Susan L. Lytle

The Teacher Research Movement: A Decade Later:

In this article, we discuss the latest renewal of interest in the U.S. in teacher research and other forms of practitioner inquiry, a movement that is now a little more than a decade old. We argue that part of what makes the current wave of interest a movement and not just the latest educational fad is that teacher research stems from several different, but in some ways compatible, intellectual traditions and educational projects. We identify five major trends that characterize the current U.S. movement: (a) the prominence of teacher research in teacher education, professional development, and school reform; (b) the development of conceptual frameworks and theories of teacher research; (c) the dissemination of teacher research beyond the local level; (d) the emergence of critique of teacher research and the teacher research movement; and (e) the transformative potential of teacher research on some aspects of university culture. Based on our own teacher research experiences and understandings of teacher research, we conclude with thoughts about the future of the movement in the face of the standards movement and other current reforms that create an educational climate quite different from that of a decade ago.

Communities for Teacher Research: Fringe or Forefront?

There are many obstacles to teacher research in schools, teacher groups, school-university partnerships, and regional and national forums. This article argues that overcoming these obstacles requires the building and sustaining of intellectual communities of teacher-researchers, or networks of individuals who enter with other teachers into a collaborative search for definition and satisfaction in their work lives as teachers and who regard research as part of larger efforts to transform teaching, learning, and schooling. Drawing on examples from various teacher and student teacher groups, the article presents an analytic framework for interpreting and evaluating the work of communities for teacher research according to the ways they organize time, use talk, construct texts, and interpret the tasks of teaching and schooling.

Teacher research: the question that persists

This is a critical moment in the evolution of the teacher research movement, which is now widespread and connected to an interesting, although not wholly consistent, array of educational efforts nationwide. The authors argue that at this point in the movement, the most persistent question — the one that underlies all others — has to do with the relationship of teacher research to knowledge for and about teaching. In this article they analyse some of the most visible writing about teacher research and the knowledge question, particularly the issues of epistemology and methodology that are receiving considerable attention in the literature and serving as the basis for an emerging critique of the movement. At the conclusion of the article, the authors explore a small but growing body of literature that takes on the knowledge question differently, and opens up the conversation to provocative new avenues for investigation.

Interrogating Cultural Diversity: Inquiry and Action

There are no monolithic solutions to the complex and often unique problems of understanding and responding to the increasing cultural diversity in schools and classrooms in the United States. Preservice and in service teacher education programs need processes that prompt teachers and teacher educators to raise questions about issues of race, class, and ethnicity and to develop courses of action that are valid for particular communities. Teacher research has been proposed as one powerful process toward this end. Drawing on examples from preservice and in service teacher education projects in urban Philadelphia, we suggest that teachers can use research in work with other teachers and teacher educators to examine what they think they already know about race, class, and ethnicity, what they see when they observe their own students as learners, and what they choose to do about the disparities that often exist in their classrooms, schools, and communities.

Assessment of the Learning Process

In an effort to help reconceptualize current approaches to assessing children with learning problems, this article proposes the use of techniques derived from recent work in cognitive psychology. Proposed as a modification of current assessment practice, Process Assessment is a model which emphasizes intervention, the environment, and the learning process. It is argued that assessment techniques derived from a cognitive perspective can be used to assess interpersonal behavior as well as academic behavior, and that these techniques can be used to develop intervention plans. The analysis of think-aloud protocols to evaluate the strategies used in reading comprehension is described as an example that is consistent with the process assessment model and has specific implications for intervention designed to improve reading comprehension. A case example is used to illustrate this approach.

Teacher research in urban Philadelphia: twenty years working within, against, and beyond the system

This article takes the history of teacher research in one large urban school district over a period of 20 years as a telling case of the intensely local character of this work. Beginning with an overview of the variations and different conceptions of teacher research in the USA, we argue that teacher research is continually being invented and reinvented by participants in the movement and is strongly informed by local conditions, agendas and epistemologies. Using a multi‐voiced text juxtaposed with published accounts, focused interviews and institutional histories, the narrative highlights work in three time periods, showing how teacher research has been within, against, and beyond the system, explicitly embedded in larger and local social and political contexts. The defining characteristic of teacher research in Philadelphia has been its primary commitment to improving the life chances of urban students and schools in a complex, embattled, and continually restructuring system. Although teacher researchers have privileged its immediate relevance, value, and impact in the situations where they work, their efforts may have common purchase with distal groups of teachers in the USA and beyond who also seek to use critical inquiry to initiate and sustain equitable change.