NancyFichtmanDa_2019_CHAPTER1TEACHERINQUIR_TheReflectiveEducator

3 CHAPTER 1 • TEACHER INQUIRY DEFINED CHAPTER 1 Teacher Inquiry Defined Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiph- any. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. —William Ayers (1989, p. 130) W hether you are a beginning or veteran teacher, an administrator, or a teacher educator, when you think of teaching, learning to teach, and continuing your growth as a teacher, you cannot help but be struck by the enormous complexities, paradoxes, and tensions inherent in the simple act of teaching itself, captured so eloquently in the quote from William Ayers. With all of these complexities, paradoxes, and tensions, a teacher’s work shapes the daily life of his or her classroom. In addition to responding to the needs of the children within the classroom, a teacher is expected to implement endless changes advocated by those outside the four walls of the classroom—administrators, politicians, policymakers, and researchers. While teachers have gained insights into their educational practice from these groups, teachers’ voices have typically been absent from larger discussions about educational change and reform. Historically, teachers have not had access to tools that could have brought their knowledge to the table and raised their voices to a high-enough level to be heard in these larger conver- sations. Teacher inquiry is a vehicle that can be used by teachers to untangle some of the complexities that occur in the profession, raise teachers’ voices in discussions of educational reform, and ultimately transform assumptions about the teaching profession itself. Transforming the profession is really the capstone of the teacher inquiry experience. Let’s begin our journey into the what, why, and how of teacher inquiry with an overview of the evolution of the teacher inquiry movement and a simple definition of this very complex, rewarding, transformative, provocative, and productive process. Copyright 2019. Corwin. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/10/2022 11:24 AM via YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AN: 2524722 ; Nancy Fichtman Dana, Diane Yendol-Hoppey.; The Reflective Educators Guide to Classroom Research : Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn Through Practitioner Inquiry Account: s2867684.main.ehost

THE REFLECTIVE EDUCATOR’S GUIDE TO CLASSROOM RESEARCH 4 WHAT IS TEACHER INQUIRY? Understanding the history of teacher inquiry will help you recognize how today, as a current or future educator, you find yourself investigating a new paradigm of learning that can lead to educational renewal and reform. This history lesson begins by looking closely at three educational research tra- ditions: process-product research, qualitative or interpretive research, and teacher inquiry (see Table 1.1). Two paradigms have dominated educational research on schooling, teaching, and learning in the past. In the first paradigm, the underlying conception of process-product research (Shulman, 1986) portrays teaching as a primarily linear activity and depicts teachers as technicians. The teacher’s role is to implement the research findings of outside experts, almost exclusively uni- versity researchers, who are considered alien to the everyday happenings in classrooms. In this transmissive mode teachers are not expected to be prob- lem posers or problem solvers. Rather, teachers negotiate dilemmas framed by outside experts and are asked to implement with fidelity a curriculum TABLE 1.1 Competing Paradigms: The Multiple Voices of Research RESEARCH PARADIGMS PROCESS- PRODUCT QUALITATIVE OR INTERPRETIVE TEACHER INQUIRY Teacher Teacher as technician Teacher as story character Teacher as storyteller Researcher Outsider Outsider Insider Process Linear Discursive Cyclical Source of research question Researcher Researcher Teacher Type of research question Focused on control, prediction, or impact Focused on explaining a process or phenomenon Focused on providing insight into a teacher’s classroom practice in an effort to make change Example of research question Which culturally responsive instructional strategies demonstrate the most significant impact on student motivation? How do children experience culturally responsive instruction? How can I use culturally responsive instruction to accommodate ESL students at the kindergarten writing table? EBSCOhost - printed on 1/10/2022 11:24 AM via YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

5 CHAPTER 1 • TEACHER INQUIRY DEFINED designed by those outside of the classroom. Based on this paradigm, many teachers have learned that it is sometimes best not to problematize their class- room experiences and first-hand observations because to do so may mean an admittance of failure to implement curriculum as directed. In fact, the trans- missive culture of many schools has demonstrated that teachers can suffer punitive repercussions from highlighting areas that teachers themselves iden- tify as problematic. The consequences of pointing out problems have often resulted in traditional top-down retraining or remediation. In the transmis- sive view, our educational community does not encourage solution-seeking behavior on the part of classroom teachers. In the second paradigm—educational research drawn from qualitative or interpretative studies—teaching is portrayed as a highly complex, context- specific, interactive activity. In addition, this qualitative or interpretive para- digm captures differences across classrooms, schools, and communities that are critically important. Chris Clark (1995) identifies the complexity inherent in a teacher’s job and the importance of understanding and acknowledging contextual differences as follows: “Description becomes prescription, often with less and less regard for the contextual matters that make the description meaningful in the first place” (p. 20). Although qualitative or interpretive work attends to issues of context, most of the studies emerging from this research paradigm are conducted by university researchers and are intended for academic audiences. Such school- university research provides valuable insights into the connections between theory and practice, but, like the process-product research, the qualitative or interpretive approach limits teachers’ roles in the research process. In fact, the knowledge about teaching and learning generated through university study of theory and practice is still defined and generated by outsiders to the school and classroom. While both the process-product and qualitative research paradigms have generated valuable insights into the teaching and learning process, they have often excluded the voices of the people closest to the children—classroom teachers. Hence, a third research tradition emerges highlighting the role classroom teachers play as knowledge generators. This tradition is often referred to as “teacher research,” “teacher inquiry,” “classroom research,” “action research,” or “practitioner inquiry.” In general, the teacher inquiry movement focuses on the concerns of teachers (not outside researchers) and engages teachers in the design, data collection, and interpretation of data around a question. Termed action research by Carr and Kemmis (1986), this approach to educational research has many benefits, among them these three: (1) the- ories and knowledge are generated from research grounded in the realities of educational practice, (2) teachers become collaborators in educational research by investigating their own problems, and (3) teachers play a part in the research process, which makes them more likely to facilitate change based on the knowledge they create. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/10/2022 11:24 AM via YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

THE REFLECTIVE EDUCATOR’S GUIDE TO CLASSROOM RESEARCH 6 Elliot (1988) describes action research as a continual set of spirals consisting of reflection and action. Each spiral involves (1) clarifying and diagnosing a practical situation that needs to be improved or a practical problem that needs to be resolved, (2) formulating action strategies to improve the sit- uation or resolve the problem, (3) implementing the action strategies and evaluating their effectiveness, and (4) clarifying the situation, resulting in new definitions of problems or areas for improvement, and so on, to the next spiral of reflection and action. Note that in our description of this third research tradition we have used a number of terms synonymously—teacher research, action research, class- room research, practitioner inquiry, and teacher inquiry. While these terms have been used interchangeably, they do have somewhat different emphases and histories (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Action research, for instance, usually refers to research intended to bring about change of some kind, usu- ally with a social justice focus, whereas teacher research quite often has the goal only of examining a teacher’s classroom practice in order to improve it or to better understand what works. For the purposes of this text and to streamline our discussion of research traditions, we have grouped all of these related processes together to represent teachers’ systematic study of their own practice. Yet we use the term inquiry most often because, in our own coaching of teachers’ systematic study of their own practice, we became dis- couraged by the baggage that the word research in the term action research carried with it when the concept was first introduced to teachers. The images that the word research conjures up come mostly from the process-product paradigm and include “a controlled setting,” “an experiment with control and treatment groups,” “an objective scientist removed from the subjects of study so as not to contaminate findings,” “long hours in the library,” and “crunching numbers.” Teachers, in general, weren’t overly enthused by these images, and it took a good deal of time for us to deconstruct these images and help teachers see that those images were antithetical to what teacher/ action research was all about. So, over time, we began replacing the terms action research and teacher research with one simple word that carried much less baggage with it— inquiry —and we will continue this tradition both in this section on research traditions and throughout the remainder of this text. To help unpack some of the baggage the word research carries with it, it is important to further explore the difference between research conducted in a university setting (stemming from the process-product and interpretive par- adigms) and inquiry conducted by classroom teachers. First and foremost, in general, the purpose of research conducted by academics and classroom teachers is quite different. The general focus of university-based research is to advance a field. Professors are required to publish their work in journals read by other academics and present their work at national and interna- tional venues to their peers at other institutions as evidence of their ability to impact the field broadly. In fact, professors’ value within an institution is measured largely by their publication record and the number of times their EBSCOhost - printed on 1/10/2022 11:24 AM via YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

7 CHAPTER 1 • TEACHER INQUIRY DEFINED publications are cited by others. In contrast, the purpose of engagement in inquiry by classroom teachers is to improve classroom practice. The point of doing inquiry is for implementation and change, not for academic impact (although this can happen too). The focus of university-based researchers and teacher inquirers is also differ- ent. In general, university-based researchers working in the process-product paradigm focus their efforts on control, prediction, and impact, and uni- versity-based researchers working in the interpretive paradigm focus their efforts on description, explanation, and understanding of various teaching phenomena. In contrast, teacher inquirers focus on providing insights into teaching in an effort to make change, working tirelessly to unpack all of the complexities inherent in the act of teaching to become the very best teachers they can be for every individual student. A final difference between research conducted at the university and inquiry conducted by classroom teachers into their own practice is ownership. While the research generated by university researchers is critically important to teachers, it is university researchers who make the decisions about what is important to study and how to go about studying it based on a careful and critical analysis of a broad and extensive body of literature related to the topic of study. In contrast, teacher inquirers make decisions about what is important to study and how to go about studying it based on a careful and critical analysis of what is happening at a local level in their own classrooms, schools, and districts. The work of university-based researchers informs the inquiries of teachers, but ownership of the classroom-based investigation resides with the classroom teachers themselves. To help distinguish between research produced at a university and inquiry done in classrooms and schools (summarized in Table 1.2), we often invoke the words of Lawrence Stenhouse, who noted, “The difference between a teacher researcher and the large-scale education researcher is like the differ- ence between a farmer with a huge agricultural business to maintain and the ‘careful gardener’ tending a backyard plot” (Hubbard & Power, 1999, p. 5). In agriculture the equation of invested input against gross yield is all: it does not matter if individual plants fail to thrive or die so long as the cost of saving them is greater than the cost of losing them. . . . This does not apply to the careful gardener whose labour is not costed, but a labour of love. He wants each of his plants to thrive, and he can treat each one individually. Indeed he can grow a hundred different plants in his garden and differentiate his treatment of each, pruning his roses, but not his sweet peas. Gardening rather than agriculture is the analogy for education. (Ruddock & Hopkins, 1985, p. 26) This image of the university-based researcher as a farmer with a huge agri- cultural business and the teacher inquirer as a gardener helps to encapsulate EBSCOhost - printed on 1/10/2022 11:24 AM via YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use