Data: The researcher collects and analyzes the

data on outcome of the implemented action. In analyzing qualitative data,

qualitative data, the researcher codes the data and develops themes that

are grounded in the data. For quantitative data, the researcher calculates

and displays data in visual form

6. Evaluate the results: The last stage of the research process involves

the researcher in reflection on the project and evaluating whether it met its

goals. This sometimes involves sharing the results with others.

Example of Teacher Action Research

Don Chouinard, an English teacher in a rural high school , conducted an

action research project that focused on changing the reading achievement and

attitudes of the male students in his classes. (2011). He defined the problem as

“How can I improve the reading attitudes achievement of my ninth grade male

students?” and conducted his project in four of his ninth grade classes. In

reviewing achievement data of the early fall, he found that males scored lower on

all standardized tests of reading. Results of a Google survey about attitudes

toward reading for pleasure indicated that 88 % of females reported they “ loved

“ or “ liked” to read as opposed to only 18% of males. In devising an intervention

and an action plan, he reviewed literature to help clarify his intentions and to

decide on this course of action: (1) developing a reading loft, a comfortable

reading space stocked entirely with donations from community members, (2)

compiling “The Guy List” of approximately 200 male-friendly novels, and (3)

providing alternative assessments on book tests to those students who failed the

first assessment.

The plan was implemented in January when the reading loft was open for

use. Furnished with a carpeted floor, three recliners, a rocking chair, a beanbag,

a sofa, and several large throw pillows, it ultimately housed over 500 donated

high interest books. “The Guy List” was compiled and consisted of over 200

male-friendly novels. Alternative assessments that included writing “novel

responses” and oral/conferencing with him about a book were also put in place.

Data collection and analysis depended on a Yin mixed method case study of

three purposefully selected male students. He used qualitative interview and

observation methods and gathered quantitative data from achievement tests

administered periodically through Northwest Evaluation Association Assessment

(NWEA) assessments. His analysis showed that while standardized test scores

remained unchanged for two of the three students, the weakest among them

showed progress. Book test scores and observed engagement in reading

improved for all three students. Most important for Chouinard, there was a noted

increase in attitudes toward reading. Students attributed the change in attitudes

to the “Guy List’ and the reading loft.

Chouinard concluded that the actions he took produced the results he had

desired. He noted, “Although the loft has taken longer to create than I anticipated,

once operating, it was a much more effective tool in promoting literacy and

positive attitudes toward reading than I had originally imagined.” As a result of

sharing his project with colleagues, the reading loft, the “Guy List” and alternative

forms of assessments were regularized as features of language arts instruction in

the school.

Teacher Research

Teacher research is the "systematic and intentional inquiry carried out by

teachers" (Cohchran & Lytle, 1993, p.7) that leads to deeper knowledge of

teaching and learning

Since 1987 Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle have been the major

voices for teacher research. As they explained,

Neither interpretive nor process-product classroom research has

foregrounded the teacher's role in the generation of knowledge about

teaching. What is missing from the knowledge base for teaching, therefore,

are the voices of the teachers themselves, the questions teachers ask, the

ways teachers use writing and intentional talk in their work lives, and the

interpretive frames teachers use to understand and improve their own

classroom practices. (1990, p. )

Like Lewin, Cochran-Smith and Lytle challenged the long-held views of what

research entails and who should it be doing; and they provided guidelines for

doing the work. They also proposed a typology of teacher research that is

presented in the table below.

Type Purpose Method

Classroom/School

Studies

To study one’s

own practice and share understandings

with colleagues.

Established qualitative and

quantitative methods of data

collection and analysis

Journal Studies

To illuminate one’s practice, examine

and reconstruct understandings, clarify

Written records that capture

personal experiences and

questions, and seek answers reflections as they occur

Conceptual

Essays

To explores big issues or answers

broad questions and reach a wide

audience

Reflective essays intended for

dissemination to an audience of

teacher researchers

Oral Inquiries

To explore issues of teaching and

learning through structured and

protocol-based dialogue with colleagues

Reflective Conversations

Descriptions of Children’s Work,

Staff Reviews of the Child

* See the Appendix for details

Table 2. The Cochran-Smith/Lytle Typology of Teacher Research

Examples of Teacher Research

These three examples of teacher research are drawn from chapters in

Cochran –Smith & Lytle & Lytle (1993)

1. Penn Starr, a teacher of the deaf, conducted a classroom study. She

wanted to understand how deaf children transfer what they compose in the

visual language of Americana Sign Language to the language of written English.

She focused on one student in her classroom and observed his development as

a writer over two years, making note of his adaptations and changes. She came

to view the process of writing for deaf children as being a form of second

language acquisition; the result of her inquiry was a firmer understanding of this

process that, “invites rather than forecloses further interpretations” (p.32)

2. Lynne Yermancock Strieb, an elementary teacher in an urban school,

engaged in a journal study and identified two audiences for her inquiry. She saw

herself as her first audience and used her journals to help with her teaching and

to provide a way to record and reflect on how she planned, how she looked at

students, how she thought about her curriculum, and how she might think and act

differently. Her journals were spaces in which she could raise questions and seek

answers, identify problems and seek solutions. Her second audience was the

group of teachers who participated with her in The West Philadelphia Writing

Project, a long-established teacher research community. There Streib joined with

Deborah Jumpp to develop a collaborative research project about journaling.

Both Jumpp and Streib had been using individual journals in their classes when

they decided to join forces. Their collaboration led to seeing their own practices

differently, raising new questions to explore, and uncovering new ways to share

perceptions. They also discovered how they used the journals as curriculum” to

help student learn about their own learning and to help them learn about journals

as a versatile genre “ (p 146); and they found that they used their journals as

tools for assessing student interests and progress,

3. Bob Fecho, a high school English teacher, and Samona Joe, a sixth

teacher of math and science published conceptual research essays. Both were

active members of the Philadelphia Writing Project, a local teacher research and

writing community. Fecho wrote a conceptual piece about what it means to read

as a teacher. He argued that “teachers constitute a distinctive interpretive

community—particularly as it related to the reading of educational research and

theory—has clear values and standards that dominate the ways teachers

ultimately interpret readings” (p 266). Joe’s essay raised questions about how

issues of gender, race, and class played out in her teaching and her student’s

learning ( p 290-298).

Inquiry as Stance

Inquiry as stance is “a continual process of making current arrangements

problematic, questioning the ways knowledge and practice are

constructed, evaluated, and used; and assuming that part of the work of

practitioners individually and collectively is to participate in educational

and social change" (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 121)

Seventeen years after the publication of Teacher Research, Cochran-Smith

and Lytle revisited their ideas in a book whose title, Inquiry as Stance:

Practitioner Research for the Next Generation (2009), signaled two important

shifts in their thinking. In selecting the term practitioner research, they extended

their original method to a broader community of educators to include

administrators, university teachers, parents, community-based educators, and

social activists as well as P-K teachers. They described this new approach as

“a transformative orientation that engages practitioners in research that can lead

to changes in the organization of education toward goals of equity and social

justice. ” Their intention was to respond to what they saw as

the “trying times” (p.5) that educators were facing in national and local stages

that valued generic, ‘expert’ knowledge and devalued the contextualized and

craft knowledge of practitioners. And they issued "a call for practitioner

researchers in local settings across the country and the world to ally their work

with others as part of larger social and intellectual movements for social change.”

The process of inquiry as stance both embraces and expands upon the

goals of action and teacher research. Like teacher research, it seeks to examine

practice with the aim of increasing knowledge and insight. Like action research, it

is problem oriented and explicitly promotes an agenda of social improvement. It

expands on these other forms by looking to critical theories of race, gender, and

class as organizing concepts for developing strategies for transforming

educational arrangements toward norms democratic practice and social justice.

Example of Inquiry as Stance

Gary McPhail, a primary grades teacher focused his inquiry on the

interplay of gender and writing. Having used the writer’s workshop approach for

over ten years as a teacher of first graders, he came to the reluctant conclusion

that

… this writing instructional model biases certain literary interests over

others. Many of the genres and styles to which many boys gravitate (e.g.,

comic books, adventure stories, silly fictitious stories, sports pages) are

considered low status by many teachers (and parents) and are not

welcome in many classrooms during writing time because they are either

“inappropriate” for school or deemed not worthy of instructional time

(Newkirk, 2002.) Thus many boys come to realize that their interests are

not worthy of being taught in the classroom and as a result come to view

writing as more of a female activity than male.

He decided to create a new writer’s workshop curriculum that included

some units especially appealing to boys and others especially appealing to girls.

He titled his inquiry “ Teaching the ‘Bad Boy’ to Write” and focused on the

development of David who, like boys in many primary classrooms, pushed

boundaries and sought attention in inappropriate ways and was also reluctant to

write about personal issues.

McPhail quoted extensively from his research journal as he described the

changes in David’s writing over the course of the school year. As the curriculum

shifted from personal narratives to letter writing and units on comic books and

fiction that engaged his interests, David’s writing became more expressive and

less violent. His behavior changed as well; his abandonment of the ’bad boy

stance’ became most evident in the anti-war poem that David wrote at the end of

the year.

By writing this happy anti-war poem, David allowed himself to be

vulnerable and showed his classmates that he was kind and that he wanted to

change his reputation as resident bad boy. This social transformation took time

but by the end of the year, when our poetry unit took place, David managed to

break out of his emotional straight jacket and abandon the boy code. It is

important to note that if the writing curriculum had not been able to connect with

David’s interest in violence, he would not have been able to write about his

interest freely, which contributed to his desire to change his social reputation. By

being more inviting, the writing curriculum helped David rebel less against the

classroom culture and become more interested in Writer’s Workshop.

McPhail concluded his piece by looking at the broader social implications

of his inquiry and urged a re-thinking of writing curriculum for boys by “diffusing

the personal from the curriculum” and attending to their tastes and interests.

Evaluating Practitioner Research

Because practitioner research challenges many of the assumptions of

professional, academic research, it is not appropriate to apply those criteria in

evaluating practitioner inquiries. We recommend that that a judgment be based

on the trustworthiness and usefulness of the work and how these questions are

answered .

• Is the issue, problem, or concern clearly defined?

• Is the purpose of the inquiry and its audience made clear?

• Are practitioners the chief researchers?

•

• How are results used?

•

• Do the findings make a contribution to practitioner knowledge and

practice?

Practitioner research is not without its critics, who question the validity of

the research because it does not meet the established standards or ethics of

university-based research, the importance of the research questions, the

sufficiency of evidence to draw conclusions, and the ability of researchers to be

objective in studying their own practice. At the root of these criticisms is the

question of what, in fact, constitutes knowledge and who is capable of producing

it.

There is also apprehension among practitioner researchers themselves

about possible misuses of the method. They are concerned that school

administrators who are under pressure to show improvement in student

achievement too often appropriate practitioner research to have teachers collect

data for the externally-driven agenda of raising test scores. In addition, there are

concerns that practitioner research tends to be conflated with professional

development and is viewed as yet another staff development strategy.

Chapter Summary

 

• Practitioner research has its roots in the work of Kurt Lewin and has been

adapted and modified by various theorists.

• Practitioner research challenges academic research in terms of who has

the authority to identify questions and conduct inquiry, the audience for the

research and how findings are uses of findings, and methods of data

collection and rules of evidence rules of evidence.

• Practitioner research may be oriented toward solving practical problems of

practice, developing deeper understanding of teaching and learning and/or

transforming educational arrangements in support of equity and social

justice

• Action research solves identifying and solving context-specific problems of

practice and uses as a template Lewin’s spiral of six steps: (1) problem

identification, (2) initial data collection and analysis, (3) planning an action,

(4) implementing the action, (5) collecting data on outcomes of the plan,

and (6) evaluating results.

• Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1993, p.7) defined teacher research as an

approach that developed understanding and insight through "systematic

and intentional inquiry carried out by teachers."

• Cochran-Smith & Lytle developed a typology of four approaches:

classroom and school studies, journal studies, conceptual research, and

oral inquiries.

• Oral inquiries include reflective conversations, descriptions of children’s

work, and descriptive reviews of the child

• Cochran-Smith and Lytle ( 2009) refined their earlier ideas and replaced

teacher research with the notion of practitioner inquiry as stance,

extending the community of researchers to include all educators and

expanding the purpose of inquiry to include the transformation of

education in support of equity and social justice.

• Practitioner research is evaluated on criteria of integrity and usefulness.

• Despite its academic critics and internal sources of apprehension,

practitioner research has gained legitimacy as a research approach that is

acknowledged in peer-reviewed journals and in research organizations

and conferences.

Terms and Concepts

Practitioner research Orientation toward problem solving

Orientation toward understanding Orientation toward transformation

Action research Action research spiral

Teacher research Teacher research typology

Classroom and school studies Journal studies

Conceptual research essays Oral inquiries

Reflective conversations Descriptions of children’s work

Descriptive review of the child Inquiry as stance

Review, Consolidation, and Extension of Knowledge

1, The practitioner research focus for both Chouinard and McPhail was the ‘boy

problem in literacy.’ They used different methods to conduct their inquiry.

Compare the action research approach of Chouinard to the inquiry as stance

approach of McPhail. What is similar? What is different?

2. Choose a problem of practice that you want to solve in an action research

project and either complete steps 1-3 of the action research spiral, or complete

all 6 steps.

3. Either independently or in collaboration with a colleague, choose one or more

of the approaches from the Cochran-Smith/Lytle teacher research typology to

explore.

4. Using an electronic database, search for a practitioner research (action or

teacher research) study on a topic of interest. Read the article and comment on

• its purpose,

• its methods,

• its findings,

• its usefulness to you as a practitioner

• Is it research or staff development?