What Is Practitioner Research?

Teaching and learning are intriguing activities. Learning how to teach can easily take a lifetime. Most educators can remember episodes in classes when they tried something new and it worked beautifully—students learned, and the teacher gained more understanding about the art of teaching. Most educators can also remember times when things didn't go so well; when good intentions and past "fool-proof" learning strategies simply didn't work. Let's examine one of these situations more closely. Feeling frustrated because a lot of students have dropped out of her class, a teacher might talk with other teachers and ask for suggested strategies that might improve retention. She might try out some of the suggestions. If the activities work, she might add them to her routine. If they don't, she would forget about them. This episode might be a learning experience for the teacher, but it would not be research.

Research is more than trying out new ideas or proving something works in the classroom. When we conduct research we examine a situation or problem very carefully to find out "why" or "how." A practitioner-researcher would think more about the situation before she began a trial-and-error type of approach to "fix" the problem. She would think about the underlying questions involved with this dilemma of students who just up and leave. Research questions related to this situation might be: What influenced the students to come to class in the first place? What were they looking for? Did they not find it, or did they change their minds about what they wanted? Did something just come up in their lives, making class attendance impossible, or were they disappointed in what they found in class?

Research is what we do in order to better understand our situation.

Research questions not only help teachers improve their classroom practice, but these questions also have greater implications: They lead the researcher down a path towards a more profound understanding of students and teaching.

Throughout this Guide we will refer to the researcher as a "practitioner-researcher." We use this term to include teachers, tutors, aides, administrators, and students as potential researchers. We will speak of questions arising from situations in the "class," but this can also be the program, the tutoring relationship, etc. The important thing to keep in mind is that we are addressing research conducted by people involved in the situation, not outside observers. These involved researchers are well acquainted with the programs and classrooms being studied; they know all the characters involved. They also have an immediate need for the results of their research. They care about their work and they know that they can be a more successful practitioner if they have a better understanding of their situations.

Many People have a preconceived idea about research. We may be a little afraid of the word—it can imply a preoccupation with cold, hard facts, an almost sterile way of looking at humanity, or an insistence on precision. We picture "researchers" as distant, boring people who are very unaccepting of those with lesser minds; people who speak in numbers instead of words; and people who spend all their waking hours in science labs peering into microscopes or at computer screens. Yes, an exaggerated picture, but you did recognize it, didn't you? In light of this image, it is little wonder that most people assume that they are not capable of doing pure, scientific research in their classes and that any attempt to research their questions will result in useless, un-scientific information.

It is true that practitioners cannot easily conduct "pure" research in their classrooms. Even professional researchers, who come into the class as non-participant observers or who assess large populations using scientific standardized tests, have a difficult time creating a controlled experiment. As practitioner-researchers we don't try to create the pure environment necessary for conducting experimental research. We draw from what we have experienced - our programs and classes, and our knowledge and experiential background with them. While we may not always come up with answers which we can confidently say will hold true in all adult education programs across the nation or the world, we can gain a deeper understanding of our particular situation. And in the final analysis, this type of information is probably much more useful to us as practitioners anyway. The primary goal of practitioner research is to improve practice through better understanding. This type of research is best conducted where the action happens - our programs, our classes, our students, ourselves. Marian Mohr and Marion MacLean state this with conviction:

Teacher-researchers begin with what is already familiar to them—their students and their classrooms. As a result, it is difficult to gain distance and perspective, but, by doing so, they accomplish something even more difficult: they begin to examine themselves as part of the context. This examination, we think, is a fundamental characteristic of teacher-researchers: their research includes them as significant factors. They observe from an involved distance. To the extent that this doing of observations becomes a habit and its own reward, teachers may see and think differently about themselves in their professional roles. (Mohr and MacLean, 1987, p. 62)

Practitioner research is valid because it is grounded in real life situations. This type of research uses lavishly detailed descriptions—of students, classes, activities, conversations, etc.—because the researcher knows the significance of the context. How often have we heard a teacher say "I'm glad that works in your class, but my class is different!"

A practitioner-researcher is sensitive to the context-dependent nature of her study, and she documents this context as thoroughly as possible.

Alternately, the researcher is not concerned with replicability—that is, whether or not another teacher conducting similar research in another class will get identical results. Her primary goal is to become a more skillful adult educator. As practitioner research becomes more prevalent, researchers will be able to compare their findings with those of other practitioners and some trends may be found across programs. But for the moment, the first-time researcher can set out to better understand her own students with the confidence that she will end up with information which is useful to her.

Before going into a more detailed description of the steps involved in practitioner research, we want to address the areas of theory and practice. A recent evaluation of staff development in Virginia (Fingeret and Cockley, 1991) reported that teachers want practical knowledge in the form of teaching tips and that they often say they want these tips without any talk of theory. The implication is that theory is rather meaningless jargon and that teacher tips are just plain old common sense. We feel that there is no separation between practical tips and theory. Every tip, every activity, every workbook page, every remark we make in class, and every program funding decision we make is based on a theory. In general, we can think of our theories as sets of assumptions we make about why we are teaching, what we are communicating, how adults learn, and so on. We usually don't think about our theories but they reside in our sub-conscious and direct our actions.

When a teacher or administrator decides to research a question, she has decided to become conscious of her theory, and to examine the assumptions of that theory as objectively as she can.

Sometimes, what we say we believe about teaching and the assumptions which are implied by what we actually do when we teach are totally different. Practitioner research can bring this to our attention. This discovery can be at once humbling and liberating. The development of a critical view of our assumptions is an important part of becoming a reflective practitioner-researcher.