Practitioner Inquiry

"Trainee teachers following the three-year undergraduate BEd course at the University of Wolverhampton undertake a final-year research study. This project requires each individual to investigate an aspect of teaching and learning within an early years or primary school setting.

Reflections on Research presents, in publication, a selection of these final-year projects completed by trainee teachers in 2008 and 2009.

The students themselves have looked back upon the project to critically evaluate the positive and not so positive elements of their investigation. They also considered how what they did as student teachers remains relevant to what they do now as qualified professionals working in the classroom.

See also ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Doing Your Education Research Project’, published by SAGE: http://bit.ly/IrLHvD, and on FACEBOOK: http://on.fb.me/QsLY2Q"

Documentation and Inquiry in the Early Childhood Classroom: Research Stories from Urban Centers and Schools is a celebration of teacher intelligence and professional acumen. In bringing together the narratives of a plethora of early childhood educators from a broad range of settings, Kroll and Meier showcase what is possible when early childhood educators research and write about their own classrooms. In a climate where teachers are increasingly told what to do and how to do it, the book makes a strong and much needed statement about the capability of teachers. And in a society that gives little respect to teachers who work with the youngest children, Kroll and Meier demonstrate how deserving these educators are of the highest regard. Finally, as more policy is focused on early childhood education, Kroll and Meier's advocacy on behalf of holistic and humanistic approaches to children and their teachers is valuable. The editors and practitioners draw their inspiration from a tradition of teacher inquiry largely associated with primary and secondary teachers and early childhood teaching in Reggio Emilia, Italy. In their writing on teacher inquiry, Kroll and Meier achieve three significant feats. The first is to add new life to a marginalized conversation about teacher inquiry. While there are certainly teachers still engaged in inquiry, the movement, as documented by Kroll and Meier, has largely been pushed aside and silenced as teachers are pressured to follow directives and assess children through standardized metrics. The second is that Kroll and Meier make an important addition to the conversation: the work and voices of U.S. early childhood educators. The third is the centrality of school‑based inquiry in the book. Much previous writing on teacher inquiry focuses on groups housed outside of the school. This is important work, but can mean that a teacher may find herself returning to an unsupportive daily environment. In contrast, nearly all of Kroll and Meier's case studies were school‑wide initiatives. The book is divided into four sections: school wide‑wide inquiry, children and teachers conducting inquiry together, teaching teachers about documentation and inquiry assessments, and developing leadership through inquiry. Within these themes, each chapter zooms into a particular setting featuring the narratives of teachers from 12 different settings in the Bay Area. These include more commonly discussed programs such as public schools and head start programs, but also a parent cooperative, a migrant and seasonal head start program, and a preschool in a museum. This captures the range of settings in which early childhood educators and children find themselves. A commonality among the settings is a focus on those that served low‑income minority children and, in many cases, those learning English. In keeping a narrow regional focus, the book can both transport the reader while remaining widely resonate. As readers practicing in rural Maine, we were able to learn about a different context while also reflecting on our own. Each narrative took an asset‑oriented view of children and a dominant refrain was that children can teach us much about the world. For example, in Las Americas Early Education School, a multi‑age preschool with mainstreamed special education students, educators had to learn how to listen to children. This careful listening allowed the teachers to break down their own preconceived notion that they were the primary source of information as they came to see the children as holders of knowledge. Another theme was the power of planning curriculum with and alongside children. In many cases, the curriculum was culturally responsive, several months long, and intellectually rich and challenging. For example, in the bilingual Mission Head Start Valencia Garden, the teachers developed an investigation of fish based initially on one child who was struggling with transitions and his positive response to the song " Slippery Fish. " Around this topic, the teachers carefully assembled a wealth of materials and manipulatives. In doing so, they drew in the rest of the children. The teachers kept the inquiry moving and rich by asking questions and documenting children's knowledge. This specific journey allowed for parents and the public to join as well: " Not only were families deeply engaged in the inquiry process, they had developed effective skills and strategies for facilitating their children's inquiry outside of school " (p. 69). Reflecting the power of diversity, the differently voiced narratives draw the reader in and connect smoothly with one another, allowing the book to flow effortlessly. The visuals and the use of specific examples give the reader a window into how the children conversed, inquired, and learned from the inquiries.

This paper summarises a study of students' and staff perceptions and experiences of assessment feedback practice across a post-1992 university. Phases 1 and 2 of the project gathered students' and academic colleagues' views on assessment feedback practice. Focus ...

Parents' assessment of children's development in the first and the second language is an essential part of their family language policy (FLP) and an important component of parent–child communication. This paper presents a pilot study focused on Russian-speaking immigrant parents' assessment of their children's language knowledge in Russian as a first language and Hebrew as the second language in the context of their FLP. The research questions were as follows: How is parents' assessment of their children's bilingual language development linked to their choice of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education? To what degree are parents' reports of their children's language knowledge similar or different to their children's actual language knowledge? Which domains of language knowledge do parents relate to or ignore when assessing their children's language development? The sample consisted of 27 children (14 from bilingual and 13 from monolingual kindergartens), and their parents. Two sets of measurements were used, one to obtain parents' reports on child's knowledge of Russian and Hebrew and the other to assess children. The finding points out parents' insensitiveness to the length of the children's utterances and their tendency to rationalise FLP by overestimating their children's general language knowledge.

This paper shows Living Theory research as a form of research that enables me to recognize and research the integration of my personal, professional, and political educational practice to improve, with the hope of give fuller expression to my ontological and social values in practice and live a loving life that is satisfying, productive and worthwhile. Changes in policy and practice in 2012, demanded by central government, meant my field of practice had to change. My concerns however were, and still are, that practice, theory and research often appear to lose connection with the educational purpose of education; theory and practice appear to be developed independently and without explanation or evaluation related to educational values and; educational practitioners appear to practice in discrete worlds, each vying to exert their hegemony over the development of educational theory, practice and provision. In this paper I show how, by continuing to research as a Living Theory research...

The use of questionnaires to evaluate educational initiatives is widespread, but often problematic. This paper examines four aspects of an evaluation survey carried out with very able pupils attending out-of-school classes: ethics, design, bias and interpretation. There is a particular focus on the interpretation and analysis of pupils’ answers to open questions. Conclusions are drawn from this analysis which will help teachers and others to take a careful and critical approach to their use of questionnaires in educational evaluation.

Author profile: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=13209

[A limited number of eprints of this article are available - send me a message if you require one].

"Between 2000-2004, a number of practising teachers in the West Midlands were awarded ‘Best Practice Research Scholarships’ from the DfES. The Scholarships allowed them to carry out practice-based research and to report on their findings.

Presented here are some of the reports which resulted. The collection is designed to exemplify some of the issues which the teacher-researchers faced, the approaches they took, and how they presented their findings. It also disseminates to a wider audience the results of their investigations and their recommendations for professional practice in schools.

See also ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Doing Your Education Research Project’, published by SAGE: http://bit.ly/IrLHvD, and on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/QsLY2Q"

‘A Beginner’s Guide…’ is a step-by-step guide for students new to research. It covers every stage in turn, starting with learning from other research, choosing a topic, designing research questions, writing a literature review, deciding on methodology, designing research instruments, and consideration of validity and reliability; then moving to carrying out the investigation, analyzing quantitative and qualitative data and finally writing up the project. The ethical issues of doing education research are examined throughout.

Included are case studies to illustrate common problems and solutions; 14 ‘Project Sheets’ (available on this Academia page) which allow students to build up their work in stages and prepare draft text for their final written project; also key points, activities, recommended further reading and a glossary of research terms.

The book is written for undergraduate students doing education courses and Masters-level students new to research. It is relevant to students of all phases of education: early years, primary, secondary and further education, and to a range of international settings.

More information: http://bit.ly/IrLHvD
Also on Facebook at: http://on.fb.me/QFobAp (click on Like to get news feed)
More information about the author: http://bit.ly/Hk3L6h

In this article we highlight analyses conducted in two qualitative literacy studies to discuss various implications of a blended, or hybrid, approach to multimodal analysis. By investigating several prominent frameworks commonly used together for the purpose of analyzing multimodal data, and describing our own experiences blending these frameworks, we determine that a hybrid approach is not necessarily ineffective at producing data interpretations, but that it is insufficiently reflexive of the role researcher positionality plays in multimodal analysis. We conclude the article by offering recommendations for supplementing hybrid analytical approaches through data co-construction and increased attention to researcher positionality.

Traditional notions around research and teaching tend to project the two as separate, often conflicting, activities. My dissertation challenges this perceived dichotomy and explores points of connections, or continuities, between teaching and research through my own practice as an adjunct community-college English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor as well as a doctoral candidate at a research-intensive university. I use Wenger’s (1998) framework of communities of practice to locate my practitioner research at the intersections of the academic community and the teaching community. I also employ Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2009) ideas around the dialectic of practice and research to conceptualize the integration of research and practice in my dissertation project.
I employ a pluralistic approach to the dissertation design and procedures by drawing upon and adapting elements from different research traditions and approaches in ways that best fitted my integrated practitioner research. Keeping doability and ethicality as my guiding principles, I provide authenticity to the thesis report by writing with deep reflexivity. With inquiry as my ongoing stance, I identify ways in which I integrated teaching and research: by primarily harnessing teaching tools to do research, and research tools to teach. I then propose that practitioner inquiry is an ongoing process, wherein the practitioner researcher analyzes in-depth a specific aspect of her pedagogy post-instruction to make research non-parasitic on teaching. I provide an example of such an ongoing inquiry by analyzing deeply a specific aspect of my own instruction—global Englishes and translinguistic identities in my ESL classroom.
I thus make a case for engaging in practitioner inquiry that integrates teaching and research, and discuss the implications of my dissertation work for teacher preparation and professional development, doctoral education, TESOL and community college practice, as well as practitioner research at large. I finally conclude my doctoral thesis by reimagining myself as a pracademic: a coherent unified and hybrid identity that allows me to be both a practitioner and an academic at the same time without privileging either role; and invite my readers to push the boundaries of their own thinking about the roles of teachers and researchers in the academy.

This paper describes the rationale and context for eight key markers of quality in qualitative systemic practitioner research. The criteria are designed for systemic practitioner researchers who are researching from the position of practitioner-at-work. The criteria include Systemic Practice, Methodology, Situatedness, Relational Ethics, Relational Aesthetics, Reflexivity, Coherence, and Contributions. They build on existing criteria for quality developed within the fields of post-positivist qualitative research and professional practice research by embedding them in systemic practice theory, activity and values. Distinctions are made between practitioner research and research about practice, and between positivist and post-positivist research. This eight-point framework brings together existing systemic methods of inquiry which recognise the importance of understanding context, movement and relational know-how. The paper proposes that systemic or relationally reflexive practice is already a form of collaborative inquiry or action research in which any action, research included, inevitably contains intention and acts as an intervention. While working with people in small and immediate systems, systemic practitioner researchers are critically reflexive in understanding how local issues are connected to wider socio-political systems and discourses.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Menurut Massialas dan Cox inquiry sosial merupakan pendekatan yang bisa digunakan untuk pendidikan ilmu-ilmu sosial. Perhatian mereka tertuju pada perbaikan terhadap masyarakat dengan memberikan solusi terhadap masalah-masalah sosial. Pandangan mereka dilatar belakangi oleh kondisi umum dari budaya mereka, yang paling penting adalah tujuan utama dari pendidikan adalah perenungan tentang nilai-nilai dan isu-isu yang sedang berkembang saat ini.

Experienced teachers in schools are often left out of discussions regarding mentors. Having established themselves within the profession,
and having proved themselves capable of managing classrooms, developing curriculum and building up positive relationships with
their students, it can all too easily be assumed that these teachers do not need a helping hand and an open ear to help them through times of transition and change. Perhaps teachers change roles within the course of their career, perhaps their line managers and members of leadership change, or perhaps they decide to improve their practice and
contribute to the field of educational research by embarking on further education awards alongside their teaching roles. Such experiences are not without their ups and downs; they can certainly be unsettling,
disorientating and lead to a feeling of having lost one’s voice. This is where a mentor is sorely needed. This contribution to the collection ‘Mentors Matter’ proposes that in order for teachers for be able to weather the storm of change, instability and in some cases
a personal transformation as a result of academic engagement and inquiry, access to a ‘caring’ mentor should be normal practice.
This will be discussed in light of empirical research conducted by the author as part of her doctoral inquiry, and a revisited
framework for a Pedagogy of CARE will be introduced. The author believes that certain principles and attributes belong to such a
framework that foregrounds voice and an act of ‘care’.

This dissertation is an analysis of four semesters/cycles of practitioner and participatory action research inquiry on my use of critically compassionate intellectualism (CCI)—a framework of critical pedagogy, authentic caring, and a social-justice curriculum and purpose—to humanize an educational foundations course for pre-service teachers in a large urban, Midwestern university. A critical interpretation of social justice teacher education requires an uncompromising commitment to challenge the structural and cultural conventions that continue to marginalize certain students while privileging others. This is most likely to be accomplished by foregrounding consciousness-raising, anti-oppressive, and humane principles not only as educational aims, but, importantly, as keys to educational practice. With critical pedagogical theory and relational–cultural theory as frames, I examine how my implementation of CCI influenced my policies, practices, and pedagogy, and what this meant for students’ learning and other experiences in the course. Additionally, I explore how CCI guided my methodological choices in the original four cycles of inquiry, as well as this fifth cycle of critical qualitative analysis. Findings from the study show that students valued the respect and care they experienced through this framework and were able to envision affording their own students the same relational support, which many began enacting immediately in their accompanying field experiences. Most felt empowered to take charge of their own learning and goals, to become critically reflective practitioners, and wanted to act as advocates and change agents for their diverse students. However, certain structural and personal limitations hindered our ability to enact more physically engaged and proactive interventions that would have strengthened their CCI experience. In the final analysis, it was both in spite of and because of these imperfections that I was able to realize my own moral vision of socially just teacher preparation, where reflexivity, critical consciousness, and compassion became assets to both their learning and my own continuing growth as a teacher educator.

This paper will question the notion of research, evidence and tools within a practitioner enquiry orientated practice. Basing the discussion within the current education research and policy context in the UK and the wider Global Education Reform Movement, I will ask questions about how a practitioner enquiry frame as located within Scottish education professional learning model, encourages thinking about how teachers engage with research. Focusing on how we judge the tools we use (in research and teaching and learning) and how both perspectives might provide helpful insight into judgements of quality, a productive space will be created. With origins in my own pedagogical repertoire, examples of visual tools will be used to exemplify this thinking demonstrating how the data arising from their use can be translated into the research domain. I will conclude by suggesting that for practitioner enquiry to be perceived as more realistic for the majority of the profession then a productive synergy is needed between research methodology and pedagogy, where assumptions about 'good practice' on either side are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary in supporting practitioners' reflective and strategic thinking.

This chapter focuses on an inquiry-oriented and multi-partner approach to teacher education and teacher professional learning created to inspire and support transformational change. In the project described in this chapter, the formation of and interactions between three regional professional learning networks (PLNs) empowered educators to re-imagine and redesign practices and structures across institutions, roles and regions in British Columbia (BC).

In this study, I compare as a practitioner researcher the learning results of my students in 2008 with the results of students in 1984, both student groups worked in the same context of a "Bio Still Life". I discover how the current context of the political or (non)digital transformation is part of the reflection in the students' art work.

In our current climate of heightened conservatism and criticism, multicultural education is as important as ever. This article argues for the need to reframe multicultural education as a praxis based on its social justice-oriented principles, values, and practices. Using practitioner action research, I examine my implementation of such a praxis in a college course. I discuss critical reflections on demonstrating the interconnections between current and historical social movements, theory and lived experiences, and the students' and my learning. I conclude by arguing that reframing multicultural education as a praxis could encourage more coalitions within and beyond schools.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to synthesise the prior literature on strategy maps to develop a practitioner’s guide to the design of strategy map frameworks. Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced the strategy map in their 2000 Harvard Business review article. A strategy map visually represents how the critical elements of an organisation’s strategies are linked together. In an organisation’s strategy  execution process, a strategy map complements a performance measurement framework such as the balanced scorecard.
Design/methodology/approach – This is a technical paper, which primarily builds on the prior literature on the strategy map design. In particular, this study reviews 41 publications on strategy maps in the period 2000-2015, including observation of 333 strategy map frameworks.
Findings – This study develops 14 design principles across seven features of a strategy map framework. This study also identifies a significant lack of empirical research on strategy map design features and principles.
Research limitations/implications – Future research could examine whether and why various design features and principles could exert different or same effects (e.g. decision-relevance).
Practical implications – The developed design features and principles can be used by practitioners as guidance for developing customised strategy maps for their organisations.
Originality/value – This paper contributes to the literature by serving as a one-stop shop” for both practitioners and researchers seeking a comprehensive understanding of the current state of the strategy map design features and principles.

The paper reports on both methodological and substantive findings. It presents a method for generating simplified representations for regional urban populations, their geographical sub-populations and communities. the method generates greatly simplified high-resolution socio-economic profiles of populated geographical areas from complex large census data sets.

Polyvocal Professional Learning through Self-Study Research illustrates the power of “we” for innovative and authentic professional learning. The 33 contributors to this book include experienced and emerging self-study researchers, writing in collaboration, across multiple professions, academic disciplines, contexts, and continents. These authors have noted and reviewed each other’s chapters and adapted their contributions to generate a polyvocal conversation that significantly advances scholarship on professional learning through self-study research. Building on, and extending, the existing body of work on self-study research, the book offers an extensive and in-depth scholarly exploration of the how, why, and impact of professional learning through context-specific, practitioner-led inquiry. The chapters illustrate polyvocal professional learning as both phenomenon and method, with the original research that is presented in every chapter adding to the forms of methodological inventiveness that have been developed and documented within the self-study research community.

Drawing on Freirean notions of praxis, employing Nancy Fraser's three-dimensional framework of social justice, and implementing Burke's Pedagogical Methodology, this practitioner-developed paper investigates the dynamics of a critical and reflexive approach to re-imagining university outreach and classroom teaching practices. This introspective work acknowledges the ethically fraught terrain of equity and widening participation outreach. It resists positioning stakeholders of practice as research participants, instead folding the research gaze back onto the practitioner-authors and their 'unfinishedness'. Dialogic relation, critical reflection, and then interrogation of recorded versions of these relations and reflections, are the main methods of enquiry as we extensively contextualise and interrogate our practices. The dynamics producing and/or limiting the possibility of praxis that emerge include enabling and disabling power relations, resistance of hegemonic time structures, and co-developing dispositions of critical hope and unfinishedness to sustain provocation of the practitioner imagination. We carefully advocate for developing a generative instability; a contextually aware set of practices and meta-practices; a praxis that is continually and explicitly (re)situated in open, social, messy programmatic contexts.

Early recollections are an Adlerian technique for discovering an individual's motivation. In this paper, early recollections are used for finding fuller meaning of practice values emerging through Living Educational Theory research in practitioner self-study. This paper analyses a workshop given at the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), where two practitioner researchers present early recollections as a Living Theory research method. As part of their self-studies, video evidence is produced to show the presenters living their values and participants learning about values motivating their practice. Self-awareness from early recollections appears to be a useful learning stage in understanding and improving values-based practice and enhancing wellbeing.