All great teachers are natural researchers of their students’ experiences. Yet, far too often, teachers are pushed to the margins of thoughtful pedagogical discussions or told to use ‘evidence-based’ toolkits and curricula built on ‘best practices’ that disregard students’ lived experiences, personalities, and cultures (Timperley & Alton-Lee, 2008).
The research we need to lead us into the post-pandemic future must be inclusive of teachers’ (and, by extension, their students’) voices. That’s why it is imperative to establish a paradigm where teachers are valued and nurtured as researchers (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). The narrative around research has emphasized large quantitative data sets and longitudinal studies, which often drives the “public consumption of education policy research” (Sablan, 2018). We advocate for a mixed-method approach, which better balances the quantitative data with case study analysis, community questionnaires, and one-to-one interviews.
It is incumbent upon school and district leaders to cultivate spaces where teachers can lean into their individual and collective expertise as practitioners. They must have the autonomy to discern applicable research to their contexts while identifying gaps they might fill through their own design and experimentation.
Cultivate Your Scholar-Practitioner Community
Building a scholar-practitioner community of educators requires a willingness to affirm teachers as thought leaders who innovate in the classroom and brainstorm with each other. Much as students should not be viewed as empty vessels ready to be filled with teachers’ pre-packaged notions and ideas, teachers also come to the classroom equipped with skills, experiences, and identities that best position them to conduct research that can be transformative for the field (Freire, 2000). Research should also enhance collaboration and collegiality between educators. Here are a few key reminders to set the tone for a scholar-practitioner community.
Consider the implicit and explicit messages you send as a leader.
When a question arises in a team meeting, do you immediately ask teachers for solutions? Chronic urgency is destructive to research design and will not give teachers the space they need to think deeply about what it is they seek to solve. Often, leaders feel they must have automatic answers. That "know-everything" approach is a hindrance to a researcher mindset. Instead, in a staff meeting on data, imagine if leaders always paused to ask, “What are you wondering about? What do you want more information about?” This pivot allows for more dialogue around pervasive or complex issues, instead of seeing them as tasks to be checked off a list.
When engaging in school-wide data analysis protocols, Caroline and her colleagues on the school’s instructional leadership team had to embrace the initial discomfort of asking each other, "How do you know …?" How did one teacher know a student doesn’t like to read? How did another know a student ‘doesn’t have’ number sense? This question forced staff to think critically about if they were generating assumptions and see how their approach might inform the research needed to find innovative solutions and build a culture where inquiry is normalized instead of weaponized.
Self-determination is key.
Give teachers opportunities to determine their professional development desires individually and collectively. Teachers typically demonstrate significant ownership when given the opportunity to direct their own learning (Louws et al, 2017). Therefore, leaders should consider cross-departmental learning in addition to grade-level or content offerings and should seek guidance from staff before pre-selecting focus areas for further study. Teachers should be put in the driver’s seat to determine their own problems of practice and design an approach for conducting their own action-research and analyzing findings. School and district leaders should serve primarily as sounding boards and resources for the design process, versus dictating one-size-fits-all goals and strategies.
Center the talent in your building.
Consider adopting EdCamp, World Cafe (Brown & Issacs 2005), or Knowledge Cafe frameworks to foster a sense of shared learning. All of these structures are participant-driven and meant to stimulate open discussion. Educators’ learning about “what works and what doesn’t work'' from one another is proven to have a lasting impact on teacher practice (Carpenter, 2018). Furthermore, when your teachers attend conferences or professional development aligned with their self-selected problem of practice or research focus, provide a consistent pathway for sharing new learning. Dedicating 30 minutes at a monthly staff meeting for short presentations or sharing a pre-recorded video from attendees in your weekly staff email will center the voices of your teachers as researchers in your building.
Safety first.
Psychological safety allows people to feel comfortable taking risks and to be their authentic selves and eliminates the fear that there will be retribution for falling short. In The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, Amy C. Edmondson discusses how leaders’ first step to create psychological safety is to focus on “frames”—the reality of what has occurred (Edmondson, 2019). In schools, teachers carry the burden of every inadequate lesson and dip in test scores. When leaders frame these events as necessary for collective learning and show genuine appreciation for risk-taking, failure, and candor, it builds educator confidence to try again.
On the flip side, psychological safety is undermined by dominant power structures and culture, and this disproportionately affects teachers who hold marginalized identities related to race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Knowledge of one’s own identity and how those identifiers may uphold dominant culture norms is essential to dismantling structures that have historically created fear-based work environments for teachers.
Embrace a Micro-Research Approach
From experience, we know how overwhelming and convoluted building-wide research can feel. When facilitating the rollout of the DataWise Improvement Process model at two K-12 campuses in Prince George’s County, Caroline experienced how top-down mandates from instructional leaders could become counterintuitive to the underlying intent of an action-research model. Trust—a key foundational element of organizational improvement—is something built over time, and new approaches to data collection and analysis can come through like a speeding train and leave people behind.
Upon reflection, Caroline realized that a more effective method would have been to focus on one school-based team who felt highly motivated and self-directed to experience the process first. By leveraging a fishbowl approach, other staff could witness the team’s process in real time and simultaneously build their own understanding and comfort. When they were ready, other teams could join the process.
Though everyone may agree on a broad topic, such as improving non-fiction reading comprehension, each individual’s or team’s unique problem of practice may require different research approaches and methodologies. Some classrooms may be more populated with English learners. Others are structured to serve students in a self-contained special education classroom. As such, one-size-fits-all research may feel incomplete based on the unique strengths and needs of students in various classrooms. This can lead to misalignment and frustration as the research and implementation process once again undermines teachers’ expertise. To help avoid these missteps, here are some things to keep in mind:
Find your champions.
Whether it be a two-person department or an entire grade level, find volunteers who are willing to engage in intentional research-design. Your volunteers should self-identify the problems they seek to solve within their practice, and then research, select, and test proposed solutions (Goodnough, 2011). In previous leadership roles, Robert has watched this process take a few weeks to two months. The inquiry process requires patience. When searching for relevant protocols and resources, all leaders should familiarize themselves with elements of action research and a problem-of-practice model. Consider fishbowls, consultancy protocols, panel discussions, and newsletter write-ups to disseminate findings and share first-hand experiences with other teachers in your building.
Develop your common language.
Give school teams space to clearly define the problem or opportunity facing them. What biases or assumptions are we making based on this data? What data might we be missing to help us more clearly define the problem? What do we think the most pressing problem is? All staff should encourage debate about what is meant when terms such as equity, at-risk, mastery, and proficiency emerge. Co-construct and make transparent definitions around progress monitoring, assessment, and even ‘grading’. A common language not only improves organizational efficiency, but also affects camaraderie and mitigates the chance of misunderstanding and misinterpretation between individuals and teams.
Find power in the pause.
Instead of putting energy into jumping to quick-fix solutions, embrace the quiet time needed to conduct meaningful research. The key question: Where will this time come from? Once teachers have articulated their focus area, set a timetable for the process and ask the group to bring their proposed strategy back for consideration at a realistic date. Like traditional academic researchers, teachers should be given time both during and outside the school day. Staff meetings (all or a portion) can be a great space to provide time. Seek out community volunteers to assist with non-academic duty posts, use substitute funds (or the flexibility that comes with virtual learning days) to schedule collaborative planning days for entire teams, or plan cross-grade events such as a Book Tasting, where students can spend time in other classrooms for half of the day while their teachers work on addressing their problems of practice.
Representation matters.
Once all proposals are on the table, educators should use a discerning eye and not simply sign on to ‘evidence-based’ solutions if they do not embrace the backgrounds, cultures, and assets of their students’ identities. Too often, ‘evidence based’ practices have held majority-white classrooms as standard-bearers for success and have imposed the expectations of white cultural norms on students of color. It is up to your team to engage in rigorous, intentional debate before adopting strategies that may harm students. To avoid racial equity detours, teams should discuss intent versus potential impact, remove or redesign institutional policies and practices which serve as barriers for students of the global majority, and ensure that proposed strategies and interventions are aimed at “eliminating racist conditions” (Gorksi, 2019). This advice is also meaningful to address equitable research application for students’ varying genders and sexual orientations.
Understand your losses.
Teachers form habitual responses to common classroom concerns, which allows them to balance competing priorities throughout the day. Therefore, when considering new research, it is incumbent upon educators to consider what default responses they need to let go of to make space for new approaches (Goodnough, 2011). When educators do not explicitly identify their defaults, they experience a phenomenon called the “problem of enactment”—outwardly promoting certain strategies without enacting them (Kennedy, 1999). In our experience, it’s the utilization of targeted peer observations and self-recording lessons that allows us to be self-reflective of our default modes.
Stepping Into the Journey
Far too often, we have attributed research findings to those who produce new knowledge inside higher education or think tanks. Though scholars in those spaces are brilliant, we must also embrace the brilliance of teachers as researchers. By embracing a culture of inquiry inside classrooms and buildings, led and facilitated by those closest to the work—teachers—we expand the possibilities for schools’ potential.
