Readings: Chapter 1: Reflective teaching and educational inquiry, pg. 1-9.

Three educational research traditions:

• Process-product research: 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 university researchers, who are considered alien to the everyday happenings in classrooms.
• Personal notes: Seems strange to call teaching a linear activity when they are dealing with so many different children with different needs. This is like saying children are all the same and one teaching style or method will satisfy them all, however, this has been proven untrue as we all know children all develop differently.
• In this transmissive mode teachers are not expected to be problem-posers or problem-solvers.
• Personal notes: I think that teachers are the best people to problem solve about what is going on in their own classrooms. At the very least let their voices be heard and considered- the best place to gain accurate information is from the source, and that would be the teacher.

Qualitative or interpretive research

• Teaching is portrayed as a highly complex, context- specific, interactive activity.
• Captures differences across classrooms, schools, and communities that are critically important.
• Personal notes: I think it is great that interpretive or qualitative research takes into consideration context. I also think it is good that they portray teaching as highly complex as I believe it is one of the most complex and important jobs out there.
•  Personal notes: research should include teachers- I believe we are missing a valuable piece of the puzzle we you don’t. Even if you have the best research and theories ever it is the teachers who are needing to implementing them and to make them work…why not take them into consideration?
•  Personal note: I don’t understand why they are seemingly devaluing teachers.

Teacher inquiry

• highlights the role class- room teachers play as knowledge-generators.
•  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 their question.
• Personal Notes: This makes more sense, who is better to formulate meaningful questions and concerns and collect classroom data than a teacher?

This approach to educational research has many benefits:

• Theories and knowledge are generated from research grounded in the realities of educational practice
• Teachers become collaborators in educational research by investigating their own problems
•  Teachers play a part in the research process, which makes them more likely to facilitate change based on the knowledge they create.
• Personal Note: totally agree; in this case if a teacher sees a problem or an issue they can work to fix it from the inside out. Plus their understanding of the classroom and its dynamics provides the best background knowledge to try and figure out a solution.

Teacher Inquiry 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 situation or resolve the problem
• (3) implementing the action strategies and evaluating their effectiveness
•  (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.

“Teacher research is a method of gaining insight from hindsight. It is a way of formalizing the questioning and reflecting we, as teachers, engage in every day in an attempt to improve student learning.”

• Personal Note: Yes- I love this… it goes back to my points above; how can you gain any insights to something without any hindsight?! Teachers provide the hindsight necessary to see what the problem was and were it needs to go.

The relationship between teacher inquiry and teacher professional growth:
By cultivating this inquiry stance toward teaching, teachers play a critical role in enhancing their own professional growth and ultimately the experience of schooling for children. Thus, an inquiry stance is synonymous with professional growth and provides a non-traditional approach to staff development that can lead to meaningful change for children.

How is inquiry different from being a reflective teacher?

Teacher inquiry is different from daily reflection in and on practice:

• First, teacher inquiry is less happenstance. The very definition of teacher inquiry includes the word intentional.
•  Teacher inquiry is more visible.
• The daily reflection teachers engage in is not observable by others unless it is given some form (perhaps through talk or journaling).
• As teachers engage in the process of inquiry, their thinking and reflection are made public for discussion, sharing, debate, and purposeful educative conversation.
• As inquiry raises the visibility of teachers’ thinking, the profession garners a new respect for the complexity teaching entails.
•  Personal Note: I think that this can go along way in changing the way teachers are perceived. I think that through this teachers can gain the recognition for all of the hard and complex work that they do on a day to day basis. It helps to show others what teaching is all about and that is it not linear and that we are the right people to be making and implementing change.

Three particularly ripe contexts for facilitating the development of an inquiry stance:

• Study groups: serve to connect and network groups of professionals together to do just what their name suggests—study practice
• They enhance the possibilities for conducting an inquiry and cultivating a community of inquirers.
• Creating collegial study groups facilitates the development of a professional learning community within your school. When you join a collegial study group or community of inquirers, your collaborative investigation into shared goals begins and your odds of achieving those goals become greatly enhanced.
• Student teaching and/or other clinical experiences
• Field experiences that include engagement in teacher inquiry enhance the quality of teacher preparation.
•  Immersion in to complex classrooms naturally encourages engagement in inquiry, as questions about teaching, schools, and schooling arise.

Personal Note: Being a student teacher in a classroom can bring about tons of questions, concerns, and general observations that can be the catalyst to inquiry and potentially change.

As you student teach, inquiry can help you learn to identify the complexities and problems inherent in teaching and tease these complexities apart to gain insights into your work with children.

Professional development schools: aim to provide new models of teacher education and development by serving as exemplars of practice, builders of knowledge, and vehicles for communicating professional understanding among teacher educators, novices, and veteran teachers.

In an inquiry-oriented professional development school, teacher inquiry is a central part of the professional practice of all members of the PDS—practicing teachers, prospective teachers, administrators, and university teacher educators.

•  Personal Note: Why wouldn’t all schools be like this? Is their a reason they are not? It seems like the education system would benefit a lot from having all schools operate this way.