Practitioner Research and

Professional Development
in Education

Anne Campbell, Olwen McNamara and Peter Gilroy

Practitioner Research and Professional
Development in Education
.
Practitioner Research and
Professional Development
in Education
Anne Campbell, Olwen McNamara
and Peter Gilroy
Introduction and editorial material Anne Campbell,
Olwen McNamara and Peter Gilroy 2004

First published 2004

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Contents

Preface viii
Foreword ix
Stephen Newman

1 Research Traditions in Education 1

Introduction 1
Two crude traditions 2
Two more subtle traditions 2
Reflecting reflection 9
Notes 11

2 Researching Professional Development 12

The political context for teacher research and development 13
Your professional development 18
Interrogating the value of professional development activities you have
experienced 20
Controlling your professional development 22
Teacher researchers 24
Further reading 26

3 Professional Identity: Who am I? What Kind of Practitioner am I? 28

The moving image 28
Exploring your professional development 30
Telling your story 35
Summary 46
Further reading 47

4 Identifying an Area for Research 49

Introduction 49
The first moves 49
Individual ways of approaching research 60
Concluding remarks 62
v i / CO N TE N TS

5 Finding, Reviewing and Managing Literature 65

Types of literature 65
Managing literature 67
Searching for literature 71
Reviewing your literature 78
Further reading 79

6 Which Research Techniques to Use? 80

Research: what research? 80
Reflective writing, diaries, logs and journals 87
Biography, stories and fictional critical writing 91
Observation 93
Interviewing 98
Analysing the data from interviews 102
Using questionnaires 102
Conclusions 104
Further reading 105

7 Critical Friendship, Critical Community and Collaboration 106

The lonely researcher? 106
How does critical friendship work? 109
Critical community 118
Mentors as support for research 122
Further reading 124

8 Qualitative Data Analysis 125

Introduction 125
The broader picture 126
Techniques for analysing qualitative data 129
Further reading 145

9 Quantitative Data Management, Analysis and Presentation of

Questionnaire Surveys 146
Introduction 146
Data management and coding 148
Data analysis 159
Data presentation 164
Further reading 168
 CO N TE N TS / v i i

10 Writing up, Reporting and Publishing your Research 169

Writing up: genres, purposes and audiences 169
Legal and ethical considerations 172
Writing for a report 174
The research process 175
Writing for publication 177
Using literature 178
The process of writing 181
Pen-portraits: an alternative genre of writing 182
Concluding remarks 185
Further reading 186

11 Evaluating and Disseminating Research 187

The professional agenda 187
The mechanics of evaluation 191
Concluding remarks 198

Resources for Research 199

Harvard referencing: questions and answers 199
Summary report from the Friars Primary School: ‘Improving Literacy:
Intervention for Low-achieving Pupils’ 205
Further reading 211
References 212
Index 219
Preface

There has been a major shift in the nature, content and location of professional
development in the last five years. This has included a move away from courses and
workshops to workplace and professional learning communities. This move has
been accompanied by a gradual realisation of the importance of research-based
professional development and research and evidence informed practice to promote
teaching and learning and school improvement.
This book aims to support and prepare practitioners to undertake small-scale
inquiries and research investigations. The processes of research and inquiry-based
learning help teachers come to terms with the complexities and challenges of teaching
as their responsibilities widen to include the notion of the teacher as researcher. This
major shift in responsibilities has focused on teachers using and doing research, with a
particular emphasis on examining how teachers’ research can impact on teaching and
learning. This emphasis is clearly related to the drive to raise pupil achievement and
to related areas such as monitoring progress, performance management, inspection
and collegiate and collaborative work for school improvement.
The idea for this book grew from the authors’ teaching experience and day-to-day
professional work with teachers and others in the caring professions. The book aims
to open up forms of research for practitioners so as to develop critical appraisal and
analysis skills appropriate to professional contexts. It will suggest activities and give
support for doing and evaluating teaching by using authentic examples of teachers’
research into professional issues. It aims to stimulate and promote teachers’ narrative
writing and autobiographical approaches to researching their professional lives. It
also tackles quantitative data management and analysis procedures that are relevant
for teachers and other professionals. It is envisaged that it could support those
involved in performance management appraisals and threshold application.
Thus the book is firmly located in work with teachers and others concerned with
understanding education within continuing professional development contexts. We
consider that practitioner research lies at the heart of professional development and
so it seems timely to produce a book that focuses on understanding the connections
between this form of research and professional development.

Anne Campbell, Olwen McNamara and Peter Gilroy

Foreword
Stephen Newman

Teacher professional development has a higher political profile today than for many
years, and links with appraisal and performance management may mean that at
times professional development is seen as something to be endured rather than
enjoyed. Yet as the authors of this book make clear, teacher professional
development can take many forms, and a key aspect of successful professional
development is the commitment of the participants to the activity. Such commit-
ment is more likely if the focus of the development activity is chosen by the
participant rather than imposed from the centre.
Choosing which development activity to pursue imposes pressures of its own. You
may feel that you have nothing to say or that the research you want to do is of little
significance. Perhaps you are overwhelmed by the different possible lines your
research could take. You may feel daunted by the difficulties of juggling all your
responsibilities, professional and personal. You may even feel that you are being a
little bit selfish, wanting to pursue an area of interest which inevitably is going to
involve sacrifices by yourself and others. These at least were some of the thoughts
I had when, as a full-time teacher in a comprehensive school, I decided to pursue
some research part time. Even now, some years after my official periods of part-time
study were successfully completed, reading through this book I am relieved to find
that these fears and worries are perfectly normal.
Taking the initial steps of pursuing research once those initial fears have been
overcome (or even perhaps when they have not) brings to the forefront a plethora
of further questions. Is there anyone who will be willing to supervise the work?
What will I have to write? Will my ideas be hopelessly inadequate? How will I be
able to cope with all the literature? What research methods would be appropriate?
These and many other questions are addressed in this book. It is useful to be
reminded of the many opportunities that exist for small-scale research for
educational development which can provide not only valuable professional develop-
ment in themselves but which may also provide a route into larger-scale research.
The questions and checklists are helpful in looking at the range of opportunities
that already exist, in highlighting areas which can be developed, and in developing
x / FO R E W O R D

techniques for making explicit aspects of professional identity. These techniques can
help us as teachers to resist the view of professional development as something
which is done to us by so-called ‘experts’, and promote the view that we can be
active in choosing how we want to develop.
Having made the initial decision to pursue your ideas further it then becomes
necessary to consider where you can best carry out your research and on what sort
of course or activity. Of paramount importance it seems to me is the matter of
finding someone to supervise your work with whom you are able to work well and
who is able to act as one of the ‘critical friends’. Here time spent at the beginning
of your research will be time well spent. You will need to be able to trust your
supervisor and accept the criticisms which you hope he or she is going to level at
your work in order to help you to develop it. A poor relationship will sap your
morale and your enthusiasm, and the quality of your work is likely to be the poorer
as a result; on the other hand, a positive relationship should help periodically to
reinvigorate your research, help you to focus your ideas (as you know they are going
to be subject to close scrutiny) and promote your confidence in arguing your ideas.
In preparing to conduct your research it is worth giving some thought to the
reasons which are going to provide you with your motivation. Motivation will be
important; you may find yourself (as described in this book) writing late at night or
early in the morning (and possibly both), and having to forgo some of the activities
which, if it were not for your research, you would be able to enjoy. Motivation is,
of course, very individual and may well consist of a number of inter-related factors
which will help to give you the determination you will need and help to sustain you
when you hit difficulties. Just like the results of educational research, your reasons
for wanting to do research, and the factors that are going to help to motivate you,
are likely to be complex; clarifying them in your mind will help you to persuade
yourself and others that what you are doing has purpose and direction.
Let us assume that you have made a decision to conduct some research and have
been able to meet someone who has agreed to supervise your work. Now is the time
to start in earnest on the formal part of your work (assuming that you have been
thinking informally about the issues hitherto). One point that I came to realise was
very important to help me to progress was that it was pointless to wait for
inspiration. So I can readily agree with the sentiment expressed in this book that it
is important to write. Writing, I find, helps to develop my ideas and to clarify my
thinking; drafting and redrafting help me to develop my ideas further. What you
write may never make it into the final copy of your work but in working and in
thinking through the ideas it is possible to find a line of argument which eventually
turns out to be fruitful.
 FO R E W O R D / x i

And what sort of writing you do can vary according to the time available and your
alertness; note taking and following up references can be done when you are tired,
so use quality time when you are alert for taking your arguments further and
developing your arguments. But the general rule I had was that I would keep writing
(writing notes, writing drafts, revising work) even when I felt I would make little
progress; I came to feel that the ‘slow times’ were an integral part of the work,
demanding of me the 99% perspiration which I hoped would eventually give way
to the 1% inspiration.
Much of your writing will develop from reading. Access to the Internet and all the
electronic resources available today makes the task of accessing resources a lot easier
than it once was, but with the drawback that now the sheer quantity of material may
be overwhelming. Getting to know the main libraries you will use, and how they
work, will be time well spent. Similarly I quickly came to appreciate how important
it is to keep an accurate record of every book or article consulted. Two minutes
making an accurate note at the time of initially consulting a work can save hours
later trying to find a ‘lost’ paper or book. I found it useful to make notes on my
computer and to make and keep dated backups so that I could always go back
through my archive to find the original source of any quotation or idea. I also found
it important to make a note of which library I had found the book or article in and
the shelf-mark of each book; this made going back to the original that much easier.
It is likely that in doing your research you will come across references which you
need to follow up but which are only obtainable from elsewhere. Perhaps you will
find some references impossible to trace, perhaps because they are incorrectly noted
in your sources. This at least was my experience. Although initially frustrating, I
came to enjoy pursuing lines of inquiry and tracking down a book or article which
had almost been ‘lost’. I was delighted by the care with which library staff (in the
UK and abroad) and academic staff would try to help track down papers from 20
or 30 years ago, where perhaps only one copy remained in some dusty file. This
camaraderie is part of what binds those working in what is sometimes called the
‘academic community’. Becoming part of that community you will be attending
meetings and conferences where you may meet people whose work you have read
but whose faces are unfamiliar. This was my experience, made all the more
enjoyable by the realisation that I could contribute and have my ideas scrutinised
by others. Sometimes I was happy to participate as a silent witness to exchanges
between well-known academics and to follow the cut-and-thrust of a lively academic
debate. Either way, whether as contributor or witness, this involvement with those
at the forefront of research is exciting and rewarding. This is an aspect of the
academic community to which reference is made in this book which rings true for
x i i / FO R E W O R D

me. And the contrasts which research affords can be illuminating; an early morning
meeting with my supervisor followed by a drive to my school for the rest of the day’s
work would see me switching thought mode from the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein to the normal routines of school within an hour. But even here the
insights given by my research enabled me to view the daily life of school in a new light.
Perhaps you wonder what your colleagues will make of your involvement in
research. Perhaps some will see it as slightly bizarre. If so, this is something to relish,
just as those who enjoy other interests relish them, interests which you may find
bizarre. Variety is the spice of life. Some may be interested and eager to participate
or to know more. Some may have done research previously and be eager to discuss
your ideas and progress with you. But much of your research will be quite a lonely
task, at least in terms of the physical presence of someone doing the work with you.
But come to see the books and papers you will be using as the voices of colleagues in
another room and it does not seem so lonely after all. And, of course, you will come
to meet with fellow researchers, even if infrequently, who can help to offer the
framework of critical support which can help to move your own work forward.
Making your research results public in some form is an important aspect of
research and of professional development. The discipline of publication helps
sharpen arguments and reduce confusion and errors and opens up your work to peer
review, a vital role of the academic community. Not only is it professionally
rewarding to see your work made public but it can also give personal satisfaction to
you and those who have supported you through the sometimes lonely experience of
research. It is also to be expected that, having completed your research, you will
have conclusions to share with others; having your work published provides a way
of formally presenting your ideas for this purpose.
Your involvement in research may result in some form of accreditation. It may
also give you a lasting interest in your chosen area of study, to which you may be
able to return at a future date or continue in another form after the official part of
your research is completed. Other consequences of carrying out your own research
for professional development are likely to include an increased scepticism (in my
view, healthy) of many of the edicts handed down from ‘on high’ to the teaching
profession, and a recognition (again, in my view, healthy) that the learning
community is one which extends across formal institutional boundaries and that
practising teachers have an important contribution to make. For reasons such as
these I am delighted to have been asked to contribute this Foreword.
Perhaps reading this book will give you new ideas for research as part of your
professional development. If so, the underlying message of the authors, it seems to
me, is that you should have the confidence to take your ideas forward.
 In memory of Helen Francis
(PG)

With thanks to all the teacher researchers

I have had the fortune to encounter.
My special thanks to Ian Kane for his ‘red pen’ work.
(AC)
.
 1 Research Traditions in
Education
OVERVIEW

This chapter introduces some of the key concepts used in the book by introducing
you to some of the more important broad traditions of education research. This
leads you into an introduction to the practitioner research movement, which
underpins the ideas that form the core of this book.

Introduction
Let us assume that you have identified some aspect of your professional practice in
your classroom that is puzzling you. You may have noticed that one particular
technique you use to encourage effective learning does not appear to be working as
well as it used to, or that another is working very effectively. You may have seen
something in the news or read something in the educational press that reminded
you of your own classroom or at least caused you to wonder how it might apply to
your own professional situation. At this point you have taken the first step as a
researcher in that you have identified an educational issue that might need resolving.
We could generalise by saying that much educational research focuses on interesting
puzzles that have been identified by practitioners.

The second step in the process is to carry out a small-scale study of the aspect of
your professional practice in the classroom that is puzzling you. However, as a
beginning researcher in education you may not realise that there are a number of
research traditions in education and that you may find yourself operating within
them without realising that you are doing so. It is important that you recognise the
tradition you are perhaps unknowingly accepting, as each has various methodologi-
cal advantages and disadvantages which feed through to your findings and
conclusions. In fact, the practitioner research approach we have described above is
itself just one tradition amongst many. These traditions are themselves worthy of
2 / R ES E ARC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N

research, as they hide puzzles that have a knock-on effect to the research they
generate in ways that we will discuss in this chapter.

Two crude traditions

One of the most common ways of identifying traditions of educational research is
to identify a distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches to research.
As the term suggests, quantitative educational research deals with measurement of
quantities of some sort or another. If you studied for your teacher’s qualification in
the UK before the 1980s it is likely that at some point you will have been introduced
to the so-called disciplines of education, in particular the psychology and sociology
of education. There are still parts of the world where such an approach to preparing
students for teaching flourish. Research within the psychology of education set out
to make the understanding and improvement of education scientific, in that it would
provide objective knowledge about education so as to allow for that knowledge to
be used to improve the learning of pupils and the teaching techniques of teachers.
Similarly, early forms of the sociology of education made extensive use of statistical
analyses with, for example, pupil achievement being measured in quantitative terms.

There have been a number of criticisms of this approach to educational research,

not least being the fact that education involves interpersonal relationships whose
subtleties cannot easily be captured in quantitative terms. The argument being
presented by such critics is that education involves issues to do with the quality and
nature of these relationships, so educational research is uniquely qualitative. As
such, objective scientific measurement of the activity is more often than not
inappropriate as a quantitative approach to qualitative debates can rarely capture
such inquiries, though they may be used to inform aspects of them.

Two more subtle traditions

In outlining the quantitative approach to education research we have referred to
research being scientific and therefore producing objective knowledge. That
conception of science is itself a particular tradition with a particular understanding
of the nature of knowledge and one we now need to examine in more detail.
 R ES E A RC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N / 3

THE POSITIVIST, COMMONSENSE TRADITION

This is an approach to knowledge which is usually first referenced to August

Comte’s 1844 publication, Discourse on the Positivist Spirit. He argued that there were
three broad ways in which natural phenomena can be explained, the theological, the
metaphysical and, finally, the positivist, this last being an approach whereby natural
events are properly to be explained by reference to empirically observable concrete
phenomena. From that conception of how knowledge is to be gained comes what
might be called the commonsense view of science.

This views scientific research as progressing through a series of steps as follows.

The researcher begins with observations and experiments which produce facts
which in turn allow a hypothesis to be developed. The hypothesis is further tested
so that it can be confirmed and, once it has been confirmed, this allows the
researcher to produce (or induce via a process termed induction, where one moves
from some to all) a law which represents objective Knowledge,1 Truth or Reality.
This aspect of the research tradition is represented in the five steps presented in
Figure 1.1. The final stage in this research tradition is to use the objective
Knowledge that has been produced through the empirical process represented in
Figure 1.1 to produce explanations and predictions based on that Knowledge by a
process termed ‘deduction’ (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1: THE FIVE STEPS OF TRADITIONAL RESEARCH

4 / R ES E ARC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N

Figure 1.2: THE SIXTH STEP OF TRADITIONAL RESEARCH

Illustration: the positivist tradition

of research
If you decide to carry out an inquiry which has the following features:

 you identify a hypothesis;

 you use observations to prove your hypothesis;

 you make use of the facts identified by your proof to identify some sort of
objective Knowledge; and

 you deduce a universally applicable conclusion

then you are clearly operating within a positivist tradition of research, irrespective of
whether your work is to be seen as quantitative or qualitative research (or even a mixture
of these two approaches).
 R ES E A RC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N / 5

An example drawn from the English context shows how this tradition might be
relied upon to justify practice. Let us assume that after a number of observations of
young children successfully learning to read in, say, Singapore, it has been suggested
that it is necessary to have highly structured reading hours provided on a daily basis,
with equally rigidly structured activities to follow. This hypothesis to explain why
it is that Singaporean children read so effectively is then tested by observing as many
young Singaporean children’s reading lessons as possible, to produce the law that
all young children can be taught to read effectively in this way. Given this
empirically derived Knowledge it is then but a small matter to deduce the prediction
that the reading abilities of young English children will be improved by using these
methods. In this way an apparently sound, evidence-based policy decision can then
be introduced to the teaching profession.

This tradition has at least three major problems which you need to be aware of, as
they will seriously compromise your findings if you do not find ways of addressing
them.

Problem 1

The first step in this tradition depends upon observation. But observation itself
depends upon what we are interested in observing. That is, we do not approach
situations, especially social situations such as those we find in the classroom, free of
certain assumptions about their nature. These assumptions allow us to select from
the wealth of information that we are presented with only those details that interest
us, so we are not observing in some pure, assumption-free manner. Consequently,
the kinds of knowledge that we create as we observe social situations are inevitably
influenced by the assumptions we bring to bear on the situations we observe and
try to make sense of.

Problem 2

Figure 1.1 shows clearly that induction, the move from some to all, underpins the
move from singular observations to universally applicable objective Knowledge. Yet
the number of observations that are required to justify the move from some to all,
from the finite to the infinite, would have to be an infinite number too. As finite
creatures ourselves this is clearly impossible. The critical effect of this basic problem
on positivism has been described thus: ‘That the whole of science . . . should rest
6 / R ES E ARC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N

on foundations whose validity it is impossible to demonstrate has been found to be

uniquely embarrassing’ (Magee, 1973: 21).

Problem 3

Figure 1.2 indicates that deduction, the move from all to some, underpins the move
from universally applicable objective Knowledge to the singular application of that
Knowledge. The difficulty here is that the crucial distinction between something
being true and an argument being valid is being blurred. Here are two examples of
logically valid arguments, valid in that they move from ‘all to one’ in a logically
valid way:

1. All books on research methods are boring.

2. This is a book on research methods.

3. Therefore this book is boring.

1. All writers on research are female.

2. The author of this chapter is a writer on research.

3. Therefore the author of this chapter (Peter Gilroy) is female.

Step 1 of both arguments are assumptions but only argument B’s assumption is
demonstrably false. However, that does not prevent argument B’s conclusion being
valid but untrue. The point here is that even if there were to be universally
applicable Knowledge about the social world you have to take very great care in
relating it to particular situations, as deduction alone will not guarantee the truth
of your conclusions.

We said that you would need to address these three problems if you wanted to work
within this positivist tradition. If you do not then you might produce conclusions
to your research that assumed that the observations you made were untainted by
 R ES E A RC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N / 7

the assumptions you bring to bear to select one set of observations from another.
This would have the problem of preventing you seeing that your conclusions were
inextricably linked to the assumptions that underpinned the observations you
selected as significant. The second problem we have identified makes it clear that
you cannot justifiably make a universal generalisation from specific observations,
which would clearly influence the way you treated your findings. The third problem
suggests that the move from all to some, the reverse of the problem of induction,
is one that might be valid but you would still need to test for its truth, irrespective
of its validity.

These three problems seem to lead towards a modification of positivism which is

so drastic that it in effect represents a rejection of the tradition. The key
modification is to reject the attempt to produce universal conclusions and to accept
the need to operate at a more specific level of inquiry. We identify this tradition as
contextualism, and will now examine its key features.

THE CONTEXTUALIST TRADITION

There are a number of different approaches to educational research that could be

accommodated within this broad tradition, but before identifying them we first need
to establish the key features of the tradition itself. The central identifying feature
of the tradition is its emphasis on context as providing the background to any social
inquiry, none more so than educational inquiry.

A key thinker in this area is Karl Popper, who claimed to have solved the problem
of induction ‘in 1927, or thereabouts’ (1971: 1). He accepted that it is not possible
to justify universal Knowledge by reference to finite observations but, rather, that
instead we have to falsify them by testing them to destruction. In addition he
accepted that observations are dependent upon the various assumptions made by
the person carrying out the observation or, as he put it: ‘Observation is always
selective . . . these observations . . . presupposed the adoption of a frame of reference
. . . a frame of theories’ (1974: 46–7). He argued that inquiry is caused by
recognising that a trial solution that had been offered up for falsification (or error
elimination) would eventually produce a further problem that would require error
elimination and so on, with the process of inquiry being never ending. Consequent-
ly the knowledge that is created is provisional, always the possible object of further
attempts to falsify it. This approach is represented in Figure 1.3.
8 / R ES E ARC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N

Figure 1.3: THE PROCESS OF INQUIRY

It is Popper’s notion of a frame of reference that we term context and which provides
the basis for the observations that allow for research to begin. It is in this sense that
we talk of observations being context dependent. It follows that any conclusions we
draw from such observations are also context dependent, as are the application of
those conclusions.2 So this research tradition emphasises the context-specific nature
of all stages of its methodology, from the initial formulation of a particular problem
through to whatever tentative and highly provisional conclusions might be
produced which are also, of course, context specific.

If we apply this to the example previously identified regarding the use of research
on the method used to teach young Singaporean children’s reading, we can see
immediately the importance of context. For example, if the children’s social
background was such that they had considerable assistance and support in reading
at home, if the Singaporean culture is one that encourages reading in various ways
other than those actually observed then these, amongst many other context-specific
factors, have been ignored: and that is to leave aside the various complex contexts
in England where a straightforward application of the methodology of one context’s
success to another context or set of contexts might be quite inappropriate.

The drawback to this tradition of research is the difficulty of providing any

meaningful generalisations as conclusions to the research. However, from the point
of view of a contextualist that is not so much a drawback as a major advantage, for
generalisations are part and parcel of the positivist tradition. Another criticism
might well be that the conclusions are so specific to a context that they have little
or no standard against which to judge their truth, unless you are also part of that
context. Again, the contextualist would not see this as a problem but rather as an
inevitable aspect of social inquiry, with descriptions of social phenomena accepted
as ringing true, rather than being true.
 R ES E A RC H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N / 9

Teacher-initiated research, which as we shall see is part of teachers’ continued

professional development, is likely to follow the contextualist tradition. To begin
with it is unlikely than many teachers will have the resources to carry out the
large-scale surveys or case studies necessary to produce the sheer quantity of data
required to allow for some form of research within the positivist tradition. More to
the point, Popper’s ‘problems’ and ‘error eliminations’ are more likely to create
further problems within the context of a class or set of classes that a teacher is
responsible for. So for both practical and methodological reasons it is likely that
teachers will be drawn towards a contextualist tradition once they begin to carry out
research.

We now need to examine in a little more detail the practitioner research movement.

Reflecting reflection
Perhaps the first person to argue that teachers, by dint of the fact that they were
teachers, were also researchers, was Lawrence Stenhouse. In opposition to those
who wished to impose curriculum developments on teachers, with teachers seen as
little more than technicians delivering a curriculum ‘product’ that others had
designed, he argued that curriculum development was a process whereby teachers
translated their educational values into practice. It follows that curriculum
development (which, of course, includes teaching a particular curriculum) is a form
of research, with teachers researching their own practice so as to come to a better
understanding of the values they are relying on to inform and improve that practice.

Although not referring to Stenhouse directly or, for that matter, to teachers in any
detail, an American thinker, Donald Schön, has been seen as developing these ideas
further. The key concept he introduced into educational debate was that of the
reflective practitioner, with ‘practitioner’ being used to include a very wide range of
professions, including architects, psychotherapists and lawyers. His arguments for
the way in which these professions develop their practitioners have been used by
many in teacher education to explain what they regard as the key feature of being
a teacher, namely reflection on practice. Indeed, it would be an unusual course
which nowadays did not at some point make mention of reflection or reflective
practice. But what is meant by reflective practice and how does it connect to the
teacher as researcher?
1 0 / R ES E AR C H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N

Schön introduces his seminal work, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals
Think in Action, by stating that the book is an ‘exploration of professional
knowledge’ (1983: vii). He continues by setting up a straightforward distinction
between two accounts of what he calls professional knowledge. The first he terms
Technical Rationality and he argues that, for various reasons, such an approach to
accounting for professional knowledge should be rejected, not least because it
cannot account for the ‘artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do
bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict’ (1983:
49).

The second is a form of knowledge which he terms Reflection-in-Action. Schön

argues that in everyday life we have a tacit knowledge of aspects of our behaviour
and this is revealed by the rule-governed way in which we act. This ‘knowing as
revealed by actions’ is often quite spontaneous and the actors concerned are usually
unaware of it (1983: 54). Part of what it is to be a good practitioner is to be able to
bring this tacit knowledge to the surface by a process called reflection-in-action,
by thinking through one’s actions as one is producing them in the thick of one’s
professional situation. This behaviour, reflecting critically on one’s actions whilst at
the same time acting, is what he identifies as reflective practice.

There has been much discussion around Schön’s work (see, for example, Gilroy,
1993; Newman, 1999) but in the context of this chapter it should readily be seen
that it can easily be assimilated to what we have termed the contextualist tradition.
The reflective practitioner is by definition a researcher, researching not just their
own professional context but, crucially, researching that context as they act within
it. Moreover, they may be doing this at a tacit level without realising that they are
adjusting their behaviour to accommodate the complex situations they are acting
within. It is in this sense that such individuals are researchers, researching their
everyday practice as they practise.

In Schön’s terms, our book is intended to provide the understanding and tools
which will help to improve your reflective practice, by allowing you to see how you
might (consciously) critically reflect on your (subconscious) reflections. In so doing
you will, with Stenhouse, be behaving as a teacher researcher.
 R ES E AR C H TRA D I TI O N S I N E D U C AT I O N / 1 1

Notes
1. The use of the capital is intended to indicate the objective status of such
Knowledge, as opposed to knowledge which is more subjective.
2. For more details of this position, see Edwards et al. (2002: ch. 3).
 2 Researching Professional
Development
OVERVIEW

This chapter explores the current context affecting issues surrounding the
professional development of teachers and develops an argument for a particular
approach to teachers doing research. It promotes the concept of teachers as
practitioner researchers and their efforts to research thinking, practice and
professional development. It seeks to highlight the relationship between doing
research and developing professionally and to argue that researching classrooms
and school contexts is a vital part of teachers’ professional development. It argues
for the evolution of a new perspective on continuing professional development
policy and provision.
It seems timely to explore understandings of the forms that teachers’
professional development may take, to understand better how the processes of
development work. This chapter investigates notions of professional development
and proposes that investigation and research of professional development are a
worthwhile activity for teachers to undertake in pursuit of improving and
developing practice in teaching and in education in general. As a preparation for
moving into the issues raised in this chapter, you should attempt to address the
following questions:

 Why has professional development become a major focus of government policy?

 What constitutes professional development?

 What roles do autonomy and self-determination play?

 What roles do research and investigation play in professional development?

 How can teachers start exploring their own professional development?

 What impact could research have on me as a professional?

 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 1 3

We are also increasingly coming to understand that developing teachers and

improving their teaching involves more than giving them new tricks. We are
beginning to recognise that, for teachers, what goes on inside the classroom
is closely related to what goes on outside it. The quality, range and flexibility
of teachers’ work are closely tied up with their professional growth – and the
way they develop as people and as professionals (Hargreaves, 1992: ix).

The political context for teacher research and

development
Teaching today takes place in a world of rapid change and development and teachers
are expected to meet high standards of teaching and raise levels of achievement in
schools and colleges. During the last 15 years or so, education has been the subject
of intense accountability measures, especially in England which has seen the
implementation of a National Curriculum and the introduction of a national
programme of testing arguably more detailed and demanding than any other
national programme.

As measures to inspect schools and appraise teachers have been introduced under
the banner of ‘modernising’ teaching, teachers have often felt a lack of ownership
and a lack of self-worth (Ruddock, 1991). Within the context of ‘rolling reform’ and
piecemeal implementation, the professional development of teachers has become a
high-profile, politically ‘hot’ issue. Civil servants, politicians, professional associ-
ations, private sector companies, universities, schools and local politicians, all are
stakeholders in teachers’ professional development. All teachers are required to
engage in professional development; to identify, document, record and evaluate it
as they cross through the barriers of qualified teacher and induction standards,
grapple with targets for performance management, submit threshold applications or
bid for research scholarships, international exchanges, professional bursaries and
sabbaticals.

This phenomenon is not restricted to the UK. Cochran-Smith and Fries (2001: 3)
describe the scene in the USA, where: ‘there have never before been such blistering
media commentaries and such highly politicised battles about teacher education as
those that have dominated the public discourse and fuelled legislative reforms at the
state and federal levels during the last five years or so.’
1 4 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

The battles referred to are those of opposing sides, one trying to professionalise
teaching and link this to raising standards in schools, the other trying to deregulate
teacher preparation and development and setting out to highlight the lack of connection
between teacher qualifications and pupil achievement. Cochran-Smith and Fries (2001:
13) made an important point that: ‘the way the problem of teacher education is
conceptualised in the first place has a great deal to do with the conclusions that are
drawn about the empirical evidence suggesting what policies are the best solutions for
reforming teacher education.’ There would appear to be a great deal of commonality in
the state of teacher education and development in both the UK and the USA.

The professional development of teachers has been a target of government policy.

It is contained within an official publication, Learning and Teaching: A Strategy for
Professional Development (DfES, 2001). There has been a gradual recognition over
the last ten years or so of the importance of continuing professional development
(CPD), as the English government has launched initiative after initiative in schools
and teachers have tried to meet the challenges of rapid change. Literacy and
numeracy strategies followed the juggernaut of the National Curriculum and
testing, then for example, education action zones, Excellence in Cities, Beacon
schools, flagship schools, training schools, specialist schools and colleges, city
academies and networked learning communities, to name but a few.

Similar initiatives have happened and are happening in the USA and Australia.
Many European countries are engaged in whole-scale review of teacher education
and teacher support and development structures in order to enter the European
Economic Community or to bring their provision up to date. There is a move to
locate the majority of professional development and professional learning in schools
in order to embed initiatives and give schools and teachers the responsibility for
organising and managing development.

These are difficult times for teachers. Far more public accountability is demanded
than ever before and that accountability is increasingly more visible in league tables,
inspections, media coverage of schools and international comparisons.

In England, it would appear from ministerial speeches and from policy documents
such as the CPD strategy (DfES, 2001) and more recent policies aimed at moving
professional development funding to schools that individual schools and classrooms
are to become ‘learning communities’ and the main, key, future sites of professional
development. In Scotland, a recent major initiative supporting teacher development
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 1 5

has established the ‘chartered teacher’, a well qualified ‘advanced’ teacher who will
engage in research and professional development and promote these amongst
colleagues. The ‘raising standards’ agenda dominates the professional preparation
and development of teachers in England, and initiatives that support teachers must
demonstrate how they will address the raising of pupil achievement. It is an
assumption that better prepared teachers mean better achieving pupils, and current
initiatives are predicated on improving teaching and learning in classrooms by
supporting teachers in their professional development. There would appear to be a
tension between personal professional development needs and the needs of the
school or department. This tension has been largely ignored, though an identifica-
tion of individual needs features prominently in the proposed implementation in
many of the new initiatives or innovations at central government level. Some would
argue that teachers’ professional development has been revived as an issue due to
recruitment and, in particular, retention issues in the profession (Eraut, 1999).

A variety of support has been promised: classroom assistants, new technological

support, scholarships, bursaries and the provision of good-quality CPD. Normally,
however, these are not available to all teachers and schools as an entitlement.
Teachers and schools have to make bids and write proposals, sometimes to gain
financial support or to match funding to participate in development activities. The
culture of ‘bidding’ and proposing projects has arrived in the UK as a recent import
from the USA, increasing the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Whilst
a climate of diversity offers flexibility it can also result in inequalities of provision
and entitlement for pupils, teachers and schools.

Highly politicised debates have also been imported, as referred to by Cochran-

Smith and Fries (2001) in their article which examines how ‘the evidentiary
warrant-empirical versus ideological’, the ‘political warrant – good versus private
good’ and the ‘accountability warrant – outcomes versus inputs’ are intended by
advocates of competing agendas to add up to and capture the ‘linguistic high ground
of common sense’ about how to improve the quality of America’s teachers. They
conclude with a cautionary note that unless there is debate about the underlying
ideals, ideologies and values in relation to the evidence about teacher quality and
about the discourse of teacher education reform, there will be little progress in
understanding the politics of teacher education reform and the competing agendas.

With regard to the English context, Whitty (1999) refers to the tensions between
regulation or state control of teachers’ work and the apparent shift back to ‘licensed
1 6 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

autonomy’ through the establishment of a General Teaching Council (GTC). We

have, in both the English and American contexts, a situation where there is
seemingly a great deal of central control of the profession but also a move to
deregulation in terms of entry to the profession and access to professional
development. Whitty argues that a ‘third way’, or a way that is different from the
state control model and the ‘traditional professionalism or self-governance’ model,
needs to be found in order to move forward. He calls this alternative ‘democratic
professionalism’, where teachers would set up alliances with parents, pupils and
members of the community, seemingly not a long way away from some of the
current proposals for learning communities and networks, but he asks: ‘In the light
of recent history, my question would be – is either the state or the profession willing
to face up to the challenge?’ (1999: 10).

In his Foreword to Learning and Teaching: A Strategy for Professional Development,

David Blunkett, the then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, states
that: ‘I believe that professional development is above all about developing
extraordinary talent and inspiration, and especially the classroom practice of
teachers, by making sure that they have the finest and most up-to-date tools to do
their job’ (DfES, 2001: 1). Teachers’ professional development toolkits will have to
have more than the physical tools which teachers use. Does a toolkit need to include
personal qualities such as enthusiasm, creativity, joy and passion? If not, the toolkit
would arguably be less than adequate. Hargreaves (1992: ix) believes:

Teachers teach in the way that they do not just because of the skills they have
or have not learned. The ways they teach are also grounded in their
backgrounds, their biographies, in the kinds of teachers they have become.
Their careers – their hopes and dreams, their opportunities and aspirations,
or the frustration of these things – are also important for teachers’
commitment, enthusiasm and morale. So too are relationships with their
colleagues – either as supportive communities who work together in pursuit
of common goals and continuous improvement, or as individuals working in
isolation, with the insecurities that sometimes brings.

Defining professional development is not an easy task, highly dependent on the

cultural and socioeconomic climate prevalent at any one time. Certainly at the time
of writing, in the early twenty-first century, teachers’ professionalism has been
somewhat demeaned by the intense media coverage of what goes on in classrooms
and schools and by the number of government interventions in what teachers should
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 1 7

do and know. Day (1999) agrees with Hargreaves when he writes about ‘teachers’
development being located in their personal and professional lives and in the policy
and school settings in which they work’ and sees teacher development as lifelong
and a necessary part of teaching. Day (1999: 2) has ten precepts about professional
development which underpin his work and which span the following points. These
may serve to illustrate a set of principles for good-quality professional development
arising from research.

Illustration: the principles for good-

quality professional development
1. Support for professional development as an integral part of raising standards
of teaching and learning.

2. Teachers as models of lifelong learning for their students.

3. Lifelong learning in order to keep up with change and innovation.

4. Learning from experience is not enough.

5. The value of the interplay between life history, current development, school
contexts and the wider social and political scene.

6. The synthesis of ‘the heart and the head’ in complex educational settings.

7. Content and pedagogical knowledge cannot be divorced from teachers’

personal, professional and moral purposes.

8. Active learning styles which encourage ownership and participation.

9. Successful schools are dependent on successful teachers.

10. Planned career-long development is the responsibility of teachers, schools

and government.
1 8 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

Implicit in the above precepts is the notion that professional development takes
many forms, from the solitary, unaided, daily reflections on experience, to working
with a more experienced or knowledgeable practitioner, observing and being
observed, professional discourses, and attendance at workshops, courses and
conferences. There has been little research that has focused on the nature and
quality of CPD, apart from Day’s seminal work and review of research (1999).
Recently the government commissioned a team of researchers from Manchester
Metropolitan University and Education Data Surveys to undertake a national
baseline survey of approximately 2,500 teachers’ perceptions of CPD in order to
gain information about the range and quality of CPD in England which would help
them plan initiatives for the future (Hustler et al., 2003).

Your professional development

It may be useful at this point to list the main types of professional development
activity in which you have participated in the last three years. Try to provide a
variety of different types. Annotate your list with perceptions of how valuable and
effective you found the different activities and types of events. This may help you
later in Chapter 3 when it is suggested that you might compile a curriculum vitae in
order to review your professional identity.

An American study of approximately 1,000 teachers’ opinions of effective profes-

sional development across the USA was recently published from which a number of
interesting findings can be gleaned (Garet et al., 2001). The research focused on
mathematics and science teachers’ self-reported accounts of the effects of different
characteristics of professional development on their learning. Results indicate core
features of professional development activities that have powerful effects on learning
and changes in classroom practice:

 Focus on content knowledge.

 Provide opportunities for active learning.

 Have coherence with other learning activities.

It was found that, through these core features, the following structural features
significantly affect teacher learning:
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 1 9

 The form of teacher activity.

 Collective participation of teachers from the same school, grade or subject.

 The duration of the activity.

Example: types of professional

development
In order to help you compile your list, some headings are suggested below of types of
professional development:

 Classroom-based development activities, such as team teaching, observation,

coaching, group discussion.

 School-based development activities, such as joint planning and design of units,

leading or participating in a session for school staff, writing a school policy.

 More formal school-based input by a visiting ‘expert’ (literacy or numeracy

specialist or other such person).

 Attendance at a short course (e.g. half day, one day/two day, 10 sessions)
organised by the LEA, a regional or national body, university or consultant.

 Longer-term course with accreditation (e.g. Open University, local university

or professional/subject association).

In summary, it was concluded ‘that it was more important to focus on the duration,
collective participation and the core features (i.e. content, active learning and
coherence) than type’ of learning (Garet et al., 2001: 936).

Whether an activity was traditional (e.g. workshops, events external to classroom

and school) or more modern (e.g. using strategies to support change in classrooms
such as mentoring, coaching, joint planning – i.e. events on-site) was less important
2 0 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

than sustained, content-focused, coherent, active learning. One major challenge

identified for provision of high-quality professional development is cost. The results
demonstrate: ‘in order to provide useful and effective professional development that
has a meaningful effect on teacher learning and fosters improvements in classroom
practice, funds should be focussed on providing high quality professional develop-
ment experiences’ (Garet et al., 2001: 941).

There are a number of lessons to be learnt from this article, not least the need for
collective participation in professional development. Current CPD initiatives in
England seem to favour individual teachers as the focus for initiatives (requiring
them to apply for funding or search out the appropriate activity for themselves) but
also requires all teachers to participate in prescribed national training for literacy
and numeracy. The advent of appraisal and performance management for all
teachers may have forced teachers to focus on their professional development
activities, but direct linking of pupil progress to pay may prove to be a wrong
move in trying to reprofessionalise the teaching force. The Hay McBer Report
(2000), whilst espousing a managerial approach to teacher development, indicated
that a degree of autonomy was important in teacher development, and this is
supported by Whitty (1999) in his identification of the current struggles over
professionalism.

Interrogating the value of professional

development activities you have experienced
In the light of the above findings consider whether you agree with the following
statements. Use the data produced as a basis for discussing the review of your
professional development at a later stage. Consult the list you compiled earlier and
try to find out what made the professional development activity worth while.

After participating in this activity, consider what you think the main features of
professional development should be. Do your colleagues agree with you? Find out
by asking them whether they agree with the above statements and write up your
thoughts. These will provide useful data to help contextualise your later thoughts
on researching professional development.
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 2 1

Exercise: professional development

Which of the following statements applies to you?

 I find that my learning is more effective when the activities I undertake are
linked and coherent with previous experiences.

 I prefer to listen rather than do.

 I have enough knowledge for my teaching; what I need are more tips and
strategies.

 I like variety in my learning, otherwise I will get bored.

 I favour approaches which focus on the content of teaching and aim to improve
and increase my subject knowledge.

 I prefer to be actively involved in my learning, experiencing new activities and

learning new ways of doing things.

 It would be useful to have colleagues on the same sessions so that we can

talk about it afterwards and develop our ideas further.

 I like quick, relevant inputs and then to move on to something else.

 It does not matter whether the teachers in sessions have anything in common
as we all have our different ways of doing things anyway.

 I like going to several sessions with the same people in order to get some
continuity of discussion and to get sustained development.

 I prefer sessions to have varied formats to suit different types of activities.

 It does not matter if all the sessions are the same format as long as it is effective.
2 2 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

Controlling your professional development

Changes in the last 20 years would appear to have resulted in a decrease in teachers’
professional autonomy and seem very distant from Stenhouse’s (1975: 144) ideas of
‘autonomous professional development through systematic self study . . . and
through questioning and testing of ideas by classroom research procedures’.
However, it could be argued that some of the current initiatives, such as teachers
as researchers and school-based networks for learning, may fulfil aspects of the
vision Stenhouse had of professional communities of teacher researchers. Day
(1999) also espouses the establishment of networks as powerful sites of teacher
learning but pragmatically also identifies the need to invest in teachers and schools
in order to provide sustained professional development for teachers. Autonomy in
the context of professional development does not mean ‘going it alone’ but refers
to the rights of practitioners to design and shape the types of learning and
continuous professional development activities they identify, either through collec-
tive or individual evaluation and analysis of their practice.

Who now decides what teachers need to know and how their professional development
should take place or of what it should consist? As can be surmised from earlier evidence
above, much of teachers’ professional development activities in the recent past in
England at least have, since the introduction of the National Curriculum, been driven
by the needs of government initiatives, policy and a somewhat punitive inspection
regime. The heavy emphasis on raising standards within national strategies and
projects with prescribed content and pedagogy, whilst important, would appear to
allow little autonomy and ownership of such policies and practices for practitioners.

But not all is gloom. The tide seems to be turning, with school self-evaluation, peer
review and ‘lighter touch’ inspections being the order of the day. Day (1999), for
example, advocates a synchronisation of institutional and personal professional
development approaches in order to maximise the opportunities for change and
development in schools. It has often been suggested that appraisal systems would
be the best way for this to happen, but research has shown this to be problematic.
Wragg et al. (1996) found that there were ongoing tensions between school and
individual needs, limitations in funding for appraisal and problematic issues of
confidentiality and personal change. It will be interesting to research and investigate
whether current appraisal and performance management initiatives support and
facilitate change and a high quality of professional development activity.
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 2 3

Many researchers of teachers’ professional development feel that self-determination

and autonomy are key aspects or hallmarks of professionalism (see Woods, 1994;
Day, 1999; Elliott, 1999). An example of such an approach would be MacBeath
(1999) in his work on school improvement and effectiveness, where he argues for a
balance between external and internal collaborators and evaluators, and for
ownership and self-determination as key components of successful developments
and successful schools.

Exercise: autonomy and self-

determination
Consider the questions below in order to explore your own ideas about autonomy and
self-determination and to build up a better picture of your ideas about professional
development, which can be used later on in Chapter 3:

 How could you identify your professional development needs? Is it solely the
responsibility of the individual or are there school, regional and national
perspectives to consider?

 What kinds of needs do you have?

 How can you be helped to identify your professional development needs?

 What role should internal colleagues and external ‘experts’ or consultants play?

 Should whole departments/faculties/schools/other groups of local teacher

specialists or year-group teachers contribute to and organise activities for
professional development purposes? Should this happen or not? You may like
to develop an argument.

 What kinds of products should there be from professional development activity?

Is it always necessary to have a product?

 What role do you envisage for networks and partnerships? How could links
with existing networks and partnerships (e.g. initial teacher education and
training (ITET) and cluster groups of schools) work and to what end?
2 4 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

 What professional development do you experience from the various roles you
may undertake as a teacher? For example, many teachers mentor trainees, and
newly qualified teachers (NQTs) develop, through rigorous questioning, a healthy
review and evaluation of their practice. This might include a reminder that
subject knowledge is an important aspect of teaching and needs constant
refinement and renewal. Roles such as moderator or leading teacher for a core
subject offer other opportunities for professional development.

 What would you like to research as a teacher? Have you considered what you
would like to find out about in your classroom or school?

Teacher researchers
The value of teachers undertaking research has yet to be fully appreciated. There
are many examples of how teachers can become researchers evident from the early
days, in Lewin’s (1948) work and Stenhouse’s (1975) vision of teacher researchers in
professional communities, but there is still a debate about teacher research and ‘real’
research in the academic arena. Currently there is also a debate about ‘evidence-
based practice’ and pressure on practitioners to use evidence to inform their practice
in similar ways that have been developed in medical contexts. Elliott (2001)
develops a view that current versions of this position (Hargreaves, 1997, in
particular) subscribe to an unquestioning commitment to an outcomes-based view
of education and lack sufficient attention to educational theory and its contribution
to conceptualising aims and objectives. Elliott’s view would seem to support
Stenhouse’s (1975) position that ‘teachers using research are doing research’.

The current focus on teacher research is not new. For decades, teachers supported
by, and encouraged by, universities and colleges of higher education, and sometimes
funded by LEAs, have engaged in action research, practitioner research, collab-
orative inquiry and teacher research in schools and classrooms in order to improve
teaching and learning and to develop and refine the curriculum and teaching
practice, and to innovate and evaluate their teaching (see, for example, Stenhouse,
1975; 1980; Elliott, 1974; 1981; Nixon, 1981; Hopkins, 1985; Hustler et al., 1986).
In England during the 1970s and 1980s teachers were often funded, through
secondment to universities, to undertake research-based courses at universities and
colleges, and a considerable amount of unpublished teacher research was produced.
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 2 5

The emphases on evidence-based practice, the opportunity to apply for funding for
classroom and school-based research and the focus on raising standards through
teacher research are new. One concern about recent and current initiatives,
expressed by Elliott (1999: 1), is that strategies to promote teacher research and
evidence-based practice may not support the empowerment of teachers, but may be
an attempt to ‘establish an epistemic sovereignty to legitimise its [the government’s]
interventionist policies to drive up standards’.

A further concern is the imprecise nature of teacher research. Teachers may

subscribe to the view, along with some critics of practitioner research, that the only
legitimate research is large-scale quantitative research that arrives at clear-cut,
measurable outcomes and conclusions. This type of research may be viewed as
positive if it also matches or endorses government policies. For many novice teacher
researchers, there is a strong pull to believe that research is a straightforward
process and that any struggle with conflicting evidence proves to be difficult. But
research into the complex processes of teaching and learning is not always neat and
tidy; it is frequently messy and inconclusive. There is often a naı̈ve belief that
teacher research may solve all the problems of complex classrooms.

The notion of criticality, of teachers being able to take a critical stance about what
they choose to research and what they find out from their research, is arguably of
crucial importance to how current teacher research initiatives are viewed within the
research community and within the teaching profession itself. Key factors in the
development of a strategy to promote critical thinking and teacher research would
include: autonomy and control of research questions and design of projects by the
teacher researchers; a high quality of support for research projects; robust processes
of self-monitoring, critical reflection and evaluation; and transparent procedures for
dissemination and debate of research projects and findings.

However, whilst accepting the paradoxical nature of teacher research, in that it

could be in danger of becoming anything and everything, Sachs (1999: 41) argues
that: ‘teacher research has the potential to act as a significant source of teacher and
academic professional renewal and development because learning stands at the core
of this renewal through the production and circulation of new knowledge about
practice.’ Sachs also argues that there are three distinct forms of teacher-initiated
school-based inquiry, ‘teacher inquiry, action research and collaborative research’,
all of which have relevance to those wishing to improve their practice. In teacher
inquiry, she identifies new roles such as critical friend, new structures such as
2 6 / R ES E AR C H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D E V E LO P M E NT

writing teams who may work on tasks such as documenting practice and new
opportunities for disseminating and creating a culture of inquiry into professional
development (see Chapter 11). This notion of creating a new culture is attractive to
all who wish to understand more about teaching and learning and who wish to
harness research to improve policy and practice. Sachs also raises similar issues to
Elliott (1999) concerning the tensions in action research arising from the
relationship between theory and practice for teachers who value their ‘craft
knowledge’ above the theories underpinning teaching practices. We must not lose
sight of the importance of teachers’ views and ‘the power of the personal’ with
regard to teachers as researchers (Campbell, 2002) nor of how, as Hargreaves (1992)
reminds us, ‘teachers’ work is deeply embedded in their lives and developing the
teacher therefore involves developing the person, developing the life’.

The seeds of teachers researching their professional development are planted in

various initiatives such as practitioner, professionally focused and action research
programmes and degrees in universities and colleges and in research networks and
the newly formed local networks springing up in the regions. But these networks
and initiatives need nurturing and strengthening to grow into vibrant and strong
learning communities and partnerships where critical friendship and critical
communities can flourish. The role of higher education personnel in teacher
research is a vital and key one, providing support for research through partnerships
with teachers, schools, LEAs, consultants and funding bodies.

In conclusion, it may be timely to remind ourselves that if we are to retain and

sustain teachers in the profession in the future, then providing them with a voice
and empowering them through active participation in research which allows them
to investigate and shape the knowledge base of their teaching may be a key factor
in defining their professionalism and underwriting their commitment to education.

Further reading
Dadds, M. (2001) ‘Continuing professional development: nurturing the expert
within’, in J. Soler et al. (eds) Teacher Development: Exploring our own Practice.
London: Paul Chapman.
Marion Dadds’ chapter was written just before the publication of the 2001 CPD
strategy in England and provides a commentary on models of continuing
 R ES E A RC H I N G P RO F ESS I O N A L D EV E LO P M E N T / 2 7

professional development. The collection in Soler et al. (above) is a very useful

resource for those wishing to investigate teachers’ professional development further.

McNamara, O. (2002) ‘Evidence-based practice through practice-based evidence’,

in O. McNamara (ed.) Becoming an Evidence-based Practitioner. London: Rout-
ledgeFalmer.
Olwen McNamara’s chapter opens up the issues explored through a TTA-funded
project where teachers, LEA advisers and university tutors worked together in a
school-based research consortium. She tackles the sea change in practice and
attitudes to research in the last 20 years and draws on data gathered from teachers
as to what counts as research and what an evidence-based practitioner might look
like. Other chapters are written by teachers themselves or in collaboration with
university tutors and focus on actual research projects undertaken.

Pirrie, A. (2001) ‘Evidence-based practice in education – the best medicine’, British

Journal of Education Studies, 49(2): 124–36.
This article suggests that the desire to find evidence to support classroom practices
may result in a belief in ‘toolkits’ for teachers as a legitimate outcome of research.
The dangers of overlooking the complexity of doing research could mean
oversimplistic conclusions being generated from such an approach.
 3 Professional Identity:
Who am I? What Kind of
Practitioner am I?
OVERVIEW

This chapter will suggest ways that teachers, either in groups on courses, in
networks or clusters of schools, or as lone practitioners wishing to improve practice
or prepare for a new job, or as a part of performance management procedures or
as part of an assignment for an MA, or for whatever reason, can begin to think,
write, explore and talk about their professional identity. The underlying assumption
is that undertaking research in this area will improve teachers’ teaching and
learning strategies. The chapter provides sets of questions, suggested activities and
devices to facilitate exploration and research.

Identity should not be seen as a stable entity – something that people have
but as something that they use, to justify, explain and make sense of
themselves in relation to other people, and to the contexts in which they
operate. In other words identity is a form of argument. As such it is both
practical and theoretical. It is also inescapably moral: identity claims are
inevitably bound up with justifications and belief (Maclure, 2001: 168).

The moving image

The image of teaching and teachers has been the subject of much media interest
and reporting for several decades. Until quite recently when either a Damascan
conversion or a supply crisis has brought about a change of heart and of tone,
teachers have been attacked and vilified on many fronts as the politicisation of
education has caused an intense scrutiny of what happens in schools and classrooms
and brought about the imposition of a ‘raising standards’ agenda on the teaching
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 2 9

profession. But there is little sense of ‘argument’, in the public domain, as Maclure
indicates above.

It could be argued, echoing Maclure, that teachers in England have undergone a

series of professional identity crises as bandwagons such as the National Curricu-
lum, performance management and their involvement in initial teacher training
have lumbered through schools’ and teachers’ lives. Teachers have become
‘deliverers’ of the curriculum. Their performance is appraised and managed and
targets are set for the future; they train novice teachers through a plethora of routes
into teaching as ‘mentor’, ‘trainer’, ‘provider’, ‘professional tutor’ or ‘teacher-tutor’.
The commercialisation of education and the advent of a new managerialism
(Hargreaves, 1994) have been cited as resulting in a loss of autonomy and a
confusion of identity for teachers. Bolam (1999: 1) identified the main features of a
‘new public management’ as including: ‘less teacher autonomy, increased line
management of teachers, delegation of tasks to para-professionals, more distinct
managerial and bureaucratic layers, reduced collegial involvement, centralised
decision making and emphases on target setting and ‘‘national’’ accountability.’
It is entirely understandable that teachers feel confused. It is arguably time for
teachers’ roles and responsibilities to be reviewed, in an exploration of values,
attitudes, knowledge, skills and pedagogy that could be reflected in a professional
identity which acknowledges the complexity and scope of the job of teaching in
the current context. The teacher’s image now is one which involves a loss of
autonomy, a lack of self-determination and a culture of audit and excessive
accountability.

This chapter will suggest ways in which teachers can actually explore their
professional identity through an investigation of, and research into, their profes-
sional history in order to illuminate and identify future areas of development. There
will be exercises to undertake in writing, thinking and talking. In particular, the
power of narrative, biography and telling stories about professional development
will be discussed. Maclure (2001: 167) asserts that:

There is a lot of interest these days in the personal dimensions of teachers’

lives – in knowing what teachers are like and what makes them tick . . . As a
result, informal, person-oriented genres such as narrative and biography,
autobiography, life history and anecdote have become quite widely accepted
within educational research and professional development.
3 0 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

She cites the work of Connolly and Clandinin (1990) on stories of experience and
narrative inquiry as an emerging paradigm in research into teacher identity. This
approach to researching teachers’ lives through stories is further explained in
Chapter 6, which discusses the types of research approaches and techniques open
to those wishing to research their professional development and to improve their
practice. She quotes Ball and Goodson (1985: 13) ‘opening up the sealed boxes
within which teachers work and survive’ in support of the promise of greater
explanatory power offering better links between teachers’ individual lives in
classrooms and schools and current social structures. From her research into
teachers’ lives and jobs, she suggests that identity can be an organising principle in
teachers’ jobs and lives and that teachers’ identity claims can be seen as a form of
argument, ‘as devices for justifying, explaining and making sense of one’s conduct,
career, values and circumstances’.

It is exactly how these devices, and others enabling practitioners to research their
practices, thinking, attitudes and beliefs, might look and work that this chapter
wishes to examine and illustrate. In summary, it is the intention to enable
practitioners, through writing activities and group discussion, to:

 identify the beliefs and attitudes which underpin their practice;

 engage in a systematic process of individual and collaborative reflection and

analysis and in an individual review of professional learning and development;

 participate in self-appraisal, evaluation and action planning;

 investigate relevant literature in the field of professional development; and

 write accounts of narratives and stories about professional development both past
and future.

Exploring your professional development

Figure 3.1 sets out a process by which teachers can explore their professional
development. The starting point is straightforward. Experience of working with
teachers researching their professional development indicates that some exploration
Figure 3.1: EXPLORING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 3 1
3 2 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

of the literature and teachers’ ideas of ‘professionalism’, ‘professional’ and

‘professionality’ will make a good place to begin the process of talking, thinking and
writing about professionalism. Hoyle (1974) suggested that: ‘professionalism refers
to the strategies and rhetoric employed by members of an occupation in seeking to
improve status, salary and conditions, and professionality refers to the knowledge,
skills and procedures employed by teachers in the process of teaching.’ Tomlinson
(in Thompson, 1997: 11) says that teachers feel they need to convince the public
that they are a ‘proper’ profession and often try to demonstrate their professional-
ism through being seen to ‘agonise over ways to better understand the needs of their
pupils and about ways to better teach their pupils’. Whitty (1999: 10) concludes his
paper on teacher professionalism in the twenty-first century with the following
wake-up call which could make a good starting point for discussion:

Throughout the last twenty years or so, teachers and teacher educators have
been understandably preoccupied with issues of short term survival in the
face of an unrelenting flow of new initiatives and inspections. It is now time
to begin working with others to develop new approaches that relate not only
to the legitimate aspirations of the profession but also those of the wider
society – and that must include those groups within civil society who have
hitherto not been well-served by the professions or by the state. At a
rhetorical level, that does not seem a million miles away from the thinking
of the present-day unions or even New Labour. But in the light of recent
history, my question would be – ‘Is either the state or the profession willing
to face up to the challenge?’

Undertaking the process of researching professional development as suggested in

this chapter will involve considering the notions of professionalism and profes-
sionality. It may be useful to undertake a discussion and writing activity based
around some questions to ask about the above concepts. How do these definitions
relate to your own thoughts? It may be helpful to start writing about some of the
questions above in order to explore professional identity. An entry in a diary or log
that addresses the questions below might be a good starting point.

Writing about oneself as a practitioner is often difficult because it can feel like
stating the obvious. It is useful at times to have a particular audience in mind. As
part of the early stages of exploration of attitudes and beliefs and practices it is
useful to write a brief pen-portrait of oneself in order to share it with another
like-minded practitioner – for example, a colleague engaged in a similar research
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 3 3

project, a member of the course you are attending, a person in the local network.
The idea of sharing your pen-portrait is to encourage the colleague or partner to
explore issues in an informal interview or documented conversation.

Exercise: exploring professional

identity
The following are questions to address as a starting point for exploring professional identity:

 Are there currently struggles over professionalism and professionality (see

definitions above)? If so, what are they?

 Are teachers being deprofessionalised or reprofessionalised? Consider Tomlinson’s

point about choosing the process by which you will teach. Is that autonomy
being eroded in the present climate within which you work? Is it a core part of
being a ‘professional’?

 Is there a ‘new professionalism’? Does it empower teachers? Or is it a ‘new

managerialism’?

 What view is held of explicit standards for teaching that are used to manage
and assess performance?

 What challenges are there in the current climate for your professional autonomy?

 Do some teachers have more autonomy than others?

To help you write about yourself and address the question ‘What kind of teacher
am I?’, we would suggest writing up a short curriculum vitae (CV) before embarking
on the pen-portrait of yourself. The usual reason for compiling a CV is to apply
for a job. What is suggested here is a somewhat different sort of CV, one in which
you would not only chart your career to demonstrate the different roles and
experience you have had but also one where you can explore ideas and reasons for
moves and professional development. It should, none the less, help you when the
3 4 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

time comes actually to apply for a job and a CV is required. The following
guidelines are offered in support.

Learning aid: compiling a

developmental CV and a pen-portrait
Your personal details:

 Name, address, telephone/fax/email, age, gender.

Your professional details:

 Where and when were you educated as a teacher?

 Dates and location.

 What qualifications do you have?

 Awards and dates.

 What experience of teaching do you have?

 What areas of the curriculum have you taught?

 List subjects and areas taught with details of age groups.

 What posts of responsibility have you held?

 List promoted posts and responsibilities.

 What interests in education do you have?

Your professional development details:

 What professional development activities and processes have you been involved
in?
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 3 5

 List and provide dates and duration of activities. Give details of whether you
contributed to or led any of these.

 List any non-teaching activities or part-time teaching in other contexts which

could support your development.

Other relevant information:

 List your current and past interests.

 Are there any other related interests or experiences that enhance your profile?

 What external responsibilities have you had?

 List any external roles you may have undertaken, such as examiner or moderator.

Having completed your CV, you can now move to a pen-portrait, which is different
from a CV.

Telling your story

Teachers have personalities and these personal qualities, attributes and behaviours
affect the way they teach and see themselves as teachers. Hargreaves (1992: ix)
stresses the importance of teachers’ backgrounds and life histories to the develop-
ment of their teaching:

Teachers teach in the way they do not just because of the skills they have or
have not learned. The ways they teach are also grounded in their back-
grounds, their biographies, in the kinds of teachers they have become. Their
careers – their hopes and dreams, their opportunities and aspirations, or the
frustration of these things – are also important for teachers’ commitment,
enthusiasm and morale.

‘Core’ questions, adapted from Smyth (1987) and presented below, are intended to
aid the writing of a pen-portrait.
3 6 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

Learning aid: writing a pen-portrait

 What kind of a teacher are you?

 What are your core beliefs about teaching and learning?

 How would you describe your teaching styles?

 What makes you tick as a teacher? What motivates you to develop your teaching?

 What ideas do you have about the nature of teaching? What do these ideas
offer to a knowledge about teaching?

 Where do your ideas and beliefs about teaching/learning come from historically?

 How did you come to have these ideas?

 What helped you formulate your ideas and thinking about teaching?

 Do your practices accord with current views of teaching? If not, why not?

 Do you address inequalities and discrimination in education?

 What do you feel strongly about in education?

The next stage in this process of researching your professional development is to

exchange your writing with a colleague, critical friend (see Chapter 7) or partner,
and then to formulate some questions for an informal interview with each other.
The benefits of using another practitioner are various, another pair of ears and eyes,
critical support and challenge and a different and more objective perspective on
your ideas and views which opens up new doors and windows of opportunity. Some
guidance for this informal interview is given below and further, more detailed,
advice is given in Chapter 6. After reading your partner’s writing, jot down your
initial ideas about this person as a teacher. You are now in a position to design your
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 3 7

informal interview schedule. It may be worth considering tape recording the

session, not for transcription purposes but for authenticity of report and for
checking against your understanding of what happened. Some questions to help you
construct an informal interview are given below.

Learning aid: questions to aid

informal interviews about teaching
 What do you think are his or her core beliefs about teaching and learning?

 What else would you like to know about his or her beliefs and attitudes?

 What questions will you ask to elicit more information and to help your partner
articulate and develop more fully his or her answers?

 Does the information you have been given have any gaps or areas that are
vague?

 How does your partner define ‘professional’?

 Are there any points to pick up on for discussion?

Following the informal interview it would be useful to write up a summary of the

main points arising. Alongside this brief account of the interview it would be helpful
also to provide an analytical commentary that gives a synopsis of your interpretation
of your partner’s core beliefs and what you think might be some challenging issues
to address in the future.

For the purpose of illustrating and modelling the process and supporting those who
are new to this particular type of writing, extracts are presented below from:

 a pen-portrait

 an account of an interview
3 8 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

 some analytical comments on that interview.

PEN-PORTRAIT

Illustration: extracts from teacher P’s

pen-portrait
I have always subscribed to a model of teaching in which the pupils are encouraged to
take some responsibility for their own learning. I have a firm belief in autonomy and
ownership as an important part of the learning process. Through active participation in
learning students/pupils can be empowered and can gain confidence as learners. I have tried
to establish environments in my classrooms that allowed students/pupils to make decisions
about their work – how they do it and when they do it.

This, however, is becoming more difficult as the curriculum and the way it is taught is
becoming more prescribed. I also believe that first hand experience and using pupils’ real
life experiences is a good starting point for education.

During the 1980s when I did my teacher training there was little pressure from the
government as to what or how to teach and I was allowed to develop my own ideas about
teaching. I was heavily influenced in my own teaching by the models of teaching I
experienced early in my career. I think having good, clear, detailed planning is essential
for good teaching, but also being flexible is important. The teachers I saw in the 1980s had
enthusiasm, energy and enjoyed teaching. They worked together a lot and went on courses
together to improve their teaching. There was a lot of cross curricular work around then
and I think the pupils enjoyed what they did a lot more when there was an element
of choice.

When I think about it, I suppose that what I learned in college when I was a student teacher
linked with what I believed anyway – it agreed with a set of principles about how to help
children learn.
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 3 9

I feel strongly that children should be able to reach their potential and it is the teacher’s
job to raise their expectations of what they can do and that there should be adequate
funding for all schools and classrooms regardless of where they are located. I find it hard
to deal with inequalities in my classroom and in school and would like to learn how
to deal with this in more effective ways. I like working with enthusiastic people who think
learning is fun and who are not stuck in a rut. I have been lucky to work with colleagues
who have helped me and worked alongside me to improve my teaching – this I find very
motivating.

INTERVIEW

A set of questions was designed by teacher P’s partner to help elicit more
information in an informal interview. A selection of these questions and teacher P’s
answers is documented below.

Illustration: an informal interview

I: Can you explain more why you believe that autonomy and ownership
are important in the learning process?

P: If children are too dependent on others and in particular the teacher, this causes them
to lack confidence in their own initiative and their ability to instigate their own learning.
It perpetuates one model of learning where the pupil is the recipient of knowledge that
is transmitted from the more knowledgeable teacher. While imparting knowledge can
be one of the roles of a teacher there are other roles that involve the facilitation of
opportunity to explore and investigate alternative answers. It also creates a dependency on
the decisions that a teacher may make instead of encouraging children to make decisions
about how and what to learn.

I: Can you describe the sort of learning environment in your classroom that allows pupils
to make decisions?

P: A learning environment which allows children to make decisions would feature choice of
activity and the facility to organise one’s own time. Organising a schedule of work to be
4 0 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

covered for part of the day would allow for children to be flexible and would also allow
them to develop planning and organisational skills which are so important for independent
study in later years. Teaching children research skills so they can find things out for
themselves as and when they need them would also be part of a flexible learning
environment. Even with very young children choices can be made available as to which
activity to do first and second on the day.

I: Can you explore the ways in which curriculum and teaching styles are becoming more
prescribed?

P: Much of the Literacy Strategy in particular lays down what is to be ‘covered’ in each
year group and also how it should be taught. Whilst it is useful to have help with planning,
I do feel it is an intrusion to be told to download good lesson plans from the Internet. I
like to be able to tailor my planning to meet the needs of the children in the class. There
are many individual differences and children learn at different rates and paces. Setting
targets for individuals and groups seems to have taken over my life. I don’t have time to
teach due to having to itemise all the targets. It all seems to have got out of control.

I: What sort of inequalities are there to deal with in classrooms?

P: Many children come to school at different starting points, due to differing pre-school
experiences and differing abilities. Some children have had many advantages due to stable
social and economic factors in their family backgrounds. Having the right kind of
experiences, resources, staff with expertise in learning support, support for parents and
carers to consolidate approaches developed in school would make a big difference. What
seems to be happening is that schools which are good at bidding for extra money seem to
be getting more and more while those who for one reason or another do not succeed
in bidding get less and less. The gap between schools is widening and that affects the
stability of staffing. It is obvious that some schools in inner city areas, with disadvantaged
pupils are losing out – so where are the equal opportunities there? Anyway I think it should
be about combating poverty, racism, exclusion and gender inequality rather than equal
opportunities.

COMMENTARY

After the informal interview, a commentary can be given by partners that will then
raise some further questions or provide feedback.
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 4 1

Illustration: commentary
Your answers reveal a strong commitment to active learning approaches
and pupil independence and responsibility for learning. It might be useful in the investigation
of your development to research how you maintain and sustain your commitment to these
principles in the current climate of ‘prescription’ and central direction of curriculum and
teaching styles. How have you developed and adapted your teaching to accommodate
the ‘new’ emphasis on coverage of curriculum and the highly structured literacy hour?

What evidence do you have that your classroom learning environment does promote
independence, choice and flexibility? How could you monitor that? Would it be possible
to illustrate and demonstrate that independence and flexibility have a positive effect on pupil
learning and pupil attitude as much of what you say infers that it does?

You obviously feel strongly about the inequalities in the school system. How could you
provide more qualitative data about this? What case studies could be collated to illustrate
and illuminate the problems and potential solutions?

The commentary opens up future research questions and areas and stimulates
further responses in writing and in discussions. The partners are acting as ‘critical
friends’ for each other, providing support and challenge for developing thinking and
practice (see Chapter 7 for a fuller exploration of this role). One of the aims of this
writing and interview exercise is to tackle how ‘tacit knowledge’ of practice can
encourage practitioners to become unthinking and routine. Schön (1983) argued
that reflection enables us to examine our practices and underlying assumptions in
order to identify why we need to change our practices (see Chapter 1). Day (1999:
22) develops a powerful argument that reflection by itself is not sufficient for
professional development to occur, stressing the need for collaboration and
dialogue with other practitioners or facilitators as ‘Reflection lies at the heart of
inquiry, but whilst this is a necessary condition it is not sufficient in itself.’

Day develops Schön’s model of reflection and devises ten challenges of inquiry that
cover a comprehensive range of issues facing teachers as inquirers and learners. The
relevant section is referred to in the further reading at the end of this chapter. Day
4 2 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

(1999: 47) concludes his challenges by making strong links between the professional
and the personal and between inquiry-based learning and professional development
supported by institutions:

It should always be remembered, though, that reflection on teaching is not

simply a cognitive process. Like teaching itself, it demands emotional
commitment. It will involve the head and the heart. Perhaps the greatest
challenge for individuals and organisations is to ensure that both of these are
nurtured in systems designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning
for teachers as well as for students.

SWOT ANALYSIS

Another way of reviewing where you are with regard to your professional
development is to undertake a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
(SWOT) analysis. SWOT is a useful tool to appraise the internal and external
factors that influence a context or individual’s performance. It can take the form of
an audit, usually laid out as a box of competing areas:
S O

W T

Strengths: What is going well? What is positive about the present situation? What
are your current strengths?

Weaknesses: What is not going well? What is negative about the present situation?
What are your current weak areas?

Opportunities: Consider the workplace situation and what it can offer to you as
opportunities. Think also of the wider economic, political or social environment
and what can be offered as opportunities. What is there in the resources or staffing
situation that could offer you an opportunity?

Threats: What threats are there for you in the current workplace? Consider the
wider economic or social climate and identify any threats which may affect you.
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 4 3

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS

Another technique for studying a situation that you would like to investigate with
a view to changing the practice or direction of your current professional future is
that of force field analysis. Lewin (1947) first described this method of studying
change which is based on the observation that, in general, a situation can be
described as a balance between two types of forces, those of driving and prompting
and those of restraining and resisting. The process has been adapted and developed
over the years by many tutors and trainers and involves identifying the driving forces
and the restraining forces you experience and then considering the strength of these
forces and the influence that each force exerts on the situation.

Change can be brought about in three ways. By:

1. increasing the forces prompting change;

2. reducing the forces resisting change; and

3. a combination of (1) and (2).

Force field analysis can give insight into the nature of the role of teachers and the
challenges facing them as they engage in professional development activities both
in the workplace and at other venues.

There are a number of benefits in undertaking a force field analysis, not the least
of which is that of reviewing the tactics and strategies in a systematic way. It is often
best done with a critical friend or a trusted and experienced colleague or mentor
who can give critical feedback in order to develop your thinking and approaches to
difficult situations where there is conflict and differences of opinion.

DIARY AND STORY WRITING

Other ways of investigating and writing about professional identity can be

undertaken through diary writing and story writing. Some extracts from teachers’
writing are given below to illustrate a variety of approaches.

Kennedy (1996), writing about herself as a developing professional, gives a glimpse

of her history and outlines how she is reviewing her practice as a teacher:
4 4 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

For the first five or six years of my teaching career it was very exciting. I
couldn’t understand why some teachers weren’t enthusiastic any more.
Change wasn’t a bad thing! Then, when change became the norm and lost its
impetus, I began to find myself questioning the underlying philosophies of
the many changes. I began to realise I was in conflict with much of what I was
being asked to do. Yet I did not have the confidence and had only partial
understanding of my own values to construct valid arguments against the
imposed changes. I began to moan! I felt that if I was questioned, which
rarely I was, about why I followed certain strategies in the classroom, I would
be on very shaky ground. Yet I had managed to secure a management post and
my responsibilities were increasing. I know I needed to do something for me.

Following ‘doing something for herself’, which was undertaking an action research
course, she had the following comments to make:

I have come to change my view of professional development and I am sure I

will continue to recognise other aspects which at the moment I have not
begun to articulate. The whole area of tacit knowledge has been quite a
revelation. As I stated earlier, I have begun to look in a more disciplined way
at my professional development after becoming disillusioned and dissatisfied
with the view of development as acquiring new skills. I now know teaching
is far more complicated than that. I knew as Polyani (in Holly, 1989) states:
‘We know far more than we can put into words; we sense and understand
more than we can describe.’

I have found such research [researching professional development] difficult

and until I read Smyth’s (1991) book I found my journal entries rambling and
unfocussed. Smyth offers four processes to develop and sustain a critical form
of teaching:

Describing – (what do I do?)

Informing – (what does this description mean?)

Confronting – (how did I come to be like this?)

Reconstructing – (how might I do things differently?)

Kennedy then goes on to describe how she applied this structure to her teaching of
drama and documents how using these four organising principles helped her to
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 4 5

liberate her ability to uncover much of her knowledge about how she teaches. The
experience of researching her own professional development has been a powerful
experience and she claims has increased her self-esteem, having led her to become
a more critical reader and a better facilitator of teachers’ professional development.

This is a putative story of success, in essence, not dissimilar to that of Dadds’ (1995)
depiction of Vicky, action researcher. Dadds employs action research techniques in
her case study of one teacher to illustrate the validation of teachers’ action research
and teachers’ writing about her experiences and the contribution these make to
teacher researchers’ professional development. There are strong links across the
professions, evidenced by Bolton’s (2001) work on reflective writing in the health
professions. There is much evidence that exploring and researching one’s profes-
sional identity results in a type of professional development that goes beyond the
acquisition of new tricks or techniques, however valuable they may be, to a more
deep, ‘therapeutical’ type of professional development. Sikes et al. (2001) discuss
how writing about ‘critical incidents’ in teaching can help teachers investigate and
construct their professional identities and as a result affect changes and develop-
ments in teaching. Campbell and Kane (1998: 139) fashioned their data collected
from and by teachers into a fictional critical writing methodology to increase
teachers’ access into stories that raised issues about the professional preparation and
development of teachers, and concluded that:

Exploring the edge of school-based teacher education, through fictional

critical writing and tale telling has, we hope, stimulated interest in further
research and investigation . . . As well as opening up the personal, ethical,
moral and human side of teacher and student experiences of partnership . . .
Readers may also identify and relate to characters, perhaps even recognise in
them traits of a well known tutor, teacher, student, or pupil. Or self.

A short extract from Campbell and Kane’s (1998) fictionalised accounts of

school-based training is presented below to illustrate the methodology. The
narrator is a tutor in university department of education:

The phone call which I had just answered from Derek Wilson, the head of
Jemima Johnston Primary School, asking me if I could make a Staff
4 6 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

Development Day four weeks hence, had triggered off my memories of Paula
and her placement there almost three years earlier . . .

The first inkling I had that one of my more thoughtful, caring, student-
centred decisions had gone badly wrong came with the phone call from Tom.
Tom is not my favourite mentor. It is not that he doesn’t dedicate himself to
the task of mentoring; he does, almost obsessively so, and he keeps copious
notes. He also writes copious notes on the student files whenever he gets hold
of them. Sometimes he gets hold of them by rummaging in their bags and
cases when they are not there. It used not to matter whether they were there
or not until the year when one of our more assertive students bit his head off
when he went into her Tesco bag. Indeed she barely stopped short off biting
his hand off . . . Some students have found him a good mentor – usually those
with few ideas of their own and a poor self-image . . . This time, however,
the phone call heralded a complaint, not about Tom. About me. Now Tom,
along with his other qualities is a direct descendant from Uriah Heap. His
complaints about students, while carrying very clear messages about the
shortcomings of our courses, our deficiencies of preparation, our poor quality
students and our inadequate tutors, always come obsequiously packaged.

Through fictionalising data, writers can amalgamate traits and characteristics from
a variety of people participating in the research and develop scenarios and vignettes
that illuminate and illustrate complex situations and allow the portrayal of
conflicting positions and ideas. It is hoped that readers will be tempted to try some
of the suggestions in this chapter in pursuit of a better understanding of what their
professional identity is, what makes them ‘tick’ as a teacher and, as Thomas (1995:
20) hopes: ‘to move from writing to reflection to accepting the possibility of a
personal professional response which has as its focus the classroom and then widens
its lens out beyond the school to a consideration of the moral purposes of education
– the imagined future.’

Summary
The routes above will hopefully lead to a more informed view of teaching, teachers
and their professionalism and professional development. Beneath the exercise of
researching one’s professional development, lies a principled motivation. It was
 P R O F ESS I O N A L I D E N TI TY / 4 7

argued in the beginning of this chapter that teachers were suffering from excessive
change and innovation overload. One damaging consequence of these phenomena
has been that in-service education and development (or CPD) have become things
that are ‘done’ to teachers. Reference was made to one teacher’s account of the
heady days when teachers used to go on courses by choice so as to improve their
practice. The element of choice in professional development has been systematically
diminished. If the pendulum is to swing back more towards autonomy or, at least,
self-determination, then teachers must truly know what it is that they feel that they
need. Whilst hunch and instinct will always be valuable tools, a more systematic
approach to self-evaluation could play a very important role. Certainly performance
management review is systematic and structured. Lest it lead to apparent
unwelcome conclusions about what is required for one’s further professional
development, an equally systematic marshalling of self-determined needs should
prove important so as to resist – or validate – top-down prescription.

Further reading
Day, C. (1999) ‘Teachers as inquirers’, in C. Day Developing Teachers: The Challenges
of Lifelong Learning. London: Falmer.
This chapter gives a comprehensive overview of adult/teacher learning which is
based upon an in-depth consideration of reflection. It discusses the ‘emotional’
commitment that teachers develop in their work and professional development and
sets ten challenges of inquiry.

Bolton, G. (1999) ‘Stories at work: fictional-critical writing as a means of

professional development’, British Educational Research Journal, 20(1): 55–68.
This article will be of interest to those wishing to find out more about fictionalising
data and fictional-critical writing as a methodology. See also Gillie Bolton (2001)
in the references for a more in-depth look at reflective writing.

Bottery, M. (1996) ‘The challenge to professionals from the new public manage-
ment: implications for the teaching profession’, Oxford Review of Education, 22(2):
179–97.
Michael Bottery refers to a ‘new public management’ emphasis on such things as
explicit standards/measures of performance, greater emphasis on output controls,
the break-up of large entities into smaller units, market-type mechanisms, the
4 8 / P R O F ESS I O N AL I D E N TI TY

introduction of competition and a stress on professionalised ‘commercial style’

management.

These three very different readings build on the ideas of notions of professionalism,
inquiry-based practice and narrative and fictionalising methodologies.
 4 Identifying an Area for
Research
OVERVIEW

This chapter is based on a discussion held by the authors of the book as they
attempted to discover a topic they could research. The discussion is structured
around the key themes that are a part of any attempt to identify a research topic.

Introduction
Three people came together for a recorded 60-minute discussion to identify a
research topic. We present edited selections from the transcript that was produced
to illustrate the way in which even experienced researchers have to cover similar
issues to those which you will have to address. In passing it is worth noting that if
you are thinking of tape recording interviews and then transcribing them, the
complete transcription of this 60-minute discussion took just over five hours, an
allocation of your time that you will have to think carefully about if you decide on
transcribing a complete interview.

The first moves

To begin with you will need to identify a research topic. If you’re lucky you will
already have something very clearly in mind, but if not then you will need to play
around with ideas and establish quite what it is you want to research. In what
follows you will see Anne obviously had something she wanted to research and,
through a process of discussion, that something becomes clearer.
5 0 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

Illustration: identifying a research

topic
Anne (A): If I start the ball rolling. I’ve been thinking about the way in which professional
development can take place within school and the way in which colleagues can be helped
to put together their professional development portfolios. This could be almost like kite-
marking their professional development in a relationship with a higher education institution.
I suppose I’m thinking about something similar to Investors in People – the school seen
as a professional development school that has undergone a process to provide quality
professional development for its members of staff. So, I’d be looking at something that
helped to research ways that a school might do that, with a school’s professional
development programme running alongside the more formal certification and might feed into
it if a teacher wanted to.

Olwen (O): So you’re talking of something that is driven by higher education (HE)?

A: No. The school is – well yes, HE would have a role in first of all identifying what was
going on and then helping the schools to document it. And if you’re talking about quality
then you have to talk about learning outcomes, and you have to talk about structures and
processes for managing these outcomes within the school. I suppose I’m talking of it as
higher education having quite a big stake in it but the schools themselves operating the
process with some kind of annual quality assurance mechanism.

Peter (P): But we seem to be moving well beyond a small and manageable cluster of schools.
Instead of, presumably a couple of primary schools and a secondary school, and maybe a HE
institution, the way you’re talking, Anne, it is a much, much bigger project than that.

A: Yes, I was thinking that perhaps several groups of schools, whether just contained
within the North-West, or whether you try to get some friendly groups in other parts of
the country – because if you’re going to make an impact on policy you need large numbers
of research sites. Maybe we want to do something much smaller, but I would’ve thought
that even if you could have a group one side of the North-West, and another group
another side of the North-West and perhaps a third group somewhere else completely
different, it would add to the project. I think the issues, say, in the rural schools for instance
 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 5 1

are going to be different than those in city schools. I was thinking maybe two, three,
four clusters.

O: But that’s a very much the ‘done to’ model, and really that’s against the modern idiom
isn’t it? Its all about ownership and not being alienated from the decision making progress
when it comes to managing your own, or your school’s, CPD portfolio.

A: But there is an interest I know because I’ve talked to you about the network learning
community I’m working with – ten schools – and they are very interested in this. They want
help because they don’t think they can do this themselves, but what they also want is
the quality assurance, or the kite mark, from a local university. This is the scale of
things beginning to get bigger. These schools are talking about not just teaching staff,
but of course teaching assistants, and anybody that works in the school actually accrediting
their professional development. They’re saying really that there’s more crying need for
teaching assistants because they’re already training them in schools themselves, and no
there’s no recognition of this. But of course you’re talking there at National Vocational
Qualification (NVQ) level rather than at degree level. That’s something else that I was
thinking about, looking at talking to open college federations of FE because I don’t think
unis are involved with NVQ’s.

At this point you can see that not only are there problems with identifying a topic
but also inevitably there are problems regarding the scale of the research topic,
which has grown from examining CPD practices of teachers in a very limited
number of schools to include all staff in schools in at least three widely differing
locations. It is a common problem with a research topic that, fired by the interest
and excitement of a good idea, you can find yourself going well beyond what you
can manage without being part of a large research team.

What now happens is the initial idea leads on to another which attempts to reduce
the scale of the proposal, which is then discussed further.
5 2 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

Illustration: the scale of the proposal

P: That idea though of distinguishing between having your CPD done to
you and instead taking ownership of it suggests to me that maybe part of what you’re
suggesting requires the creation of teacher researchers, who could be trained up by their HE
institution. They could be the CPD specialists – if you like – within the schools who would
actually be both a school teacher and in some sense linked to the university. You could
actually reduce the amounts of work that you would have to do by just training up these
people as researchers, researchers for the project, so the project would actually be very
much a ‘teacher-led but managed by us’ kind of project.

A: I’ve got to say that what was in my mind was working with people who already have
experience in a research role or professional development role in schools. The idea of
partnership, I think is a good one and extending the ITT partnership into CPD and research
because that’s how I see it going. Many ITE partnerships are much more HE-led, that’s
true, but still there’s still a lot of activity from schools.

P: Yes, so what’s started out as a possible large scale funded project has now become
something we could manage without any funding really, except our time. I suppose time
is a resource; it has to be counted as money. So how big is it going to go before it becomes
unmanageable by us?

A: What you could do is a very quick pilot project that could then enable you to write an
informed bid based on data, some ideas that you’ve developed. So let’s concentrate on
no more than two clusters over a short period of time. Our objectives would be to
identify CPD needs within those clusters and what possibilities could be for trying out
new ideas to connect school-based CPD to HE CPD.

A basic question for any project is what its scale should be and this is one that you
will have to address from the outset. As you can see from the discussion, the original
very large-scale project has now come to be something much more manageable.

The next problem to deal with is one of time.

 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 5 3

Illustration: time
P: If we just look at the pilot for a moment. The timing is quite critical
because of the school timetable. We’re now in February. We couldn’t set this up for March
because of Easter. But if we go into the summer, we interfere with exams in secondary
schools and also SATS in primary, so that means that we couldn’t do the pilot until
September? Is that right?

A: I think so. Certainly we couldn’t do it at the beginning of September. It would have to

be at the end of September because people, including ourselves(!) have got to get into
classes and get settled, but it does give you some planning time.

O: Yes I was going to say planning would take at least that long.

A: It does give you time to do a bit of a literature review, and to do some drafts of what
it might look like, and talk to schools about it. So even though officially the pilot wouldn’t
start until much later, we would be talking to schools and doing things on the ground
before then.

P: Yes. So staying with that timeline that, as you say, gives you plenty of planning time,
we could presumably pull in the appropriate teachers to join the planning team for the pilot.

A: Yes, so it’s a year from now that we’d actually work through to the larger project.

Sorting out a timeline (that is, a structure for the project, beginning with the first
meeting and ending with the report, dissertation or whatever) is obviously
important. Perhaps even more important is making it a realistic one so that it can
be kept to.

A literature search has been mentioned in passing, but now some problems that such
reviews have are discussed.
5 4 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

Illustration: literature search

P: Can I ask you a question, which is you mentioned doing a literature
review. Would this be more than just library work? If so how would you carry that out?
How would you actually look for research projects and so on that might be relevant to the
research, that you know are running somewhere if you didn’t happen to know that they
were running?

A: Well, one of the ways of doing that is to look at conference proceedings because often
conferences are where people present important projects in progress. So for instance the
British Education Research Association papers, are online – you go there and have a quick
look though to see what there was and you would come up with quite a number from last
year’s conference and if you do that internationally, you would perhaps be able to pick up
quite a few other ones.

O: If you look at the DfES website to see what projects have been funded recently, you
can see which ones are relevant and I suppose you could do that with the professional
associations too.

P: The quick way into those associations is through the UCET website because they have
links to other teacher education, or education-type research websites as well as DFES, TTA,
GTC and so on. The UCET website is just ‘www.ucet.ac.uk’.

O: But I think you’ve hit on an incredibly big problem for us let alone school teachers.
There is just too much information.

P: I think that’s why I paused there because ten years ago, even less, you’d think of
researchers as going to the library, finding the most recent journal, looking at the
biographies for the areas that you’re interested in, and then following these up so you
get the key references that are being used in relevant publications. That wouldn’t work now,
except as a very crude beginning.

A: I think as well, because people usually are involved in some kind of network or other,
maybe it’s not the partnership network, it might be through national scholarship, or school
leadership – you have a range of people that you can actually talk to and find out what’s
going on and get contacts, people to ring or websites to look at, or whatever, because
 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 5 5

there are a lot of projects around and there are a lot of them that are producing newsletters,
things like that, which are often on the web as well so it’s spending time doing that and
finding out.

P: So literature searches could be a virtual search, at least to begin with. You have got
to find the key websites to go to get yourself off the ground. My last book I co-authored
with Anne Edwards and David Hartley – they bring a psychological set of networks and
a sociological set respectively to my philosophical ones and they had references which
were directly relevant to my work, which I would never otherwise have identified because
they had the kind of subject specialist background that they did. I guess if we were to
work together, we might find the same, but not necessarily the same subjects but the
networks that we constantly refer to, to formulate our ideas.

A: But increasingly, well especially with this particular idea about both, investigating,
identifying and if you like accrediting school-based professional development, there’s very
little written about it. Generally speaking the professional development has been linked
to something like being a teacher researcher, or it’s been within a project or going on a
master’s course, or being part of some kind of initiative like the Literacy Strategy and
Numeracy Strategy, which is concentrated on the content and the input, whereas what we’re
looking at here is teachers working together, teachers, if you like, coaching each other,
teachers providing their own professional development or others with colleagues. This sort
of topic is more under-researched than many other topics that you might want to look at,
so we might have trouble finding appropriate literature.

O: I like the idea of a more collaborative emphasis, because the processes I think are still
as important whether you’re a lone researcher or whether you’re a member of an action
group or member of a staff group. Take for instance the network learning community
that I’m working with at the moment – this is about raising achievement at the transition
from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2, so they’re concentrating a lot of their activity around
that, in particular, new approaches to literacy development using media, film, digital film,
all sorts of things, in trying to . . . [reach] the reluctant readers and writers. So right across
10 schools, you’ve got people collaborating and within those schools they’re identified
lead learners which is, I think, the normal thing that they’re doing in there, 20 lead
learners, two in each school, all of them have different, if you like, interests, they’ve all
worked around a very broad theme, but all of them have different interests. They tend to
work in pairs the two of them in the same school, and you’ve got there 20 teachers working
around 10 themes under a broad raising achievement transition. So it’s matching the
5 6 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

school improvement agenda, as well as people’s interests – because one of them’s

particularly interested in the use of video, one in particularly making films, story board-type
of approach.

P: So we’ve got a project with a pilot, a rough timeline, we’ve raised a number of issues
about the nature of research itself and what this does to the top down model with one
of us at the top and the teacher at the bottom, or maybe the other way round, and
there’s this problem about the literature search nowadays not being as straightforward
as it was. So you’re looking for key websites really, as well as a good library.

Having established some of the problems of a literature search on a topic that has
very little literature, the discussion then turns to the questions to identify objectives that
the research will be dealing with.

Illustration: questions to identify

objectives
A: Now I think one of the things we need to do is to really think in a bit more depth
what the project would look like, what questions you would be asking, what kind of
outcomes are we expecting and how are we going to do it. Because we seem to have a
purpose – to provide, if you like, a pilot and an example of accrediting school-based
professional development. So that’s the kind of general idea isn’t it? So what sort of
questions do we want to be asking around that general idea? How are we going to do it first,
rather than what questions? We’re going to have some cluster groups of schools.

P: Well, we could do it that way. I wonder whether, if you take that idea I mentioned
earlier, of having trained researchers implanted within the school, who are themselves
schoolteachers – I mean, they’re there already – what you would have is not so much
clusters of schools but a group of schools that had people like us in them. Or at least
people with the same thoughts that we have. It’s rather like getting inexpensive research
associates. One of the benefits for the people involved, bearing in mind you wouldn’t
expect them to have a career as professional researchers, is that the work would be part
of their professional development. So it would be an example of professional development
 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 5 7

for them and of course for ourselves. But as you say, what we need are a set of objectives
or problems that the project is supposed to address. Perhaps the first one is: what currently
exists in the form of CPD?

A: And that’s, I think, a really interesting one because if we look at what we found out
from the sections of the CPD project and if I cast my mind back to 10 years ago, working with
teachers, one of the biggest problems is identifying what professional development is. And
also there is so much going on out there – do you want to acredit everything, or is there
a sense of teachers deciding to select what to focus on in any one year, which links it very
much to what’s going on in each of the individual schools? So, yes, mapping the area,
finding out what’s going on and identifying what is termed ‘professional development
is your first step.’

O: And also more than that really in the political context that we’re in, a national context,
you’ve got to think of what is the current DfES model of professional development? Because
that’s a big issue, particularly since most of the teachers – three quarters of the teachers
– have a very traditional perception of CPD and yet I think the government perception
of CPD has moved right to the far end of it into peer coaching, lesson observation.

P: Teachers could appear to be trapped in their profession and so we could work through
a model where you first become a teacher, then work through some form of CPD, which’ll
allow you if necessary to move out of school teaching onto some other form of teaching.
But now, the model that the TTA has of advanced teachers, SEN specialists and so on, are
always in the school, there’s little or no movement out of the school possible. The
different funding regimes in universities as well makes it even more difficult to move out
financially. So we’ve got a kind of CPD, which is narrowing the horizons rather than
broadening them, and our project might be seen as trying to reverse that view.

A: There is also a feeling from government that every teacher should be involved in
professional development of some sort. There is that feeling that CPD is not quite an
entitlement and not quite a requirement. Whereas it was much more common 15 years
ago for some people to say, ‘Well I’m not interested in CPD, I’m getting on with my job’. And
I suppose it was an understandable view, because there was a lack of recognition as to
what was going on in terms of development in schools anyway.

O: And now the national initiatives have a CPD done to you, feel such as the national
numeracy strategies of literacy, science Key Stage 3 strategy, and so on.
5 8 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

P: Yes, and TTA inset although it provides funding for CPD, you don’t have any choice
about it, you have to draw from a range of courses that are identified for you by the TTA.

O: What it’s also doing coming back to your point, that a classroom focus doesn’t allow
you to look back at the ideology of the situation you are in, keeping you technically focused
on what’s going on. So having problems in the classroom doesn’t allow you to question
the literacy strategy, for example, that might be causing some of those problems.

P: It’s interesting that because what you’re describing is a form of centrist, TTA centrist
CPD which first of all restricts the skills that you have and secondly prevents you being
critical, so that CPD becomes a form of retention, a policy for retention, so it helps resolve
one of the problems the TTA were having of retaining teachers professionally. This is very
much a live issue. I think it’s well worth following through.

A: It also raises for me the issue that teachers who are not involved in any sort of CPD
activities, and the whole business of the assessment of prior experiential learning, which is
something which happens anyway, in the majority of certificated courses. What I had been
envisaging for a project like the one we’re talking about, would ease and help people
to identify more the experiential learning that takes part in the workplace. And therefore
if they wanted to, it would also facilitate bringing that forward as evidence for certificated
learning. It actually just accredits it and recognises it, and in that way charts a lot more
what is actually happening on the ground of professional development, more so than what’s
happening at the moment. I do think one of the things that might be quite useful for us
to do is to think about what we actually know about what’s happening out there and to
help us formulate questions. Because when I was thinking about this earlier, that having
someone who is responsible for managing and organising professional development in
this school is a good idea – many secondary schools already do have somebody, usually
in the senior management team, but I can’t say that that’s true for primary schools. So my
idea was that they would be the personnel we’d want to target first in this kind of project,
as well as the head teacher, or somebody in the senior management team. So that
immediately, as soon as you start approaching schools who want to be involved or could
be involved, you go straight to the senior management team. The other implication is that
it has to be a whole school thing, so therefore you have to concern yourselves with the
management of the school. But the person who manages CPD, and the knowledge, and
information that they need is key to what happens in the school. So that’s where I
 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 5 9

would probably want to start by thinking about that person and how we could get them on
board.

P: Yes. That would fit nicely with the pilot as well, wouldn’t it? You could start to see
whether that was possible with the pilot. So we’ve got a beginning of a structure, a kind
of pre-history of CPD, immediate history of CPD, and then what exists now, so you
contextualise the situation now, using history. We can do that from our own experience
and publications. So that is quite straightforward, that section, rather like a standard
dissertation – at least the first two bits – contextualising via a standard literature review. We
might then need an interview or two with someone from the DFES or someone like Mary
Russell or from the CPD committee at UCET, but we’d tidy that up quite quickly. That would
then start to throw up questions, wouldn’t it, that’s what a good contextualising section
does. As we’ve been doing today, you start to veer off in other directions, and get pulled
back to the topic that you’re supposed to be working on.

A: And there is a problem about evidence of prior learning, even when you consider a
reflective journal, because if you look at things like performance management, and you
look at what pupils do in terms of records of achievement I mean they’re basically not worth
the paper they’re written on, people don’t look at them, do they? You go for an interview
and its like, oh yes, you’ve got a record of achievement. I think there’s too much emphasis
on written evidence anyway, and I wouldn’t want to be going down the road of increasing
teachers’ workload by asking them to do even more. So we’d have to be thinking about what
is worthy of credit and how you measure it.

P: It’d be interesting if we had as part of our team these small group of teachers who
were these teacher researchers for the project, because we could ask them that question.
What would they consider to be worthy of credit? Because they’ll have degrees, some of
them might have master’s degrees. In fact by being part of the team they could join
immediately the master’s programme if they hadn’t already got a master’s degree, a master’s
by research. So perhaps we should be running concurrently with the project a master’s
research programme, just on research.

So it looks as if we’ve got the rough idea for a project fairly well planned out, the skeleton of
it, and a clear topic. We’re also saying we can’t identify the key questions until we’ve
done the contextualisation. We still need obviously to work out a more detailed timescale for
the research.
6 0 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

So here you see that the further development of a research topic needs to be
informed by the literature search, which provides a context within which it has
meaning and a purpose. At this point in the discussion the three contributors then
asked themselves how they came to identify a particular project they eventually
worked up. What is interesting here is the way in which the examples given came
from actual teaching situations which sparked an interest in taking the problems and
puzzles that were thrown up further.

Individual ways of approaching research

Illustration: approaching research

P: What we’ve just looked at is a group of three of us looking at a project,
which is going to be quite large scale, and requires funding, and preparation that goes
with it. How about examining examples of our own research interests? I could draw on one
that I had a while ago. There was a time when I got very very interested in IT, and its use in
primary schools. And it came about because I was in primary schools watching people
working, and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t using IT for the particular work they
were doing. They were trying to design a newsletter for parents, but written by the
children, semi-edited by the teacher concerned, but they were doing the whole thing
manually. It struck me as bizarre because there were PCs along the corridor and they were
just not using them. So I was faced with an issue there, why are they not using the
equipment they could be using to do what they were doing? And that led me into talking
with the teachers involved, and the children. The older children were also somewhat puzzled
because they had IT at home. This led me to begin to write up this issue of what was
happening to the IT policy that the then Conservative government was pushing in to the
schools, to see what was going on. So I was looking at one school in my immediate area,
which happened to have one of my children in as well. It was a highly personal situation, but
it was possible to generate at least one research paper out of that. Now that’s how I did it, it
came out of a very personal interest, and also bumping up against the particular problem in a
school. So how would you deal with a particular and personal research issue?
 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 6 1

A: Well, I’ve done very little research totally by myself, but when I think about what I have
done, it’s been mainly practitioner-orientated because that’s what drives me, as a
researcher. So research either for a research degree or in terms of improving my own
practice, and looking at how I worked with people, is how I would approach it, and that
would probably be through some kind of reflective diary to start with, to try and get some
ideas down on paper, and then actually monitoring and researching those ideas over a short
period of time to try and look at how I would improve my practice.

One of the other things I’ve been doing recently which is slightly different, because I’ve been
involved with quite a lot of empirically based research projects, is to use some of my
experiences in that, to write a more conceptual piece about more ideas or policy rather than
collecting data and researching in that particular way, which I’ve got to say I do find quite
difficult! Recently I’ve just written a couple of pieces like that, and in a way, my inaugural
lecture was kind of working towards that, it was based on projects that I’d done but I wasn’t
particularly reporting them. The lecture allowed me to do a little bit of reporting on data that
had been collected. But really developing ideas, and particularly ideas about professional
development, and in some ways I find that quite interesting to do, and I can do that by
myself. And it involves quite a bit of re-doing, obviously, a lot of discussion, and a lot of
reflective thinking, looking back, trying to make sense of what’s happened in the past. So
that’s how I can try to approach it.

O: I haven’t been involved in any personal research of this nature at all. As it happens all my
research has been driven by funding, albeit I’ve become very interested in it afterwards, but
it’s been a very eclectic bunch and it’s just been based really on what turns up and what
liaisons I make. But a huge amount of it has been based on networks with the local authority
advisers etc., and working with people and mainly it’s been researching development
projects. So really it’s been almost exclusively looking at baseline research to see classically
what the situation is now with a notion of implementing a new policy and then evaluating
the new developments, whatever they are.

By and large it’s always been with networks of schools and specifically with the teacher
researchers in each network of schools, so I think about at least four if not five projects I’ve
done have been based on that kind of model, which has thrown up issues of ownership
which has always been a very key area that I’m very aware of.

A: What about your doctoral study though?

6 2 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

O: Yes, in fact I was thinking when you were talking about that – well I wouldn’t call it
philosophical in Peter’s presence! But it was kind of deeply theoretical and literature based.
Bits of it were empirically based and that was videoing my own practice, but I wouldn’t lay
claim to it being research. I wouldn’t lay claim to doing any research until after I got my PhD.

Concluding remarks

Illustration: coming to a conclusion

A: In a way, partly what we’re doing in the book is providing just that for
practitioners. It’s the basis of what we as experienced people working with teachers think
that teachers need, in terms of research training, and ideas for doing research either
alone or with groups.

P: It’s interesting how very different that is because what we’ve just been talking about
[individual research projects] doesn’t require money, it just requires our time, so it requires
manipulating your time if you were a school teacher again in the school to give yourself
the freedom to do the PhD or whatever. I mean in my case, I actually took time out of
school as a full-time teacher to get a master’s degree, and became a supply teacher, so
that I could control the amount of time I was working and the amount of time I was
doing my master’s degree. But that’s only possible if you haven’t got a family, and a house, and
all the other responsibilities we tend to collect. Research does require a resource, time.
With the large project what you’re looking at is capital to allow you to do the project, in an
individual project you’re looking at time, which is the capital, to allow you to do whatever
the project is. So it’s the same principle, it’s just on a different scale.

A: But we’re different from teachers in school because (a) we’re more experienced and
doing research and (b) because in some ways it’s a requirement of our job, to actually
undertake some research, and we feel we’ve got something we want to say, and we want to
make it public, whereas I think that some teachers find that aspect of it difficult
because they’ve not been in a community, they’ve not been in an environment that actually
supports such thinking. Teachers might talk about their practice, but it’s difficult actually
to talk about how you research it, or to say, ‘Well I’ve been doing this, I’ve been investigating
 I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H / 6 3

my practice and I think it might be quite useful if I talk to you about this’. So what’s
important is providing that kind of environment for teachers to grow in. Some schools
have it, but it’s giving teachers the confidence as well to be able to talk, and not just in
a bland way, but actually to give detail in depth and rigour to the kind of work that’s going
on in the classrooms, and they don’t always see the need to do it.

O: And we’ve also got to see what’s driving a teacher to consider carrying out research.
Let’s face it where the money is for teachers is in things like advanced skills teachers whose
salary can go up to £40,000. Now, what kind of CPD experiences would necessarily fit
them for a kind of position like that because we’re thinking of us wanting master’s/PhD’s?
I can’t begin to imagine that it’s a PhD that would maybe get them along that route.

A: But I think there is a case for advanced skills teachers undertaking research themselves,
and undertaking quite a bit of professional development, because they are in that kind of
mentoring role with other teachers, and demonstrating a modelling role. So in some ways
there’re a number of things in terms of the subject knowledge in whatever area they’re
working in, that they do need to be in the forefront of, as well a the kind of skills needed
to be working alongside somebody.

O: Mentoring I think is a key thing to a lot of the models of CPD that are around at the
moment.

A: But you see this is where you need a community to debate things, especially while
the pressure is on schools to conform to whatever strategy you’ve got to work with now,
or whatever the flavour of the month is. It’s interesting to watch emotional intelligence
and accelerated learning and what have you, take over from literacy, because the
nature of that is much more exploratory, at least you think it would be, but yet it’s been
presented as a package called ‘emotional intelligence’, a package called ‘accelerated
learning’. I think that’s what teachers as researchers should be doing, making problematic
and criticising the packages rather than accepting them. And I think there are people who
are trying to do that, you just need to give them a voice.

P: I think that distinction (between the touchy-feely approach and everything’s working
fine approach, and the highly critical approach) is what we’re trying to capture in the book
aren’t we? We’re arguing that there’s no point in the former, it’s the latter which identifies
a good researcher, finding appropriately critical evidence to substantiate whatever
judgements you’re making.
6 4 / I D E N TI FYI N G AN A R E A FO R R ES E AR C H

A: But often it’s difficult to do that on your own. Even people like ourselves, professional
researchers, don’t always find the time to talk about an issue with other people. Do we
always have colleagues asking questions making you rethink what you’ve been thinking?
Like teachers we always ask, ‘Is there time? Is there time to do it?’
 5 Finding, Reviewing and
Managing Literature
OVERVIEW

In this chapter we discuss the contribution that literature can make to your
research. We begin by looking at different forms of literature that may inform your
study, including materials relating to previous research in the area, methodology
texts, readings about educational theory and philosophical or literary works. We
outline some of the strategies that will be useful to you in searching for this
literature in books, journals and electronic resources. We give you suggestions
about how to establish a personal recording system and advice on formatting
references in your bibliography and citing them in the text. Finally, we discuss
briefly about how you should go about reading, reviewing and summarising the
literature you eventually locate.

Types of literature
Before we start looking in detail at literature search strategies it would be helpful
to discuss briefly the kinds of literature that may be of use to you in your research.
First, reports of other research projects will be an invaluable source to build on.
Ideally, you will have located and read some of these before you formulated the
detailed plans for your study, and decided upon your research questions and
methodology. There is a vast amount of research available, ranging from large-scale
surveys to small-scale classroom-based action research inquiries; ideally it will be
useful for you to explore studies of both these types. Locating relevant studies is
not always easy but it is important, and later in the chapter we will give you some
pointers as to where you may begin to look. You will want to be guided by previous
research in the area, the methods they used, problems they encountered and the
suggestions they may well have made for further research. The reason for this is not
simply to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’. Indeed, in research it is often valuable to
6 6 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

do exactly that – to replicate a research study in another context – and one criticism
of educational research is that it rarely does carry out replication studies. Much
useful information can be gleaned from comparing the findings of research studies,
assuming the methodology is sufficiently well documented to be able to do so. A
criticism not infrequently made, certainly in relation to educational research, is
precisely that it is too fragmented and does not build cumulatively upon past
studies, and/or test out current knowledge and understandings.

The second kind of literature you will need to consult will be methodological texts,
or professionally focused research user guides, such as this one. They will give you
practical ideas and support relating to your research. It is likely that you will need
advice on how to go about identifying and refining your research area, defining
research questions, and devising, planning and conducting your project. One of the
most challenging decisions you will have to make, for example, is deciding upon the
appropriate research method(s) to use. Short overviews, like the one presented in
Chapter 6 of this book, are a useful introduction to the range of options open to
you but you may well need to consult a book, or chapter in a book, relating
specifically to the method you are intending to employ. There are a number of
accessible texts of this nature suggested in the further reading section of Chapter 6
but if you are considering a non-standard data collection method, such as
image-based research, for example, you will have to do a literature search to locate
a relevant text. Data analysis is another important topic in which it is useful to have
ideas from a variety of sources and a few are suggested at the end of Chapters 8 and
9, but again you may need to go into the specialist literature if your research
methodology is non-standard. You will need to refer to such methodological
literature not only before you commence your research but also at frequent intervals
during the process.

The third literature domain you may well refer to embraces literature about
education theory and practice relating to your area of interest. This might include
ideological ‘think pieces’, books relating to pedagogy, official documents laying out
educational policy, critiques of educational policy and so on. Such accounts will
perhaps argue the case for particular policies or practices or relate sociological or
psychological theories to the educational context. These will be important to inform
your understanding of the issues surrounding the area of your investigation. They
will also be effective as a source against which to bounce your own ideas, helping
you to sharpen your debate or provoking you to produce counter-arguments.
 F IN D I N G , R E V I E W I N G A N D M A N A G I N G L I TE RAT U R E / 6 7

Finally, there is a whole range of literary works, philosophical and historical

writings, television and films that can be a great source of ideas. This latter category
is most likely to be one that you will not expressly seek out; it is more probable that
it is one that you will bring with you from previous reading and experiences. You
will find that your memory will be jogged by particular events at certain points in
the research process. Alternatively, current events or discussion with colleagues or
your critical community may furnish you with information or spark ideas and
suggest associations in previously unexplored territories. Such connections may add
to the theoretical argument, provide insight to the analytical process, illuminate the
analytical frame or simply enliven the writing up.

Managing literature
In our experience many, if not most, people embarking upon research for the first
time begin their literature searches in a somewhat haphazard fashion. They start
with one or two key texts and perhaps explore a number of others that are
referenced in the articles or books . . . and so their bibliography gradually grows.
This method is certainly not to be dismissed and, indeed, the bibliography of a good
review article is one of the best sources of further literature. However, the danger
of adopting this rather haphazard generative method is that the small collection of
papers that you once knew intimately will soon grow to such a size that you no
longer know which book you found a particular quote or idea in, let alone which
chapter or page number. Additionally, depending on your area of study, a systematic
literature search will most probably eventually be necessary.

We cannot stress too much how vital it is that you devise your literature
management systems before you embark upon searching for and acquiring
literature. You must settle on two matters: the reference system you will use; and
the method by which you will record the literature you have amassed and the key
messages it contains.

REFERENCING SYSTEM

Dealing with the first of these matters, you will need to adopt a standard
bibliographic referencing system. If you are enrolled upon an award-bearing course
6 8 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

then you will most probably have had a standard system recommended to you; if
you are not, then simply decide upon one of the standard systems and stick to it.

We recommend the Harvard System, which we use in this book, for referencing
literature in the bibliography and citing it in the text. Harvard is a fairly standard
system used by many publishers. It happens to be the one that is very attractive to
authors as it allows you to give the bare minimum of information in the main body
of your work, rather than having to give full details of a reference in, for example,
a footnote which then has to be repeated in the bibliography. You will find that our
‘resources for research’ give you, through a straightforward question-and-answer
session, a detailed breakdown of the formats you will need to use for authored
books, chapters in edited books, journal articles, reports and web-published
literature. The resources are organised to give you one example under each of these
classifications but, when you construct the bibliography as a whole, of course, all
these different types of literature will be arranged in one alphabetical list (see, for
example, our own references).

PERSONAL INDEX SYSTEM

Having decided upon the reference system the next matter to attend to is devising
an effective method which will allow you to record information about the books,
articles and reports you read. We cannot stress enough how important it is to get
this in place before you start to read and review this literature. Bearing in mind the
bibliographic information you will require and details you will need for your own
purposes (key words, quotes, synopses, etc.), we suggest the following format as a
basic framework for an index system. You can use it as a blueprint and add to and
personalise it as appropriate.

If the reference is of a book you will need to record the following details.

Example: recording a book

Author(s): McNamara, O. (editor).
Title: Becoming an Evidence-based Practitioner.
Year of publication: 2002.
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Publisher’s name: RoutledgeFalmer.

Place of publication: London.
Key words: Evidence-based practice, partnership, practitioner research, case
studies.
Points of interest: Eight case studies written by teachers about their experience
of researching in their own classrooms – includes methodological
insights (record page numbers); chapter reflecting on partnership
(pp. 155–71) . . .
Useful quotations: ‘What counts as evidence? For whom is it intended? In what
context is it to be employed? For what purpose is it to be used?’
(record page numbers).

Where the book is an edited volume and you are particularly interested in one
chapter you will need to record details not only of the book itself (as outlined above)
but also details of the chapter.

Example: recording a chapter

Author(s): McNamara, O. (editor).
Title: Becoming an Evidence-based Practitioner.
Year of publication: 2002.
Publisher’s name: RoutledgeFalmer.
Place of publication: London.
Chapter title ‘One mouth, two ears: seeking ways to make children and
teachers effective speakers and listeners’.
Chapter authors Sarah Brealey and Claire Van-Es.
Chapter page nos. pp. 79–89.
Key words: Case study, video data, speaking and listening, primary phase.
Points of interest: Use of video data to analyse strategies to improve the speaking
and listening skills of children and teachers – Year 2, 3 and 6
(record page numbers).
Useful quotations: ‘subjecting ourselves to the scrutiny of the video camera was
painful but fruitful . . .’ (p. 88).
7 0 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

For a journal article the minimum details you will need to record are as follows.

Example: recording a journal article

Author(s): McNamara, O. and Corbin, B.
Title of article: ‘Warranting practices: teachers embedding the National
Numeracy Strategy’.
Title of journal: British Journal of Educational Studies.
Year of publication: 2001.
Volume of publication: 49 no. 3.
Page numbers: pp. 260–84.
Key words: National Numeracy Strategy, evidence-based practice.
Points of interest: Historical perspective on the introduction of evidence-based
practice to education (pp. 261–2); analysis of ways in which
teachers legitimated their professional judgements
(pp. 270–8) . . .
Useful quotations: See paper copy for highlighted text.

In the case of a journal article, the last two fields would perhaps be dealt with
variably and we will consider this in more detail in the next section. If you have a
paper copy of the article, and it is particularly rich with interest, you may well find
it more useful to highlight possible quotations and interesting passages for future
reference rather than copy or paraphrase them. A note to the effect that reference
should be made to the paper copy could be entered in the index system (as above)
and the paper copies filed elsewhere in alphabetical order, or perhaps catalogued.

It now remains to consider how to record this information. Such an index system
is best recorded electronically but, if you do not have easy access to a computer,
you can use a simple card index system to record the key fields. If you do have access
to a computer then information such as references and quotations, once entered,
can be cut and pasted easily into a bibliography or report.

There are a number of ways of managing the information you need to record on
your computer. The simplest option is to use a word document in which individual
entries are recorded alphabetically, as in a standard bibliography, and this would be
 F IN D I N G , R E V I E W I N G A N D M A N A G I N G L I TE RAT U R E / 7 1

quite adequate for the majority of small-scale practitioner inquiries. You could
perhaps enter the information into a table organised in such a way that the columns
contain the key fields and the rows are the individual entries. If you wished you
could keep the entries in alphabetic form by inserting extra rows in the table at
appropriate points. Whatever word document you construct for your particular
purposes it can of course be searched using the normal ‘find’ facility.

An alternative option is to use a database such as Microsoft’s Access, in which the

fields recommended above can be set up and key-word searches completed, etc.
There are purpose-made bibliographic software packages now available, such as
End Note, which not only act as a customised database for referencing but can also
be linked to compatible word-processing packages, such as Microsoft Word, to
allow for references to be imported directly. End Note also has a facility to reformat
and reorder references where necessary and, even more amazing, can import data
electronically from certain national/international bibliographic databases and enter
them directly into the correct field in the appropriate End Note library.

Searching for literature

Having established a system to document your literature, it is now time to consider
how to find relevant texts. This will be best accomplished through a university
library. Most practitioner researchers will be in some way associated with a
university, through perhaps an Initial Teacher Training Partnership. Indeed, your
study may perhaps be undertaken as one element of an award-bearing course, and
you may have a considerable degree of support in devising the methodology and,
perhaps, in selecting appropriate literature. Whatever your situation, if you are
registered as a student at a university you will have full access to the university
library and you should also be able to access the library catalogue and most of the
associated electronic resources from your home. If you are not a registered student
then just approach your local university, or the one you are most closely associated
with; you will find that access is easier to negotiate nowadays than it used to be in
the UK. If all else fails and you have a grant for your research, it may be possible
to use some of the money in order to pay for access to the university library.

Libraries clearly vary but whatever contact you have, or negotiate, your chief point
of access will be off-site through the library’s web pages. There are now many
services available that make libraries more user-friendly to off-site students
7 2 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

including facilities such as electronic searches, document retrieval, borrower

inquiries, loan renewals and reservations, etc. If you are a student on an
award-bearing course you will undoubtedly have received a library induction when
you enrolled, but the sheer volume of information you receive at this time makes it
all too easy to forget, and the purpose of this section of the chapter is to remind
you about the range of services that may be available. Although the detail provided
here might not be sufficient to enable you to complete whatever transaction you
require at your local library, it will at least alert you to the fact that such a facility
may well be available so that you can make further inquiries.

In addition to the obvious final resort of browsing the appropriate sections of the
library shelves, there are three main search domains available to you through the
library: the main library catalogue, the journals catalogue and the electronic
resources index. We will now briefly review of each of these domains, but do
remember that the library will most probably have someone staffing an inquiry desk
who will be only too pleased to help you with any queries or complex transactions.

THE MAIN LIBRARY CATALOGUE

Most main library catalogues will generally index reference and lending books, the
audio-visual collection, master’s/PhD theses and proceedings of annual conferences
of research societies and similar professional associations. These items may be
available for extended loan, short-term (usually overnight) or one-week loan or be
available for reference and photocopying in the library only.

The main library catalogue will generally be searchable using various combinations
of author/title/key word/topic search strategies. If you are looking for a particular
text the more information you have on it the easier and quicker it will be to locate.
If, as is more likely, you are looking for books on a particular topic then the search
will be trickier, and you will need to experiment with search terms in order to
narrow or widen the number of ‘hits’. Having located a text, or texts, that appear
interesting or useful you will need to note the library index number, but be alert to
notice (and record in your own indexing system) whether items you have identified
are on the main shelves, or perhaps in other collections. It may be that short-loan,
audio-visual, reference, special, outsize or schools collections are stored separately.
You will also normally be able to check the current availability of the items and
place a reservation on a book if all copies are out on loan.
 F IN D I N G , R E V I E W I N G A N D M A N A G I N G L I TE RAT U R E / 7 3

If you are unable to locate the book you require at your library you will be able to
search the library catalogues of other libraries, and in particular the British Library,
to which all UK university libraries have lending rights. An application through the
Interlibrary Loan Scheme will enable you, for a small fee, to loan whatever book
you require from the British Library. It will usually arrive within two to three
weeks, but do ensure you return it on time as the overdue fee for such items can be
considerable.

THE JOURNALS CATALOGUE

Much of the literature you will need to access, particularly the reports of research,
will be located in articles in journals and to complete a systematic literature search
you will need to explore their contents. All the journals held by the library will be
catalogued in an index that will contain information such as the dates and volumes
for which the journal is available. The catalogue will only list the titles of the
journals and not their contents, so this is of limited value in itself, unless there is a
particular journal or journals of direct interest to you. If this is the case then a good
old-fashioned hand search of back copies might be worth resorting to at some stage.

The list of education journals is very extensive. There are, for example, subject-
specific journals such as the Journal of the National Association of Teachers of English
and special interest journals such as the Journal of In-service Education and the Journal
of Mentoring and Tutoring. If your library subscribes to a journal in the specific area
you are interested in then browsing back copies would be a profitable approach to
locating useful articles. Adopting just this strategy, however, would not be sufficient;
many authors publish in more wide-ranging areas of race, gender and disability and
in general education journals such as the British Journal of Education Research, Journal
of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy, Journal of Teacher
Education and so on. Despite some journals preceding their title with ‘American’,
‘Asian’, ‘Australian’ or ‘British’ you should not be put off looking at those outside
your own country’s area, as authors publish in many different types of journal,
irrespective of their country of origin. There is a way to locate articles on specific
issues, however, without browsing the library shelves. This involves searching
bibliographic databases and indexes and we shall return to discuss this below.

An enormously valuable growth area in relation to journals is the increase in the

number of electronic journals now available and the rise in the number of publishers
7 4 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

of paper journals that are making them available electronically. In practical terms
this means that many of the journals in the library journals catalogue will have a
link to the publisher’s website and you will be able to access full-text versions of the
journal directly. You will then be able to browse through the journals’ contents
pages, locate the volumes and part numbers of articles you require, download them
and print them off in the comfort of your home.

An additional service that some publishers also extend to support awareness raising
in respect of their titles is an alerting service whereby email alerts of contents pages
of the new editions of journals are sent to anyone who requests them. The service
can be accessed through the web pages of big publishing companies. The Taylor &
Francis Group, for example, which includes publishers of a great many education
journals, has a free alerting service called SARA (Scholarly Articles Research
Alerting) to which you can subscribe. The British Library also provides electronic
alerting services. Through ZETOC (http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk), for example, you
can access the Electronic Table of Contents of all current journals held by the
British Library, and arrange for a personal alert to the table of contents of new
issues of journals of your choosing. There are options on some alerting services to
purchase the articles you require online but, beware, these services can work out
very expensive and the Interlibrary Loan Scheme is a cheaper way to acquire such
articles, as we will outline below.

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

The growth in the volume, range and importance of electronic resources over the
last five years has been awesome but, for a researcher, engaging with such electronic
resources is an absolute must. However, not only is the scale of the enterprise
overwhelming but the rate of change of the whole landscape is also alarmingly rapid
– useful websites come and go, restructure and change addresses. Consequently, we
will only mention a handful of the most secure web-based resources, each of which
will have up-to-date links to other domains.

The whole gamut of sites which would be of interest to an educational researcher

is very broad and includes newspapers (e.g. The Times Educational Supplement);
institutions (e.g. universities, The British Library, NFER – National Foundation
for Educational Research); organisations (e.g. BERA – British Educational Research
Association, SCRE – Scottish Council for Educational Research, DfES, GTC –
 F IN D I N G , R E V I E W I N G A N D M A N A G I N G L I TE RAT U R E / 7 5

General Teaching Council, UCET – Universities Council for the Education of

Teachers); public and charitable foundations that fund research (e.g. ESRC –
Economic and Social Research Council, Nuffield Foundation, Joseph Rowntree);
and professional associations (e.g. NUT, NASUWT). There are also information
gateways (e.g. SOSIG – The Social Science Information Gateway; NISS –
National Information Systems and Services; BOPAS – British Official Publications
Awareness Service; ePolitix – political awareness service); bibliographic databases
and indexes (e.g. BIDS – Bath Information and Data Services; BEI – British
Education Index); and electronic books and journals.

All the above electronic resources will be accessible via links available on a typical
university library site, or go to the British Library site (http://www.bl.uk). Many of
the sites are extremely valuable resources in themselves and it is difficult to select
any out for particular reference. The Times Educational Supplement (http://
www.tes.co.uk), for example, has not only electronic copies of the newspaper
available but also archives of back copies, searchable by key word, title and date,
and downloadable. ePolitix (http://www.epolitix.com/) has everything you could
ever want about politics and politicians. The GTC England website (http://
www.gtce.org.uk) has a Research of the Month page where current research is
summarised in user-friendly form. The Teacher Training Agency has, amongst
other research commissioned, published three sets of reports resulting from the
Teacher Research Grant Scheme (1996–99), available not only in hard copy but also
electronically, together with other research documents on the TTA website
(http://www.canteach.gov.uk). The DfES website (http://www.dfes.gov.uk) has a
collection of research briefs – four/five-page user-friendly summaries of the research
studies they have commissioned. The briefs can be downloaded and printed.
Likewise, some research funders such as the ESRC (http://www.esrc.ac.uk) and the
Joseph Rowntree organisation (http://www.jrf.org.uk) have electronic databases of
the research they fund, and reports and summaries can be downloaded. The
Evidence for Policy and Practice Information (EPPI) Centre (http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk)
was established by the UK government (c. 2000) to co-ordinate the commissioning
and management of systematic reviews of educational research, and should become
a very useful resource. NFER hosts a database funded jointly by EPPI and DfES of
all Current Educational Research in the UK (CERUK) on their website (http://
www.nfer.ac.uk). They also produce a research digest series called TOPIC, which
is a collection of practitioner-friendly summaries of research published biannually,
and may be available in your library, but check their website for further information.
7 6 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

There is clearly considerable variation in access arrangements to these sites but

most are not password protected, which means that anyone can access them from
anywhere. So, for example, if you were to go to a typical university, such as the
Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) (http://www.mmu.ac.uk), access the
library home page and browse through the electronic resources you will discover
that the greatest proportion require no password from within MMU or outside. It
is becoming increasingly common for information gateways/hubs/databases, etc.,
that are password protected to manage their security and subscription arrangements
through ATHENS (http://www.athens.ac.uk), the standard access management
system for all UK higher education institutions (and much of the UK National
Health Service). This has the advantage that you do not have to remember an
armful of passwords but just an ATHENS ID and a username, which you will get
from the library. This will secure access to most of the significant education
electronic resources that are protected. You can use the account from the comfort
of your own home.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC INDEXES AND DATABASES

Most important for our purposes amongst these many electronic resources are
bibliographic databases/indexes. These are databases of journal articles only; they
do not include reference to books or book chapters. Indeed, book chapters are the
most intractable items to locate. Databases also have some remarkable gaps; the
more esteemed databases in particular can be somewhat conservative in including
new journals in their index. This is not normally a problem unless a journal vital
for your area of interest is, for some reason, not included. For this reason it is
important that you do not rely on just one search strategy – instead you should
search perhaps a couple of bibliographic indexes and check for pertinent journals in
the main library catalogue, perhaps sifting electronically through the table of
contents of the past volumes.

In education in the UK, the main generic database is the British Education Index
(BEI), which covers a very wide range of education journals from the academically
prestigious to the professionally useful end of the range. BEI is an Anglicised
version of the much more extensive and older US education index, ERIC. These
two databases are extremely user-friendly and linked so that search strategies
conducted in BEI can be transferred directly to ERIC and repeated. BEI and ERIC
can be accessed through your local university website and through BIDS (http://
 F IN D I N G , R E V I E W I N G A N D M A N A G I N G L I TE RAT U R E / 7 7

www.bids.ac.uk), which also has access to the International Bibliography of the

Social Sciences and the Social Science Citation Index. BIDS requires an ATHENS
password.

Search strategies for these databases vary, although again all are becoming a lot
more user-friendly. As with general library catalogue searches you will have options
of author(s), titles, key words in title and abstract and topic, etc. Some databases
allow for simple searches (as above) or more advanced search strategies that allow
for additional sophistication including years, languages, etc. Specific search
terms/syntax are always explained in the help menu and include not only the usual
AND/OR/NOT type of configuration but also useful truncations with wild cards
(* or ?) which allow for a key word such as ‘parent**’ to locate items relating to
parent, parents, parental, etc. Locating a manageable number of ‘hits’ (neither too
few nor too many) is, of course, still a challenge. If you want to see just how
challenging this can be try using the search term ‘education’ which, on its own, will
produce so many ‘hits’ that you could spend many months following them up.
Refining your search strategy in a broad research area such as education is obviously
an absolute necessity.

You will probably require a few attempts at refining your search strategy by using
different combinations of words, and perhaps combinations of previous searches,
before you are satisfied that you have generated an acceptable number of hits. You
have two options at this point: you can print or email yourself the entire list or,
alternatively, you are generally offered the option to go through the details on
screen to mark the ones you are particularly interested in. Once you have selected
your ‘marked list’ you can then print the details off, or email them to yourself. You
will be asked which fields to include in the emailed or printed report and it is
important to choose an option that includes not only bibliographic details but also
the abstract (if the article has one) and perhaps references (although these can
sometimes be rather extensive).

When you receive your emailed and/or printed report go through the bibliographic
details and abstracts carefully to consider which are of particular importance and
prioritise them in a ‘wish list’. Your next step is to check the journals catalogue of
your university library to identify which of the articles are in journals available
there. In the case of the ones that are you can simply go into the library and either
read the article and make notes, or photocopy it and take it home (remember
journals themselves cannot generally be loaned from the library). If an article you
7 8 / F I N D I N G , R E V I E W I N G AN D M A N A G I N G L I TE RATU R E

require is in a journal not held by your library then you can arrange for a photocopy
of it to be sent to you through the Interlibrary Loan Scheme. This will again require
the payment of a small fee to cover the photocopying and postage and receipt of
the article may take a couple of weeks.

Reviewing your literature

The depth with which you read and summarise the literature you have now
obtained will depend upon how central or useful it is to your area of study. Much
of the literature will just require cursory attention. Indeed, for articles in particular,
if you have acquired an abstract during the course of an electronic search, you may
feel having read it that you do not need to obtain the full-text version. In the case
of a research report you may be able to glean sufficient information relating to the
methodology and findings from the abstract. So, for example, you may be able to
report ‘Evidencing pre and post tests Rain (1998) claimed that in a study of 152
trainee teachers 90% did not increase their subject knowledge during their PGCE’
without reading more than a couple of lines!

It may be that other literature will warrant consideration that is more detailed. In
order to help you decide whether a book is worth investing time and energy in, skim
read the preface and introduction to get a sense of level and audience and you
should find an overview of the structure of the book with perhaps a short paragraph
on each chapter. If the book is an edited volume it will be much easier to identify
useful chapters. In the case of an article, if you skim read the abstract, introduction
and conclusion these will give you a fair idea as to whether the article should be
read in more detail. If you feel it does not warrant further consideration – or the
outlay of the cost of photocopying – just enter it in your personal recording system
and make brief notes relating to what you have gleaned about the methodology and
findings. Alternatively, just photocopy the abstract and conclusion. If you feel it
does warrant further consideration then your approach to reading either an article
or a book chapter would be best structured to a degree that goes beyond
skim-reading, in order that you get the most out of what may well be a considerable
investment of time and energy. Many research reports in particular are far from an
easy read!

We will now consider how such a structured reading might be accomplished. If the
literature in question is a research report then you need to pay particular attention
 F IN D I N G , R E V I E W I N G A N D M A N A G I N G L I TE RAT U R E / 7 9

to methodological issues, research methods used, how the sample was selected, the
research questions posed, etc. Note any methodological weaknesses and importantly
any themes for future research identified by the authors. If you have your own copy
of the article or book chapter, highlight any passages that seem of particular
relevance, or if not then make brief notes. If you are not able to enter the notes
directly into your personal index system then remember to transfer the details as
soon as you are able. Now move on to the research findings: what types of claim
are made? Upon what evidence were they based? How was the data analysed? Was
any attempt made to validate the findings by triangulating different sources of
evidence? For example, were self-reported claims about professional behaviour
made in interviews corroborated by observational data, or have they been left as
rather subjective claims?

If the article or book chapter is a theoretical discussion, note down key words
relating to the general focus, and a summary of the central thrust of the argument.
Then on the hard copy of the article, if you have one, highlight section headings
and passages where the author has made key points. So, for example, if they note
that there are four reasons why a particular policy has failed to deliver the hoped-for
improvements, highlight those reasons in the text, or note the essence of each of
the points. Also highlight or record any especially outstanding sentences or short
passages and in particular ones that say powerfully and succinctly what you would
want to say.

We will come back to the topic of literature again in Chapter 10 where we think
about the ways in which you might draw on the literature you have read and used
in the design and execution of your research study when it comes to writing up
accounts or reporting your research.

Further reading
Bell, J. (1999) Doing your Research Project. Buckingham: Open University Press.
This immensely popular research methods reader contains a number of useful
chapters relating to finding, managing and reviewing literature: ‘Keeping records,
marking notes and locating libraries’, ‘Finding and searching information sources’
and ‘The literature review’.
 6 Which Research Techniques
to Use?
OVERVIEW

This chapter will suggest appropriate techniques to use in the research of

professional development and practice. It identifies key questions for practitioners
who wish to research their practice and reviews methods of reflective writing in
diary, log and journal formats, biography, stories and critical writing approaches.
There are also reviews of, and support for using, observation techniques,
interviewing methods and schedules and questionnaires.

Research: what research?

Before suggesting which research techniques to use, it would seem appropriate to
consider what kind of research is to be undertaken. The type of research undertaken
by practitioners is usually small scale and focused on professional practice and
thinking as manifested in the workplace. Practitioner research is often concerned
with the improvement of practice, of teaching and learning and levels of care in
medical and nursing practices. Research by practitioners is related to their everyday
professional life and directly concerns their context or environment. It is affected
by the prevailing social and political climate and is not uncontroversial. There are
tensions and differences of opinions about what kinds of research matter and what
kind of methods are appropriate for doing research. There is continuing debate
about the value of practitioner research and applied research as opposed to ‘pure’
research.

This book promotes an approach that supports research aiming for the improve-
ment of practice and has a commitment to practitioners themselves doing research
into professional issues. It is important that practitioners have an understanding of
the frameworks within which research has developed, especially the differences
between scientific and interpretive research (see Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 8 1

these issues). Similarly, the differences between qualitative and quantitative models
of research are important aspects to consider (see Chapters 8 and 9).

Practitioner researchers can move along a continuum of methods when collecting

data. Figure 6.1 is intended to indicate that there are degrees of structure within
each method that determine the kind of approach researchers might take and would
also influence the level of formality in the conduct of the research. As a result of
the development of thinking and practice in practitioner and action research
methodologies, there are no longer narrow, simplistic models of data collection and
analysis. The ‘myth’ of systematic inquiry is also being questioned. Walford (1991:
1) refers to accounts of both scientific and interpretive research processes that show
that, often, research is not neat and tidy. Rather it is: ‘frequently not carefully
planned in advance and conducted according to procedures, but often centres
around compromises, short-cuts, hunches and serendipitous occurrences.’

Exercise: the relationship between

research and practice
Some questions surrounding the debates about the relationship between research and
practice are given below in order to stimulate your discussion and thinking:

 Is it the role of practitioner research to provide ‘tips’ for practitioners?

 Is the goal of research primarily the development of more effective practices?

 Should research throw light on the socio-cultural processes that affect learning?

 Should all practitioner research demonstrate a commitment to reflect upon

what happens in the workplace?

No one methodology dominates practitioner research and it is possible to be

eclectic. However, issues of increasing importance are the justification for one’s
methodology, the consideration of ethical matters and the social context of research
in the workplace. This last issue is particularly relevant to those researching the
8 2 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?
Figure 6.1: INTERVIEWS

–
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 8 3

raising of achievement or the meeting of targets. A consideration of the rights and

responsibilities of those participating in the research must be carefully undertaken
in order to avoid discrimination and bias. However, it is difficult in social and
educational research to isolate factors causing events or behaviour. Variables are not
always easy to isolate in complex social and educational contexts where activities
contain factors that interact and are interdependent. All the more reason, then, to
have an over-arching, albeit flexible, structure for such research, which we identify
as involving three stages.

Learning aid: structuring your

research
The first stage to practitioner research design concerns the preparation and setting of
questions or areas to focus on. Key questions are as follows:

 What to research?

 What are the aims of the research?

 Why do the research?

 How to do the research?

 Whom and when to research?

The second stage involves data collection. Again, there are key questions:

 What mix of data collection techniques and methods is to be used?

 When will the research take place and for how long?

 Where will the research be conducted?

The third stage is the analysis and evaluation of the data. Here the questions to be
addressed include the following:
8 4 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

 Have the aims of the research been met?

 Was the analysis rigorous?

 Have the underlying assumptions been addressed?

 Have the data been evaluated?

 What are the implications of the research?

 What are the findings/conclusions of the research?

 How will the research be disseminated or made public?

This third stage will also involve consideration of a number of issues, including the following:

 Validity (do the conclusions follow from the arguments presented?).

 Reliability (are the methods used appropriate and relevant to the research aims?).

 Feasibility (were the research aims realistic?).

 Authenticity (is there a sense of reality about the research?).

 Representation (is the sample used appropriate?).

 Ethics (have issues of confidentiality and bias been considered?).

You need to make sure that these issues have been addressed to ensure that your research
is robust.

When researching one’s own practice or investigating aspects of professional

development, some methods will be more appropriate than others. Small-scale
research into one’s practice is often open to criticisms of lack of objectivity and
rigour. Qualitative methodologies are concerned with authenticity and voice and
interpretations of situations and behaviour, and do not set out to ‘prove’ hypotheses
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 8 5

in the same way as experimental, scientific research may do. This does not mean,
however, that rigour, critical review and processes of checking validity do not form
part of these small-scale research projects. What is generally called triangulation is
frequently used to check the perceptions and interpretations of several people.
Denzin (1970; 1985) distinguishes four types of triangulation:

1. methodological

2. investigator

3. theory

4. data.

Figure 6.2 gives more detail as to how to undertake the different types of
triangulation. Involving colleagues is desirable, whether they are colleagues in
school, those in your course group or colleagues you meet through action research
networks or cluster groups of schools. Colleagues can be very useful to you as
‘critical friends’ or ‘critical community’ members. The cross-checking and the
gathering of differing perceptions about research is an essential way of ensuring
reliability and authenticity.

The concepts of critical friendship and critical community are discussed in detail in
Chapter 7; however, brief descriptions of the role are presented here. A critical
friend is someone who acts as a peer reviewer, asking questions in supportive yet
challenging ways. It could be characterised as a kind of partnership in investigation
of practice. A critical community extends the notion of critical friendship from an
individual to a group of people acting as a way of debating and examining
practitioner research. The community could operate in a variety of ways: as a
sounding board; as a group of experts in the research area; or as a group of lay
people who might represent those with a stake in the developments being
undertaken by the researcher.

In the paragraphs that follow, a number of common and useful research techniques
will be introduced and reviewed, as follows:

 Reflective writing, diaries, logs, journals.

 Biography, stories and fictional critical writing.

8 6 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?
Figure 6.2: TRIANGULATION
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 8 7

 Observation.

 Interviewing.

 Questionnaire design.

Reflective writing, diaries, logs and journals

Many writers feel giving a personal response to events and situations is a kind of
therapy. Recording one’s reactions and thoughts to events and situations, how one
felt, how one behaved, can tap into the inner self and serve to develop
understanding. This can be a very subjective account or perspective, but it can
provide important insights into situations. It is important, however, to keep to a
professional code when writing and to observe an ethical code that is non-
discriminatory and which recognises the dilemmas which teachers face in the course
of their professional lives. The guidelines produced by the British Educational
Research Association (BERA – bera.ac.uk/guidelines.htm) are a very useful resource
for identifying and resolving such dilemmas for researchers.

REFLECTIVE ACCOUNTS

Reflective writing is a major tool for a teacher researcher who wishes to investigate
and research practice with a view to improving and refining his or her practice.
Most teachers in schools today will have qualified through course models that
espoused the development of the reflective practitioner at either initial teacher
education or continuing professional development stages. Schön (1983) coined the
phrase ‘the reflective practitioner’ which, according to Day (1999: 26), has become
synonymous with good practice (see also our Chapter 1).

Currently there is much debate about the relationship between reflection and technical
aspects of teaching. Our view is that having access to a ‘technical toolkit’ is not
sufficient in itself to create or support good teaching or researching. Rather, one has to
know why any particular strategy or method is appropriate at any given stage or time.
This involves understanding frameworks or paradigms for teaching and researching.

Arguably, effective teachers and researchers ask good, well framed and probing
questions and are good listeners and readers. In order to ask appropriate questions,
8 8 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

it is necessary to have a conceptual framework on which to draw so as to know what

is and is not appropriate. Eraut (1994: 124) offers a five-level model of teacher
development that spans the territory from novice to expert and identifies reflective
and analytical approaches at expert level. Day (1993) also reminds us that
collaboration improves reflective practice and that reflection alone is not sufficient
for the improvement of practice.

However, evaluating events by writing reflectively, and critically appraising the

process and outcomes with other researchers or colleagues, can stimulate renewal
and provide useful research data and indicate areas for further development.
Some questions to address when starting to write a reflective account are as
follows:

 What has been successful and why?

 Which strategies or approaches worked well? Why?

 What were the difficulties?

 What action can be identified to improve the situation in the future?

 What can I do? What can others do?

 Do I need an action plan?

 How will this be monitored?

DIARIES, LOGS AND JOURNALS

Practitioner researchers may also find it useful to keep a diary or journal. This
document would be part of the data collection, and extracts or transcripts could be
used or referenced in any report or account of research. Attention should be paid
to confidentiality issues. The style of writing should be that of professional
discourse, reflective and analytical, but using everyday language and professional
terms. It is advisable not to identify particular institutions, colleagues or children
but to use alphabetical or numerical notation when necessary (e.g. teacher X and
child 5 in institution Y). There is currently some discussion about confidentiality
issues that indicates that perhaps there should be an acknowledgement and
celebration of successful practice and good practice by naming teachers and schools.
Whatever, the consideration of, and discussion about, ethics and confidentiality
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 8 9

issues is an important and essential part of doing research (see Chapter 10 for
further discussion of ethical and confidentiality issues).

Some different ways of recording thought, actions and evidence are:

 critical incident analysis

 informal observation

 log of events.

Critical incident (or scenario) analysis is an interesting and innovative way of

looking at the professional experience and life of practitioners in education and
related professions. As part of keeping a diary, it may be useful to use a variety of
approaches to help structure the writing. It involves a great deal of reflection on
incidents and events that occur as part of one’s professional life, and then selecting
those incidents and dilemmas which are rich and which can be critically reviewed
with a view to understanding and developing thinking and practice. The classic
example is the impact of the window cleaner and his ladder upon a lesson. But there
are hundreds more and they happen to practitioners all the time.

In some ways undertaking a critical incident analysis relies on the ability to analyse
and appraise situations, which is helped by a researcher/teacher’s abilities to focus
on key incidents, events or situations that might yield data relating to the
professional concern or research focus. Some questions that may aid the process are
as follows:

 What led up to the event?

 What happened?

 What was the outcome?

 How would you take action from this critical incident?

 How can you make action judgements, diagnostic judgements, explanatory

judgements, reflective judgements and critical judgements?
9 0 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

 How will you check out your perceptions of the events with another observer or
participant?

For an in-depth look at critical incident analysis you should consult David Tripp
(1993).

A log of events can quite simply be a list of events, dated and timed. Keeping a log
can be useful in documenting your own behaviour or that of others. It could be a
list of interactions of a particular type for analysis or a log of the different roles you
undertake as a researcher. Logging the course and the conduct of the research
project can also be a useful aid to writing up your methodology.

The terms log, diary and journal seem to be used interchangeably. Bolton (2001:
156) refers to the work of Holly (1989) in order to distinguish between them. A log
seems to be characterised by its straightforwardness, like an aide-mémoire, being
highly selective like a ship’s log which would never claim to be a record of
everything that occurred on board. A diary can ‘contain anything’ and ‘be a
confessor, a confidante, or a special friend . . . just like a reflective practitioner’s
writing’ (Bolton, 2001: 157). A journal, however, is like a diary but includes
‘deliberative thought and analysis related to practice’ (Holly, 1988: 78).

It is important to consider the timing and frequency of diary/log/journal entries/

reflective accounts. As a rough guide, our experience of working with teacher
researchers indicates the following time frames to be useful:

 Critical incidents should be recorded as and when they occur.

 Informal participant [observation] should be recorded when you have a set of

questions to investigate.

 Log of events should be recorded daily or weekly if selected or specific events

occur at that interval.

 Personal response: whenever the situation demands it and you feel ‘moved’ to
write.

 Reflective account should be once or twice weekly for entries which review events
and less frequently for non-specific reflection.
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 9 1

Biography, stories and fictional critical writing

Less well explained in the research literature is the use of biography, stories,
pen-portraits and fictional writing. Nevertheless, teacher biography and teachers’
stories are established methodologies (Ball and Goodson, 1985; Dadds, 1995;
Thomas, 1995), but the fictionalisation of settings and characters is less well
established. Campbell and Kane (1998) and Campbell (2000) have developed
fictionalising research data in the investigation of school-based training drawing on
the work of Winter (1985) and Clandinin and Connolly (1996). Pen-portraits,
developed to illustrate and depict teachers’ perceptions of professional development,
were utilised by Hustler et al. (2003) in a major UK government-funded project
which investigated teachers’ perceptions of professional development. This involved
amalgamating evidence gained through interview into teacher pen-portraits to
depict common experiences and views about professional development.

Hardy (1986) called narrative ‘a primary act of mind’ and gave ‘storying’ a central
place in logical thinking. Thomas (1995: xii), in his introduction to a collection of
teachers’ stories, notes that: ‘story telling can be captured in logs, diaries, research
journals, vignettes, life histories or autobiographies . . . can be seen as ways in which
the person socially constructs him or herself’ and refers to Woods (1993) as
providing clear evidence of the value of personal narrative to the development of
teachers and teaching.

Talking with teachers about their personal experience of teaching and constructing a
life history give good insight into the profession, and these techniques would also
apply usefully to other professions. Thomas (1995) provides a long list of the
varieties of biography and story already in the literature, ranging from a newly
qualified teacher (NQT) who was interviewed and observed closely by Bullough et
al. (1991), to teachers of English writing their biographies (Beach, 1987), and a
large-scale study of the professional and private careers of primary teachers (Nias,
1989).
9 2 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

Learning aid: writing a biography or

telling a teacher story
Some methods, which might help in starting to write a biography or to tell a teacher story,
are given below:

 Construct a simple curriculum vitae and then identify two or three major
development or growth points or professional ‘disasters’, if appropriate, from
each entry in order to begin a biography.

 Think of the most rewarding time in your career and start to unpick the reasons
why and the events that led up to it.

 Write a short pen-portrait of yourself as a teacher. Pair with a colleague and

each of you construct an informal interview schedule based on reading the
pen-portrait which aims to engage in a professional dialogue about each other’s
career developments and history.

 Think of a particular difficult or amazing pupil or student from the past. How
did you deal with this person? What key characteristics can you identify from your
behaviour? How does this fit with your perceptions of yourself as a teacher?

 Interview pupils or students about your teaching. Care should be taken to elicit
stories that are authentic, not just what the listener might want to hear.

It is not much of a step to begin to fictionalise the data collected from research or
from teachers’ writing above. Fictionalising data allows the writer to bring the voice
of the participant to the centre of the stage and also allows for the amalgamation
of ‘real’ stories and ‘fictional’ stories as exemplars for discussion and critique.
Clandinin and Connolly (1995; 1996) talk of teachers’ professional landscapes and
believe that the access to those landscapes which will unlock professional
development is best gained through story. As teachers tell and retell their stories,
different versions are evident as new insights are gained and prevailing ‘band-
wagons’ influence interpretations.
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 9 3

Learning aid: fictionalising data

Before beginning to fictionalise data, it is necessary to have some idea or
hypothesis relating to the research and data collected (Chapters 3 and 4 will be useful
for this). Some questions to ask are as follows:

 What lies beneath the stories? What hypothesis is being developed? What was
the impetus to tell a story?

 What issues and topics will be raised? Will each story cover different topics or
will each story provide different versions or perspectives on the same topic?

 What characters and personalities will be constructed?

 How will issues of confidentiality and ethics be considered?

 Whose perspectives will be put forward? Teachers, pupils, parents, other

professionals?

 What is the plot?

 How will theory and practice debates be integrated into the stories?

The writing up of biographies, stories and fictional accounts is greatly dependent

on the abilities of the writer and the ability, as in drama, to suspend disbelief. It is,
however, an enjoyable and interesting approach to research. Examples of fic-
tionalised accounts can be found in Campbell and Kane (1998), especially in the
chapters dealing with student teachers’ and mentors’ perceptions of the challenges,
trials and tribulations of school-based training. See chapters 8 and 10 for further
support regarding the analysis of this type of data.

Observation
One approach to practitioner research is informal participant observation. Record-
ing what you see as you participate in teaching or meetings or other educational
9 4 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

events can provide evidence as to what is happening. ‘Insiders’ in events often

understand the significance of what is happening as they are very much in tune with
the context. On the other hand, because ‘insiders’ are very familiar with the
day-to-day routine, it may be difficult to see anything ‘new’ in events.

Use can be made of time-sampling techniques (noting every so often at intervals of

one minute onwards what is happening) or recording the frequency of events
(recording every time a certain event or behaviour occurs). Just simply noticing
events can also provide insight into situations.

Many researchers develop this technique as taking field notes. Taking field notes as
part of research is a recognised and well developed research method, adapted from
ethnographic and anthropological research for use in educational settings. Hitch-
cock and Hughes (1989: 67) suggest that field notes can be contextualised by
background notes and are often supplemented by gathering data by other methods,
such as interviews or structured observations (that is, triangulation). It is useful to
get into the habit of dating and timing your observations and reflections in order
to use them as evidence and provide a system for organising them.

The issue of subjectivity is relevant to many qualitative and interpretive approaches.

Macintyre (2000: 62) discusses the issues of selection of what to record and the need
to maintain a professional code of practice when researching. As long as objectivity
is not claimed in the research and that research methods are justified and critically
reviewed, subjectivity is accepted and recognised as a perhaps inevitable feature of
small-scale qualitative research. Thus Dadds (1995: 68), when discussing ‘Vicky’ the
action researcher and her personal convictions and her personal presence in her
research, claims that ‘subjectivity enriched its authenticity’.

Making observations is far more complex than it sounds at first hearing, especially
in professional situations such as the schoolroom as:

classrooms are exceptionally busy places, so observers need to be on their

toes. Every day in classrooms around the world billions of events take place:
teachers ask children questions, new concepts are explained, pupils talk to
each other, some of those who misbehave are reprimanded, others are
ignored (Wragg, 1999: 2).

Observation has many uses in the various social and educational settings in which
professionals in education and related fields find themselves. It is an integral part
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 9 5

of human behaviour. We all make observations as we go about normal everyday life.

Observing as a part of the process of doing research is different, being more
organised around a specific focus, although some researchers use very open-ended
and unstructured approaches.

Another complicating factor is that it is now much more common to find more than
one person in each educational or workplace setting and for there to be
collaborative work practices in classrooms and other settings. Observation of
professionals at work is a more frequent phenomenon than in previous years: for
inspection purposes, for training purposes and for assessment purposes. The kind
of observations that are undertaken in a research context are systematic and
organised to suit the aims of the research and the style of research. Types of
observation can range from highly structured schedules to ‘noticings’, which are
informal and happen incidentally.

We suggest that a few guidelines should be followed. First the purpose and focus
of the observation must be decided, which will greatly influence the type of
observation used. Some purposes might be to observe:

 pupil, teacher or student behaviour;

 teaching performance;

 pupil interaction in particular contexts;

 the nature of pupil–teacher interaction;

 the frequency of certain events; or

 the rating of behaviour or interactions.

Approaches to observation can be described as either quantitative or qualitative and

are demonstrated by the continuum below:

Pre-ordainedEOpen

Observations of all types offer insights into situations and can often be combined
in powerful ways to ‘saturate’ situations. Many research projects successfully
combine quantitative or survey methods with qualitative or interpretive methods.
9 6 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

Quantitative observation is characterised by highly structured, systematic schedules.

Rating scales, such as those devised by Likert, allow researchers to make judgements
against defined criteria. An example of a behaviourally anchored rating scale is given
below. It refers to the observation of pupils in a science activity using a five-point
(Likert) rating scale.

Example: observing pupils in a

science activity
1.:Pupil is fully engaged on task and fully occupied.

2.:Pupil is mostly engaged on task and is occupied.

3.:Pupil is frequently engaged on task and is occupied.

4.:Pupil is sometimes engaged on task and sometimes occupied.

5.:Pupil is seldom engaged on task and seldom occupied.

The use of opposite behaviour or mood characteristics can be used as a rating schedule.

Example: observation of teaching

behaviour or characteristics
Informal 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Formal
Lively 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Dull
Eye contact 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No eye contact

Wragg (1999: 23) identified some criticisms of rating scales, not least the possibility
of differences between observers, their use and judgements in observation, although
training of observers until they show high agreement with each other’s systems may
lessen these subjective differences. Simpson and Tuson (1995) refer to the valuable
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 9 7

work of Powell (1985) in the development of the System for Classroom Observation
of Teaching Strategies (SCOTS schedule) and of the selection of an appropriate
rating scale. Obviously a great deal of time will be taken up with identifying the
categories to be rated, with careful reference to the range of behaviours or features
in the area to be researched being absolutely necessary.

Care should be taken to note when inference is being made by the observer, as the
reader should know when this is happening (for example, does a nod mean that a person
understands what has been said, or is he or she simply trying to appear as if he or she
understands?). There is nothing wrong with using inference as long as it is recognised
that that is what is happening and that value judgements might be being made by the
observer. Two instances of how inference can be measured are given below.

Illustration: ‘Pupil happily reads her

book’
This observation requires considerable judgement by the observer and has a high inference
as the judgement of ‘happily’ requires the observer to infer from his or her viewpoint
what is meant by someone else’s (the pupil’s) body language and facial expressions.

Illustration: ‘John used his

handkerchief ten times in the
mathematics session’
Low inference is evident in this observation as the observer is recording the recurrence
of discrete pieces of behaviour.

Having a specific focus for observation inevitably structures the observation. It is

necessary to highlight the different features in the context being researched. For
9 8 / W H I C H R ES E A RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

instance, there will be a difference in what is being looked for in a modern foreign
languages session with 15-year-olds and a story-time session with a nursery class.
The quality of the analysis of the context will significantly affect the quality of the
observation schedule design. Observation is not done in a vacuum. To neglect the
details of time of year, size of classroom and learning environment in the
description and setting for the observation leaves the reader in a disadvantaged
position and would mean that questions could be posed about your research
concerning factors such as validity, reliability and authenticity, identified earlier.

Interviewing
A frequently used research method is the interview, and in fact this is something we
used in Chapter 4. There are many different types of interviews, ranging from
highly structured, formal interviews to informal conversations (ours was semi-
structured). You must choose the form to suit your purpose after carefully
considering what style and approach to data collection you wish to pursue. For
many practitioners interviewing colleagues, pupils or clients a more informal style
is appropriate, though a structure of some sort is required.

Learning aid: interview planning

When you are making preparations for interviewing, consider the following:

 The setting for the interview in order to consider comfort, privacy and seating.

 Timing to suit interviewee and duration of interview. Remember that long

rambling interviews are difficult to record and could be seen as a waste of time.

 A need for clarity of focus for the interviewee is essential in order to maximise
the time and give a sense of value to the interviewee.

 How structured will the interview be? Consideration of what you want to achieve
as a result of the interview should be clear in your mind at the outset.
 W H I C H R ES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ? / 9 9

 Planning of prompts, probes or follow-up questions. It is useful to have these

prepared so that you don’t ‘dry up’ or have nothing to say.

 Preplan the way you will analyse the interview so as to aid the process of
interviewing. It is always useful to have some notion of the way you intend to
analyse the material when interviewing.

 Whether to record the interview or not (recording does allow for more eye
contact and focus on the questions to be asked). A negotiated (between the
interviewer and respondent) account can be produced as the outcome of the
interview which serves as a summary of the main points.

It would appear that many individuals feel pressure to want to give answers to
interview questions that please the interviewer and many try to guess the answer
favoured by the person asking the question. Some discussion at the beginning of an
interview about feeling able to give an opinion could alleviate this pressure.
Confidentiality must be assured if there is any risk or disadvantage to the
interviewee or if the topic is controversial. There has been some discussion in the
research community about whether anonymity is always the best solution to issues
of confidentiality, there being some concerns that omitting the names of informants
may result in practitioners’ contributions to research in the workplace remaining
hidden and unrecognised. Whatever is decided, again it may be useful to consult
the Ethical Guidelines produced by the British Educational Research Association
(BERA – www.bera.ac.uk/guidelines).

One major pitfall to avoid is asking predominantly ‘closed’ questions or questions

that appear to have a factual or right answer such as ‘Do you think research can be
done in classrooms?’ or ‘Is it a good idea to base teachers’ professional development
activities in schools?’ Both these could be answered with either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’
responses. Interviews should aim to be exploratory and facilitate the giving of
information or opinions and be discursive in nature. Use open questions such as
‘How would you describe your recent professional development activities?’ or
‘What kinds of activities do you think would best support you in your professional
development?’ Open-ended questions facilitate the giving of opinion and allow the
respondents opportunities to develop their responses in ways which the interviewer
might not have foreseen.
1 0 0 / W H I C H R ES EA RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

Most interviews will use a range of open and closed questions. The work of
Hitchcock and Hughes (1989: 79–93), summarised below as types of interviews,
may help to structure the format of any interviews planned.

Learning aid: interview formats

Structured and semi-structured interviews
Most close in style to a questionnaire and can be useful for situations where you wish to
have a high degree of control, such as in a survey or in market research.

Counselling interviews
Involve a great deal of interviewer participation and may be used to structure a programme
of intervention or give advice to colleagues or pupils involved in reviewing their work or
practice.

Diary interviews
Focus on reviewing diary entries and providing interpretations or explanations after the
event. These could be useful in developing reflective evaluations of teaching and learning.

Life history interviews

Allow researchers to ask about the interviewees’ personal, professional experiences in
ways, that encourage anecdotal and narrative accounts of their lives in teaching.

Teachers’ biography
A well documented methodology in researching professional development (see Ball and
Goodson, 1985; Goodson, 1992; Thomas, 1995).

Oral history interviews

Provide opportunities for respondents to provide a historical account of the past in relation
to information they may have or their memories of events and incidents.

Ethnographic interviews
Involve the researcher in working like an anthropologist. Studying a way of life takes account
of the context, identity of persons involved and their relationship to each other, and the
variety of social, cultural, institutional and linguistic factors influencing the interview.
It is a naturalistic interview technique.
 W H I C H RES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E? / 1 0 1

Telephone interviews
Sometimes used when dealing with people in remote places or who have difficulty finding
time for an interview. There are limitations in telephone interviews due to the inability to
see facial expressions and body language. Para-linguistic utterances, such as ‘uh-uh’, ‘mmm’
and ‘um hum’, can be used by the interviewer to encourage talk and support the
interviewee.

Group interviews
Where one interviewer interviews several people may require tape recording, as note taking
at the same time as guiding the discussion could be difficult. Alternatively, a ‘scribe’ can
be used.

Unstructured interviews or conversations

Non-directive and offer greater scope for asking questions. Some attention to issues
concerning systematic inquiry and validity is necessary. Many researchers find the informality
of unstructured interviewing very suitable to ‘insider’ research contexts when working
with colleagues or familiar pupils or clients.

Whatever type of interview is selected, interviewers must try to reduce bias, often
by rehearsing (or piloting) the interview with a friend who can then give feedback
on how the interviewer’s views on the topic being researched are evident. After
reflection further steps can then be taken to reduce any bias. It is always worth while
to trial or pilot questions in the pursuit of high-quality data, which will result in
interesting and worthwhile analyses. The quality of the questions asked will
directly affect the type and quality of the responses. It is also a good idea to have
well thought-out and preplanned, but not intrusive, strategies for probing inter-
viewees.

In conclusion there are a number of useful tactics:

 Have a well prepared schedule.

 Be friendly but business like.

 Help interviewees to be explicit in their answers.

 Try not to lead your interviewee.

1 0 2 / W H I C H R ES EA RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

 Try to use verbal and non-verbal tactics to structure the interview, rather than
leading or dominating it.

 Keep checking your approach and style by listening and reviewing your tapes and
notes.

Analysing the data from interviews

There are many advantages in transcribing taped interviews, such as access to a
complete account of the interview and the facility to scrutinise detail. But there is
one major disadvantage, and that is time. For many readers engaged in small-scale
research of their own and others’ professional development, time or secretarial
support will not be available. It may be useful to consider taping the interview and
selecting short extracts for transcription and providing a negotiated account of the
rest of the interview (for further, more detailed, advice on analysing data, see
Chapter 8).

Using questionnaires
As with designing an interview, questionnaires need careful and detailed preparation
if they are to yield a high quality of data: they are, in a sense, an interview without
the presence of the interviewer. The quality of the questions asked will directly
affect the quality of the data gathered. Hopkins (1993: 134) states that question-
naires provide a quick, easy way of accessing pupils’ views of what happens in the
classroom and can give specific detail about a teaching method or aspect of the
curriculum. He also suggests that cartoon pictures make the completion of a
questionnaire more fun. If the researchers are interested in pupil feedback about
their teaching then developing simple, uncomplicated questionnaires which pupils
are motivated to complete will be an advantage.

As with interviews, questionnaires may include closed and open questions depend-
ing on the data required. Open questions that allow for individual response will, of
course, present more challenges in the analysis stage. One of the biggest problems
with questionnaires is the low response rate (sometimes well below 20%), but
perhaps if the researcher is well known to the respondents it may positively affect
the response rate. One other disadvantage to questionnaires is the time-consuming
 W H I C H RES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E? / 1 0 3

nature of the design and analysis. However, questionnaires can yield specific
information from a group of people in cost-effective ways.

Learning aid: questionnaires

When designing a questionnaire for a more sophisticated audience, the
following points and questions may be helpful:

 Keep the title, description and objectives of the project at the front of your
mind at all times.

 Keep the questions simple in order to aid the analysis and to motivate the
respondent.

Ask the following key questions:

 What is it I am trying to discover or measure?

 How can I do this in a straightforward way?

 Does this question get at what I am trying to discover?

 What will the responses look like?

 How will I analyse the responses?

 How far are the data generated likely to fulfil my aims or objectives?

 What forms will the data take?

 How can I structure the questionnaire effectively?

Consider issues of validity and reliability:

 Am I discovering or measuring what I intended to?

1 0 4 / W H I C H R ES EA RC H TEC H N I Q U ES TO U S E ?

 Will the way I have worded the questions get a similar reaction from all
respondents and at different times of administration?

Be aware of timing, structure and piloting issues:

 Use different sections, fonts and colours for different types of question/data.

 Will the questionnaire be able to be completed in an optimal time of five minutes?

 Are the explanations and instructions to respondents unambiguous, simple and

clear?

 Do you need to promise confidentiality?

 Do you need to explain what will happen to the collected responses?

 Have you considered the analysis of the data as you construct the questionnaire?

 Have you asked anyone to review the questionnaire and offer a view on whether
it is a good questionnaire?

 Have you undertaken a trial?

Be prepared to pilot the questionnaire on a small sample and be prepared to make changes.

Conclusions
It will be obvious that there is no shortage of research techniques for a practitioner
researcher to employ. These are the most suitable methodologies to the field of
practitioner research that relies to a great extent on day-to-day activity in a
changing landscape. However, it remains our belief that practitioner research is
essentially untidy. It lends itself to illuminative approaches, particularly in the
context of monitoring and evaluation. It is for this reason, as will be discussed
subsequently, that lively and engaging dissemination is critical. In order to allow us
to make it possible for you to see clearly what the different techniques are and how
 W H I C H RES E A RC H T EC H N I Q U ES TO U S E? / 1 0 5

you might, as a practitioner researcher, use them we have treated them in isolation
from each other. Our last suggestion in this chapter is that, despite the way we have
structured our material here, you should also be prepared to make use of a
combination of techniques in order to produce as rich a data set as possible which
can then inform your research of your practice.

Further reading
Bell, J. 1993) Doing your Research Project. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
This is a well-known and readable book for beginner researchers. It has useful
sections on all the methods mentioned in the chapter.

Holly, M.L. (1989) Writing to Grow: Keeping a Personal-professional Journal. Oxford:

Heinemann
A comprehensive book about the variety of writing styles that can be developed
through the keeping of a personal-professional journal, ranging from therapeutic
writing to logs of events.

Tripp, D. (1993) Critical Incidents in Teaching: The Development of Professional

Judgement. London: Routledge.
If you are unfamiliar with critical incident analysis, this book will help you be more
informed and feel confident in using this method in your research.

Wragg, E.C. (1999) An Introduction to Classroom Observation (2nd edn). London:

Routledge.
Well written, comprehensive and extremely useful, this book tells you all you need
to know about observation in the classroom. It has many useful pointers to how
observation can enhance professional development processes and practices.

Dadds, M. and Hart, S. (2001) Doing Practitioner Research Differently. London:

RoutledgeFalmer.
This book presents edited versions of practitioners’ research reports and explores
the motivations that caused the practitioners to break away from conventional
approaches. Of particular interest are the chapters by Tish Crotty in which a fable
is presented as a consideration of difficult issues, and by Liz Waterland where an
imaginative reconstruction of several months in the life of a school is the focus of
the research.
 7 Critical Friendship, Critical
Community and Collaboration
OVERVIEW

Similar to the approach used in Chapter 3, this chapter suggests ways in which
practitioners in pairs or small groups can begin to explore the ways colleagues can
be a useful resource in researching professional development and practice. There
are sets of questions and activities to try which use critical friendship and critical
communities to support your investigation.

The lonely researcher?

When you are carrying out research you can sometimes feel very isolated and there
is often a sense of the ‘loneliness of the long distance runner’ in teachers’ accounts
of doing research (Campbell, 2002). Some of what has been advocated in previous
chapters may appear to refer to individuals working by themselves, writing, reading
and reflecting in lonely isolation. However, there is a need for a substantial
recognition of the value of involving others, of collegial interaction, collaboration,
peer scrutiny or review and of the role of others in providing challenges and
different perspectives when researching into practice. Day (1999: 41) builds on the
work of Ebutt (1985) in promoting the use of a critical friend/colleague to
self-monitor practice in the classroom in an advanced model of teacher as inquirer
working along a continuum spanning ‘usual teaching mode to teacher researcher’.
Day (1999: 144) states:

Critical friendship is based upon practical partnerships entered into volunt-

arily, which presuppose a relationship between equals and are rooted in a
common task of shared concern. The role of a critical friend is to provide
support and challenge within a trusting relationship. It is different from the
‘mentor’ relationship in which one person (the mentor) holds a superior
relationship by virtue of his/her experience, knowledge and skills. The critical
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 0 7

friend is recognised as having knowledge, experience and skills which are

complementary.

While there is a notion of friendship in the roles of teacher as critical friend,

collaborator and peer scrutineer, there is also a notion of challenge and confronta-
tion for the purpose of development. Critical friendship and other relationships will
involve disclosure and feedback. Talk is one of the main ways of conducting these
critical friendships, peer scrutiny sessions and collaborations. In addition, being
mindful of the developing use of new technologies, email, video conferencing,
websites and chat rooms, for example, will all play a part in future exchanges and
dialogues.

The following sites may be useful to visit, especially the CARN (Collaborative
Action Research Network) and BERA sites:

 www.dfes.gov.uk/teachers/professional–development

 www.teach-tta.gov.uk

 www.ncsl.org.uk

 www.canteach.gov.uk

 www.carn.ac.uk

 www.bera.co.uk

The value of collegial discussion, collaboration, peer scrutiny and review cannot be
overstated. Today’s workplaces, whether in education or other related professional
contexts, are far more collaborative than in the past. There is a tradition of
‘coaching’ and learning from ‘master teachers’ in the USA (Joyce and Showers,
1982), from which we could learn about collegial relations and developmental
interactions. Similarly, Little (1982) wrote about the value of teachers engaging in
‘concrete and precise’ exchanges about teaching in order to improve teaching and
schools. Eisner (1978: 622) wrote about the ideal situation:

I would like one day to see schools in which teachers can function as
professional colleagues, where part of their professional role was to visit the
classrooms of their colleagues, and to observe and share with them in a
supportive, informative and useful way what they have seen. Less professional
1 0 8 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

isolation and more professional communication might go a long way to help

all teachers secure more distance and hence to better understand their own
teaching.

In the last decade, it could be argued that practitioners engaged more regularly in
discussions about the curriculum, planning, pupil achievement and progress. This
is ostensibly one of the few acknowledged, visible benefits of the introduction of
the National Curriculum in England and arguably one of the spin-offs of more
overt teacher involvement, through mentoring, in the education, training and
induction of new teachers. In recent years it has become much more common for
there to be more than one adult in the classroom for most of the day. The
appointment of a large number of teaching assistants, learning support assistants
and learning mentors has contributed to existing arrangements with nursery nurses,
care assistants and parents in classrooms. Due to inspection procedures and
performance management practices, observation and giving feedback have become
part of the accepted way of developing practice.

There is, however, a difference in what is meant in this context. What is referred
to as critical friendship with reference to research methodology is a practitioner
researcher who develops a critical community in order to interrogate and validate
his or her research in a much more systematic way than the everyday occurrences
outlined above. It requires a critical stance to be taken in order to provide rigour
and depth of response. Becoming critical or acting as a critical friend, according to
Macdonald (1986), gives teachers the power to determine their own agenda and to
explore the role of theory in their teaching lives and may let them be in charge of
the ‘knowledge-creation process’ instead of having the ideas of others imposed.
Smyth (1991: 135) asserts that a critical pedagogy of supervision, used in the sense
of appraisal of practice and ‘supervising’ or critically evaluating one’s practice and
the practice of others, is a powerful tool for reviewing and changing practice:
‘Teachers working with other teachers to create a critical pedagogy of classroom
practice through processes like clinical supervision can reveal the existence of a
number of major impediments quite apart from the general issue of ‘‘Why would I
want to do that, it sounds uncomfortable?’’’

On occasions, being ‘uncomfortable’ results in some serious review and analysis of

the ‘taken for granted’ practices we unquestionably employ on a daily basis. Smyth
(1991: 113) advocates teachers engaging in four forms of action to develop a critical
pedagogy of supervision:
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 0 9

1. Describe: what do I do?

2. Inform: what does this description mean?

3. Confront: how did I come to be like this?

4. Reconstruct: how might I do things differently?

Kennedy (1996: 22), a practitioner researcher, found:

Using these four processes has liberated my ability to uncover much of my

knowledge. I had at last found a structure that enabled me to see closely some
of my values and beliefs and put them into words . . . and peer scrutiny has
provided me with some of the best insights into my own development and
practice.

Exercise: starting a critical friendship

These four processes may provide a useful starting point for writing a
piece to be shared with, or talked about with, a critical friend or group of critical friends.
Choose a particular strategy that you would like to improve in your teaching and, on your
own, systematically address the four questions above. When you have finished, spend
some time with your critical friend discussing your responses.

How does critical friendship work?

A critical friend or ‘significant other’ can be anyone who has the ability to listen
and to ask challenging questions. The meaning of critical in this context is worth
brief reflection. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus give the following definitions
that may help to explain the role:

expressing or involving an analysis of merits or faults of a literary or artistic

work.

a critical essay . . . evaluative, analytical, interpretative, expository, explana-

tory.
1 1 0 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

Critical friendship provides both support and challenge to the practitioner researcher.
Normally you would approach a colleague in your own school, a neighbouring one or a
colleague with whom you have been attending course or network meetings. It is
important to recognise that differing views may arise and that having a critical friend may
not always be comfortable. You may have to agree to disagree. One major issue that has to
be considered is that of confidentiality. Critical friends have to establish a trust and adhere
to a professional code of practice that allows them to disclose professional and, at times,
personal views that may be contrary to the prevailing norm in the institution in which
they work. Indeed, they may be contrary to those of their ‘other half’. A critical friend is a
peer, a colleague and an equal. A group of critical friends could form a peer scrutiny
group, looking at data, reading reports and generally engaging in collegial interaction.

A critical community is different from a group of critical friends. Normally a critical

community would act as a ‘validating group’ that would ‘comment fairly but
critically on your research’ (McNiff et al., 1996). A critical community may include
‘stakeholders’ in the project and may also undertake a mentoring role, challenging
and supporting through discussion, but also would be able to give advice and offer
expertise in the area of research. A critical community may assess the research
project and make valid the claims or findings of the research. (Further discussion
and examples of a critical community are to be found later in the chapter.)

It is necessary for critical friends to devise ground rules for critical friendship duos,
trios or larger groups, including issues to do with confidentiality, trust and other
ethical concerns. The group should discuss and explore some of the questions below
and agree a modus operandi. For a pair or small group to work well, each participant
needs to make a commitment to the activity by allocating time for communication.

Learning aid: critical friendships –

issues and friendship qualities
Some issues to discuss when embarking on a critical friendship are as follows:

 How do you establish trust between critical friends? What can be disclosed in
a safe environment? How can it be ensured that these opinions will go no further
than the group?
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 1 1

 How can agreement be reached on confidentiality issues amongst the members

of the group?

 Who has responsibility for note taking or for feeding back points in the group?
Will this rotate on a regular basis?

 How will the pair or group work? How often will there be meetings/interactions/
communications?

 What roles and activities will the group engage in?

Some qualities to look out for in your critical friends are as follows:

 The ability to listen carefully.

 Interest and knowledge about the learning process.

 Empathy with adult learners.

 Ability to provide support in a variety of ways (e.g. experience in giving

constructive feedback).

 Skill in asking probing and challenging questions.

 Ability to articulate ideas and beliefs, but also to be sensitive to others’ opinions.

 Willingness to share expertise and knowledge.

The role of the critical friend is one that demands a great deal of patience,
and listening more than talking. Egan’s (1990) skilled helper model may be useful
here.
1 1 2 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

Learning aid: the skilled helper

model
Egan identified the skills of helping as follows:

 Exploring the concern by asking some open-ended questions, such as ‘How do

you feel about . . .? or ‘Tell me about . . .?’ or ‘Can you explain . . .?’ and avoiding
expressions such as ‘I think you should . . .’ or ‘I remember a similar thing
once . . .’.

 Focusing on a specific aspect. It is essential to ensure that the choice of aspect

is owned by the person being ‘helped’.

 Considering new perspectives by asking ‘In what ways might you . . .?’ or ‘How
did this situation arise?’ or ‘Why did that happen?’ or ‘What do others think
of . . .?’

 Setting realistic goals by being clear and specific about aims that are measurable
and verifiable and in the control of your partner. Goals should be in keeping
with the values of your partner and attainable in a reasonable time.

 Generating ways forward by focusing on action steps and asking ‘How will you
do . . .?’ and generating a list of possible ideas for action.

 Planning precise action by producing an action plan. Agree first steps and
anticipate support and pressures and plan ways of dealing with these. Agree
a time line and a process of feedback and monitoring.

 Implementing the new approach or ideas by beginning a process of ‘plan, do,

review’ similar to the steps in action research cycles, in order to monitor and
reflect upon the implementation.

 Evaluating the new approach by formulating success criteria and a set of

questions about the effectiveness of your approach or ideas.
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 1 3

The above structure can be more loosely followed in order to be more flexible and
responsive to changing contexts, but as such could provide guidelines for developing
a critical friendship. A crucial aspect of the pairings or groups is the forming of
good collegial relationships, built upon trust and mutual professional regard.

Learning aid: questions a critical

friend might ask
At the beginning of any research project the sorts of questions to be asked by a critical
friend might include those that will help refine the focus of your research project, such as
the following:

 What are the aims of the project? How do they fit with what you want to do?
Can you clarify them further?

 What key words would describe your focus?

 Is the research concerned with evaluation of initiatives; personal experiences of

teachers; pupils’ learning; teaching strategies; or something else?

 What do you know about the topic already? How will you find out about previous
research?

 How will you go about doing the research? What will you actually do?

 What do you hope to find out?

If you are involved in reviewing and researching your practice or professional needs
and development and have undertaken some of the tasks in other chapters such as
those in Chapter 3 about researching your professional identity, consider choosing
a critical friend from among your colleagues or from within any network to which
you belong. You could offer this person a piece of your reflective writing to read
and discuss or you could ask him or her to interview you informally (see Chapter 6
1 1 4 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

for support and advice). It is always better to have something concrete to discuss as
a starting point and to make an outline plan for the session.

Some examples of how a critical friendship might work are illustrated below as
extracts from teachers’ reports of their research of their professional development.

Illustration: teacher A (primary

teacher) and diary writing
The use of a diary journal was an attractive method of collecting data on my teaching
and I was able to use the data in my journal to help me analyse my current situation.

I found myself wondering whether or not I really was representing ‘typical’ incidents
and episodes, or whether, indeed, my diary was building into a rather distorted
image of my practice. This is why I found it particularly useful to submit my
diary to the critical analyses of my fellow students on the course. Their responses
not only directed me to consider the validity of what I had written, but, crucially,
they highlighted for me some of the ‘writing between the lines’. They
focused my thinking by demonstrating to me that many, varied narratives were
often motivated by the same underlying concerns, namely the tension between
externally imposed demands and the conflict I perceived with my own professional
sense of the best way for children to learn.

Teacher A used her critical friends to help her question the everyday occurrences that
she was researching and helped herself develop a better view of what she was doing in
her classroom and how this was informed by her beliefs and attitudes about ‘good teaching
and learning’.
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 1 5

Illustration: teacher B (special school

teacher) and ‘trusted colleagues’
discussion group
I have benefited from being a member of an amazingly supportive group. They
find time to listen and talk through issues with me and now I feel more able to
support them. Discussion must occur with others if professional development is to
occur but the others must be ‘trusted colleagues’ who have not only practical
skills but also good social and communication skills. I feel privileged in that I could
view any member of my group in this way. I also benefit from being a member
of a multidisciplinary team who see issues from different perspectives. Motivation
and the degree with which you are satisfied with your own work must play a factor
in the reflection on practice and developing as a professional. I can’t imagine ever
feeling that I have finished learning or that I’ve got everything right. A group
that asks challenging questions helps you to keep on learning.

The above demonstrates the reciprocity of the critical friendship role, where support and
challenge allow the recipient of that support and challenge to engage in the same behaviour
within the group.

Illustration: teacher C (science

teacher educator) researching
approaches to teaching
Discussions with critical friends have been interesting and occasionally controversial.
Most of them share my view that science is not a body of facts but is a personal
construct of our world. As such the methodology of science is the most important
aspect of teaching it, because it is through this that we create our own constructs.
1 1 6 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

Discussion with G has led me to the writings of Popper, who said ‘every
recognition of a truth is preceded by an imaginative preconception of what the
truth might be’ (Popper, 1971: 56), thus advocating a creative approach to science
teaching. This approach has been taken up by members of the group. S has done
some work which he calls ‘Tell me a story’ in which he asks students to make up
a story to describe what they see happening. Discussions with him have moved
me into thinking of science in this more creative way. Another critical friend has
discussed with me his desire to discover scientific truth. He reads of the theories of
the great scientists and critically appraises them and tries to understand their
scientific judgement and to fit these into his own framework. To be driven by the
ideas of others is contrary to my philosophy but I cannot expect students to
constantly re-invent the wheel for themselves, nor can I expect them to discover
for themselves explanations that took years of thought and research. I am coming to
the view that perhaps we should look upon science facts as scientific history.
Collaboration and critical friendship has resulted in some agreement about
approaches in teaching science.

Teacher C has engaged in an exploration and review of the theoretical knowledge and
beliefs underpinning her practice with critical friends that did not always result in common
understandings and agreement.

Illustration: teacher D (primary

teacher) following an informal
interview with a critical friend
Being interviewed about my beliefs and attitudes about teaching in such an honest
way, and exposing all my inadequacies, brought back memories of school and
failure and lack of support. My critical friend was exceptionally supportive and
non-judgemental and wrote a very constructive response to the interview [see
below]. He expressed similar experiences to mine relating to school days that have
consequently shaped our beliefs. We talked about how important it was for teachers
to know their pupils well and how experiences at school helped to generate a
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 1 7

determination in oneself to know one’s pupils well and to look for signs of
dissatisfaction. He helped me to see the importance of developing a child-centred
approach to teaching and learning. I had been fighting a system of traditional
academic success and attainment throughout my own childhood experiences and
in the schools where I had taught. I will research my teaching strategies in the light
of these discussions and document the strategies I use to improve the learning
in my classroom. I intend to read more about how to improve the teacher–pupil
interaction and relationship in order to provide more opportunities for success.

Critical friend’s response

It is clear to me that your own experiences of education have affected and shaped
your beliefs. We began talking about your experiences of school and compared
that with children’s experiences today. These early comments introduced three
main beliefs that you seemed to revisit throughout the interview: the need for
teachers to know their pupils well; the crucial role that encouragement plays in
improving performance; a belief in experiential learning.

Teacher D was helped to recognise and analyse her beliefs and attitudes to what was
important in teaching and learning and to explore her own professional development areas
for the future.

Other ‘tried and tested’ ways of using a critical friend are as:

 an observer of one of your lessons;

 a provider of post-observation feedback and critical dialogue;

 co-teacher and discussant; and

 co-planner and ‘sounding board’ for action.

Costa and Kallick (1993: 50) usefully describe the critical friend role as: ‘a trusted
person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through
another lens and offers critique of a person’s work as a friend . . . A friend is an
advocate for the success of that work’ and it is this person whom you can see as the
common feature in the extracts quoted above.
1 1 8 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

Critical community
Having a group of critical friends, sometimes called a critical community, is another
arrangement that allows you to take both the role of giver of support and challenge
and receiver of support and challenge. Groups of practitioners and others in the
local area (i.e. school(s), courses or networks and partnerships and, in some cases,
national or international networks) can be established for the purpose of discussing
and debating research projects and the resultant professional development.

A critical community is different from a critical friendship group as it would have

more of a ‘validation’ type of role in a research project, although there is scope to
vary the formality of any brief for the group from very informal and loosely
structured to more formal and highly structured and organised depending on the
nature of the research and the nature of the role of the critical community. It can
often consist of those who are ‘stakeholders’ and ‘experts’ in the research area, and
those who have an interest that may be ‘academic’ in nature.

Care should be taken to consider the role of each member of a critical community
and to safeguard the researcher’s interests and to prevent undue influence on the
research project from those who may have a vested interest or ‘stake’ in the project.
However small scale the research, it is important to ensure authenticity and validity
within the research project and to consider whether what is being said or claimed
is intelligible or meaningful; that what is claimed can be justified and that there is
sincerity and merit in the communications (see Habermas (1972) for a full
discussion of validity claims). There are several forms of validating procedures and
a useful list can be found in McNiff et al. (1996), which covers a range of informal
and formal styles across self-validation, peer validation, up-liner (management)
validation, client validation, academic validation and general public validation. The
choice of validation group is determined by the purpose of the research and the
style, scale and scope of the research. In the context of this book, we are concerned
with practitioner research in small-scale studies and a typical critical community
might consist of the following.
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 1 9

Illustration: type A critical community

For a project looking at the use of group teaching strategies in the
development of the use of ICT in the teaching of history:

 Fellow teacher researcher from network or course.

 Local authority adviser with an interest in the research area.

 Headteacher or interested governor of the school.

 Member of a national group or network who is an email contact.

Illustration: type B critical community

For a project looking at how one teacher uses questioning to improve
his teaching in mental mathematics:

 Colleague from neighbouring school.

 Teaching assistant who works with the teacher in class.

 Head of maths department.

 DfES website chat-room contact.

Illustration: type C critical community

For a project looking at the development of the role of the headteacher
in strategies for school improvement:
1 2 0 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

 Two local headteachers.

 Researcher from National College of School Leadership (NCSL) – email contact.

 Tutor in leadership and management from the local university.

 Headteacher of a well-known school which has pioneered strategies for school

improvement through the use of Best Practice Research Scholarships.

Illustration: type D critical community

For a project looking at the development of the curriculum for citizenship
in a small Catholic high school and the impact on teaching strategies:

 An interested teacher from a similar school.

 An interested teacher from a non-denominational school.

 Two senior pupils from own school.

 Two senior pupils from a non-denominational school.

 Adviser or advisory teacher in citizenship.

 Parent or member of the general public.

The role taken by the members of a critical community can vary from that of
discussant or ‘sounding board’ to adviser and expert. It is necessary to present your
work publicly and to get views and opinions. Not everyone will agree with your
research design and conduct or findings but it is important to document the views
of others in a systematic way.

A critical community does not have to meet as a group, though face-to-face

interaction yields good data and healthy dialogue. Communication can be by
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 2 1

telephone or email or fax or in chat rooms and coffee bars on the Internet. All
communications with the critical community should be documented and used as
data in the research project. There are confidentiality and ethical issues to be
considered by the critical community and it may be useful to have an agreed code
of practice which establishes behaviour and responsibilities at the outset of the
project. McNiff et al. (1996) have devised a useful set of briefing notes and, for more
formally constituted groups on master’s courses, criteria for making judgements
about research projects. These could be amended to suit other contexts such as
networks of practitioner researchers and small informal groups of practitioners in
networked learning communities (NLCs) as currently being set up by the UK’s
DfES and National College of School Leadership (NCSL). Members of the critical
community may have differing roles depending on their interest and expertise; one
would not expect pupils to have the same role as an LEA adviser, for instance. Roles
that can be undertaken by the critical community are listed below:

 Discussing ideas put forward by the researcher.

 Commenting on the draft reports (not editing).

 Trying out and commenting on materials.

 Providing knowledge and expertise in the research area and offering an ‘informed’
opinion.

 Providing a different perspective from that of the researcher.

 Asking ‘difficult’ questions and challenging assumptions.

 Supporting researchers in their development of ideas.

 Confirming the validity of the research.

 Commenting on the research design and project aims.

 Providing a critical perspective on the research.

It is the responsibility of the researcher to manage and organise the critical

community, its role, function and identity. These aspects can vary greatly,
depending on the individual specifications and requirements of research projects.
For practitioner researchers, especially those concerned with investigating,
1 2 2 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

reviewing and improving their professional development, it is essential that critical

commentaries from colleagues in the field are documented and seen as part of the
research process.

Collaboration, networking and critical appraisal are key aspects of researching

professional development and therefore contribute greatly to the understanding of
professional identity. Yet collaborative cultures are not ‘cosy’, as Hargreaves (1994:
195) states: ‘in their more rigorous, robust (and somewhat rarer) forms, collab-
orative cultures can extend into joint work, mutual observation and focussed
reflective inquiry in ways that extend practice critically, searching for better
alternatives in the continuous search for improvement.’ For a more personal
approach, engaging in the types of writing and discussions advocated in Chapter 3
about exploring your professional identity may be a way into developing critical
friendships and communities that support teacher learning and development. If you
are engaged in, or contemplating, a research project or research activity, it would
be useful to begin to identify a possible critical community that would be relevant
to your concerns and to begin to think about the purpose, function and role that a
critical community would play in your research. Map out a potential group and
draft a brief for the group.

Mentors as support for research

This chapter has strongly promoted collaboration between teachers, practitioners
and related individuals in critical friendship roles, peer groups and in critical
communities in a variety of forms. It would be useful to explore, briefly, the role of
mentor as different from the critical friendship and peer roles.

There may be some commonalities in the roles of critical friend, member of a

critical community and mentor that could provide interesting comparisons and may
illuminate practices, which could be adapted to enhance the various different roles.
One aspect, which would appear to be common, is the reported benefits of
collaborative work between experienced teachers and between teacher mentors and
student or novice teachers. These reported benefits are in the resultant professional
development experienced by all who engage in carefully structured and focused
collegial interactions. Campbell and Kane (1998: 110) identify a strong relationship
between mentoring and teachers’ professional development in the areas of improved
observational skills; developing new ideas and practices; and evaluating and
 C R I TI C A L F R I E N D S H I P / 1 2 3

appraising practice. Sachs (1999: 41) argues that: ‘teacher research has the potential
to act as a significant source of teacher and academic professional renewal and
development because learning stands at the core of this renewal through the
production and circulation of new knowledge about practice.’

Generally, a mentor has additional expertise to that of the mentee in the area in
which he or she mentors. This is different from the ‘buddy’ type of approach being
promoted in the critical friendship role and from the ‘validating’ role described for
a critical community. As Edwards and Collinson (1996: 7) state in their discussion
of mentoring in initial teacher education and training (ITET), mentoring: ‘is used
primarily to induct newcomers into the expectations and procedures that operate in
a specific workplace . . . Frequently mentors have to take responsibility for teaching
student teachers key aspects of their professional training.’ Maynard and Furlong
(1993) suggest that mentoring may also include ‘co-inquiry’, in tune with Russell
and Munby’s (1991) ‘puzzles in practice’ promoting collaborative examination of
practice between mentor teachers and student teachers. There is a sense of the
school or workplace as a ‘learning community’ where all participants are seen as
learners. Stoll and Fink (1996: 156) linked peer mentoring with coaching and
discussed the benefits in relation to school improvement strategies. Dallat et al.
(2000) report on a project that meshed mentoring and teacher researcher
approaches together in a way that enhanced mentoring and professional develop-
ment, providing a ‘bridge between scholarship and practice’ (Fueyo and Koorland,
1997), and which allowed teachers, if they wished, to extend their initial research
into a study for a higher degree which recognised and validated their professionally
focused research projects.

The links between practice-centred initiatives and research activity are currently
being firmed up and developed in England by the joint National College of School
Leadership (NCSL) and DfES initiative ‘Network Learning Communities’ and
other schemes promoting school-based research, where schools are being encour-
aged to bid for funding for projects aimed at developing the kinds of roles discussed
in this chapter.

Looking ahead to the development of ‘communities of practice’ and learning

communities, the practices developed in critical friendship models and collabor-
ations offer a real opportunity for teachers and other practitioners to reclaim the
agenda of appraisal, performance management and professional development. By
using and publicising their professional development research projects, practitioners
1 2 4 / C R I TI C AL F R I E N D S H I P

may help create the landscape of the future and establish practitioner research
networks at local, national and international levels.

Further reading
Chapters 6 and 7 in McNiff, J., Lomax, P. and Whitehead, J. (1996) You and your
Action Research Project. London: Routledge.
These two chapters, entitled ‘Making claims to knowledge and validating them’ and
‘Making your research public’, provide a good setting for the further exploration of
critical friendships and critical communities. There are useful hints for getting work
published in professionally focused locations.

Chapter 5 (‘Teachers as collaborative and critical learners’) in Smyth, J. (1991)

Teachers as Collaborative Learners. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
This chapter tackles how to bring about lasting, significant and meaningful change
in schools by accepting the ‘messiness’ of development and the importance of
ownership and collegiality and collaboration. Smyth’s notion of ‘clinical supervision’
as a powerful tool in teacher development is explored and discussed.

The notion of coaching, first developed by Joyce and Showers (1982), may well be
having a revival as teachers collaborate and develop ways of working together as
critical friends. For a further exploration of coaching, see Joyce, B. and Showers, B.
(1980) ‘Improving in-service training: the messages of research’, Educational
Leadership, 37(5): 379–85.
 8 Qualitative Data Analysis
OVERVIEW

In this chapter, we look at some of the features of qualitative data analysis and
begin to unpick the strategies, skills and techniques you will need to develop in
order to make sense of the data you have collected. We start by thinking about
how the coding of qualitative data can be managed and discuss in detail the
technique of open coding. We also consider, briefly, other techniques such as
pen-portrait, metaphor and dilemma analysis that might be useful to you in
developing an understanding of your data.

Introduction
Qualitative data analysis is a crucial part of the research process, yet typically it is
clouded in ‘mystique’ and often not described in detail in reports of that research.
This is in part because such analysis has characteristically been considered an
interpretative art rather than a science, and hence a process that does not lend itself
easily to simple articulation. Recent years, however, have seen a trend to more
explicit discussion of qualitative analytical methods and this has been accompanied
by an increase in the use, and sophistication, of computerised software packages
such as QSR’s NUD*IST and NVivo (www.scolari.co.uk/qsr) for the management
and analysis of data. Generally speaking, investing in such software and spending the
time to get to grips with it is probably not cost-effective for small-scale practitioner
inquiry. An additional time/cost implication of using such packages is that the data
would have to be held electronically in order to input it into the software program.
Although we do not cover software analysis packages in this book, you will find
increasing reference to them in educational literature and indeed they still require all
the analytical skills and techniques outlined below – particularly open coding.

All qualitative data analysis is an ‘interplay’ between you, the researcher, and your
data. The process is not just, or even centrally, objective, mechanistic and ‘scientific’
and it is important that you bring to it knowledge of life and literature, along with
1 2 6 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

the necessary technical skills. So, for example, as we saw in Chapter 5, insights and
theoretical frameworks from a wide variety of texts can be used as intellectual and
practical resources for providing ideas, initial research questions and theories. This will
include specialised or technical literature, such as research reports, sociological theories
and methodological texts; but literary works, such as philosophical and historical writings,
films and biographies, can also be a useful source of ideas. A cautionary note, however:
although qualitative data analysis involves you using your knowledge and understanding
of the world derived from experience or reading, it is important to be aware of any
personal biases or preconceptions that may affect your data collection or analysis.

If that sounds a difficult enough task, it is also necessary for researchers to avoid
‘going native’. That is, although they have to immerse themselves in situations and
data and develop sensitivity and awareness of the subtle nuances of meaning, they
should maintain a degree of ‘objectivity’ – an ability to remain at a certain distance
from the research materials and characters and represent them fairly and impar-
tially. You, as a practitioner researcher, have an even greater challenge in that you
are a ‘native’. This has tremendous advantages in that you have profound and
extensive knowledge of the context you are researching but at the same time you
need to develop the expertise to be able to look afresh, with a researcher’s eyes, at
everyday situations, habitual patterns of dialogue and interactions. In short, you
need to develop the ability to reflect upon the familiar as unfamiliar.

The broader picture

Analysis is an integral part of the research process and so the methods employed
should be consistent with the underpinning research tradition. In contextualist or
interpretative traditions, for example, qualitative data are harvested mainly from
interviews but they may also be forthcoming from open-response questions on
survey questionnaires based in a more positivist tradition. The analysis of open
responses to survey data has many features in common with the analysis of all
qualitative data. One central difference between the two types of data is that it is
possible, and often advantageous, to quantify qualitative survey data once they have
been categorised and, in Chapter 9, we consider how this and other quantitative
data from small-scale surveys can be managed, analysed and presented.

Before we look in detail at analytical techniques, however, it is worth reviewing,

very briefly, the three important processes mentioned in Chapter 1: induction,
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 2 7

deduction and verification. Social science, as well as natural science (so-called

scientific) research, is subject to these processes and they are as important in the
analysis of qualitative data as they are in the development of all scientific knowledge.

Induction leads the researcher from empirical observation to the development of a

hypothesis. Such hypotheses are inevitably provisional and time and context
dependent.

Deduction involves the researcher inferring the implications of current hypothesising

and elaborating further upon the consequences. New hypotheses can then be
developed and empirically tested against existing or additional data.

Inductive and deductive thinking are central to the process of constructing theory,
as is the subsequent validation process. Although many would argue that much
educational theory is descriptive, rather than explanatory, and thus not ‘proper’
theory.

Verification ascertains the integrity of hypotheses empirically – whether total or

conditional or non-existent – and indeed the limits, if any, of their applicability.

The idealised model of inductive thinking leading to deductive thinking and so to

validation (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.1) doesn’t always materialise in reality, however,
even in scientific research. Just as the relation between data and their understanding
is problematic in social science research so too is it in scientific research. Rarely does
scientific understanding and theory flow from unstructured observation. Most often
in quantitative research data are collected with a hypothesis in mind, so observations
are already geared towards those events that connect in some way to that hypothesis.
Thomas Khun, famous for his reflections upon scientific method, observed that
‘Numbers gathered without some knowledge of the regularity to be expected almost
never speak for themselves. Almost certainly they remain just numbers’ (1961: 45).

Equally well, theory often precedes scientists’ ability to measure – the laws of
planetary motion, for example, predicted the existence of a number of heavenly
bodies many years before they were ‘discovered’ experimentally. Additionally, even
when measurements are made they may not be understood; it was, for example, 25
years before experimental data which refuted the existence of ‘ether’, as a medium
through which light was transmitted, were ‘correctly’ interpreted as such by the
scientific community (Pawson, 1989).
1 2 8 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

Initially research in the social sciences adopted pseudo-scientific methodologies

until the late 1960s when contextualist traditions (referred to in Chapter 1) began
to take a hold and different analytical techniques were needed. Grounded theory
was, and perhaps still remains, foremost in this field. It was devised by Barney
Glaser and Anselm Strauss, whilst researching in the field of palliative care (their
original book (1967) is quite a hard read and not to be recommended to the faint
hearted). Grounded theory was a methodology in which theory was derived from
data, systematically gathered and analysed; it offered a new way of studying social
reality, which at the time was very novel and quite controversial. It was many years
before it became accepted in the research world because it emphasised the building
(‘discovery’) of theory rather than its testing (‘verification’). Thus grounded theory
was based on the ‘logic of discovery’ rather than the conventional ‘logic of
verification’, which was more accepted in the still dominant positivist paradigm (see
Chapter 1). The collaboration of Glaser and Strauss, fruitful for many years, ended
acrimoniously, however, and both continued to write separately about grounded
theory.

Grounded theory attempted to make data analysis a rigorous process and some
would argue that in its earlier versions it attempted to replicate the perceived
objectivity of the scientific method. In particular, it did not acknowledge the extent
to which the interpretive framework held by the researcher/observer influenced the
data collected and how they were perceived. So, for example, have you noticed that
after becoming aware of something you have not previously observed you see it
everywhere for a time. This is probably because you are sensitised to noticing it,
which indicates that what you see is influenced by your personal theories about life.
Language operates in the same way – the name of an object determines, or at least
influences, what we think about it; which is of course the reason why marketing
executives are so keen on re-branding products and organisations suffering from
‘image problems’.

Nowadays many researchers claim to have used ‘grounded theory’ in their analysis,
although in truth not many implement the complex procedures outlined by its
designers to the full (a good example of an article that does use grounded theory to
its full potential is Morrow and Smith (1995)). Although we do not have time to
examine grounded theory methods in detail either, they do provide many rich and
helpful insights into the analytical processes and in the section on open coding
below we will attempt to indicate, in a much simplified fashion, some of the key
features.
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 2 9

Techniques for analysing qualitative data

Analysis centrally involves the interpretation of data and it may be useful to begin
by noting that the layers of complexity and construal of data are often threefold:

1. The actual events.

2. The accounts of those events given by observer/participants/researcher.

3. The subsequent interpretation of the accounts of the events by the researcher

and others.

So it is important to remember that virtually all raw data are already a ‘story’ of an
event – one person’s account of that event from his or her very particular
perspective. When you then add a further layer, that is, your interpretation of the
data, it becomes a story of a story of an event, with the event itself (whatever that
might be) gradually disappearing under layers of interpretation.

Having received that account, how do you prepare it for analysis? Ideally, the raw
data would be in the form of a tape recording and along with this would be detailed
‘field’ notes recording contextual features relating to particular interviews. Details
such as where and when the interview was conducted and particular characteristics
and behaviours of the interviewee before, during and after the interview should
figure in the material. If the interview is recorded in the form of handwritten notes
then it is vital that as much as possible of the dialogue is written down verbatim.
Tape recording an interview is preferable, not only because it is much easier for the
interviewer, but also because it provides a far richer source of data for analysis; it
captures speech inflections, pauses etc., which helps with interpretation. It is not
necessary or even possible, however, to transcribe all of the interview. It can take
anywhere between 5 and 10 hours to transcribe 1 hour of tape, depending on the
clarity of the dialogue, background noise, the number of speakers, typing skills, etc.,
so it is important to be discriminating in the selection of excerpts to transcribe.
Alternatively, analysis can be done straight from the tape.

Whatever course of action you decide upon it may be useful to listen to the tape
and note down key points of the interview and the approximate position of these
on the tape for future reference. An alternative would be to make brief notes
1 3 0 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

relating to this during the interview itself, in chronological order so that the
relevant extract is easy to locate. There is not the space here to go into detail about
this data preparation phase but accounts such as that of Carole Cummings (1982)
of her attempts to tape record the activities of her reception class one morning and
transcribe the data would perhaps be interesting to peruse.

Analysis of qualitative data is complex because it involves two very different, and
you may think contrary, skills. It necessitates you to be systematic and meticulous
on the one hand and yet on the other creative (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). The
process requires the ability to be able to:

 be open to the multiple meanings that the data offers;

 look at situations from different perspectives;

 think creatively in devising analytical/conceptual frameworks;

 make connections and apply relevant theoretical insights; and

 employ multimodal discourse (art, music, metaphor, etc.).

In this next section we will explore a number of techniques you may find useful to
employ when approaching the analysis of textual data. The first, most basic and
extensively employed analytical tool is coding, and we shall spend most time
discussing this process which is at the heart of most data analysis. For many, or even
most, research tasks coding and subsequently categorising data will be a sufficient
analytic tool to identify relevant themes and understand what is happening in
particular situations. We shall, however, very briefly consider other useful tech-
niques that can be used along side coding: including metaphor and dilemma analysis
and creating fictionalised pen-portraits.

CODING

Coding provides a mechanism for handling large quantities of raw data and how
you chose to code these data will depend upon your particular project. The coding
strategy may range on a spectrum from being, on the one hand, fixed before data
collection. That is, data may be assigned to predetermined categories, as is often
the case with closed questions on survey questionnaires. At the other end of the
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 3 1

spectrum, codes may be entirely open and responsive to the data, that is, you may
choose to use codes that emerge from the data. The conceptual categories, ‘building
blocks’ of theory, once identified and developed, can later be integrated to form
theory. We will focus in what follows on the kinds of skills that will enable you to
open code data, and they are indeed generic analytical skills that will be useful to
develop any reading of data. The likelihood is that the codes you will employ in the
analysis of a limited-scale practitioner research project are somewhere between the
two ends of the spectrum. That is, guided by your research questions, you will have
some notion of the categories in which you are interested in collecting evidence and
construct codes accordingly.

OPEN CODING

Open coding necessitates the researcher being, simultaneously, systematic and

creative in his or her examination of the data. The process involves breaking data
up into fragments, analysing their meaning and allocating codes to the concepts that
are identified. The intention is not to come to a definitive answer but creatively to
open up the possibilities.

This conceptualising is the first level of analysis and in this first instance it is helpful to
give the phenomenon/event/action a name that is very closely related to it in some
way, through, for example, imagery. These first codes should be a very close ‘fit’ to the
data and can use actual words or phrases from the data. Glasser and Strauss (1967)
recommend the use of actual words in the data and called these in vivo codes.
Nearness to the data in selecting a code for the concept is vital as objects can, of
course, be classified in multiple ways. A knife, for example, may be a culinary
implement or a lethal weapon. It is important not to become too attached to these first
codes, however, as they may become less significant as the entire data set is inspected.

Example: excerpt of interview data

from a study of home–school links
Parent: If this Link project . . . is about [political agendas] asking parents to do the job
that teachers are getting paid [demarcation of responsibility] to do I think that it is unfair.
1 3 2 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

Researcher: To whom?

Parent: Parent, child, but primarily the parent . . . we are guilt tripped. YOUR child is not
achieving so YOU must do something about that [responsibility]. Most of us actually do
want to do something but it has to be fair we want to take responsibility but they
must take theirs [demarcation of responsibility] . . . if it is going to be a partnership
we want a forum to speak [political agenda] . . . I’m fortunate I’ve had an education I don’t
feel intimidated by school and teachers, lots of parents do [power relations].

The example above shows an early stage of data coding from an action research and
development project about home–school partnerships (McNamara et al., 2000). The
codes indicated in bold typeface include some codes that are in vivo codes (e.g. ‘guilt
tripped’, ‘partnership’); others are attached (e.g. ‘political agendas’). It can be
helpful, but is not always by any means necessary, to complete such detailed analysis
of fragments of text, to look for ambiguities of meaning and articulations of
politics/power/social dynamics, etc. However, the codes allocated to the fragment
of data above give a good sense of what is happening. So, for example, two themes
thread through the data: one is about intimidation, guilt, unfairness; the other is
about partnership, responsibility and fairness. The data should be examined
analytically and not just descriptively. Thus it is important to attend to not only
what is said but also to how it is said, and what effect it has. What, for example, is
the parent above telling us about herself, other parents, teachers and the dynamic
between them in the sentence: ‘I’m fortunate I’ve had an education I don’t feel
intimidated by school and teachers, lots of parents do’? Why does she feel she needs
to say it?

If we consider this initial phase of open coding as a whole, characteristically:

 concepts are classified into categories related by common properties;

 categories are developed and subcategories defined; and

 analytical memos are written.

We will now look at these techniques in detail.

 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 3 3

Creating categories

Creating categories is a process of grouping concepts that share common

characteristics together under a more general category. Creating categories is
important because it allows researchers to reduce the number of items they need to
think about and move on from the stage where they can’t ‘see the wood for the
trees’. Strauss and Corbin (1998) give the example of an observer reporting objects
in the sky as birds, kites and planes. Recognising the common properties associated
with all these phenomena in later analysis might usefully combine these conceptual
codes into the category ‘flight’. Categories are more powerful than single concepts
in that they have analytic potential; that means that by comparing the relationship
between individual concepts in a category the whole is more than the sum of the
parts. For example, by associating birds flying with planes flying we can identify the
various possibilities and constraints relating to aerodynamics and also where the
analogy breaks down and why. There are drawbacks to this, though. For example,
seeing the bird in terms of just one of its characteristics – ‘flight’ – is a shift that
closes down certain avenues of inquiry in that the bird is now less likely to be seen
as a part of the ecological system or the ‘food chain’.

Developing categories

This involves identifying its properties or characteristics. In Strauss and Corbin’s

example above of the category ‘flight’, the properties of height, speed, distance, etc.,
are defined and the limits or dimensions of the properties recorded (e.g. height from
very low to 35,000 ft). At this stage subcategories may be usefully identified within
categories. These may be classified in relation to characteristics (type of flying
object) or according to specific properties (speed of flight). In the development of
categories it is important to find as many different cases of particular categories as
possible and the data should be trawled to discover new examples. As far as possible
the subcategories should be mutually exclusive – that is, they should not overlap –
although of course it is possible that data extracts will be classified into more than
one subcategory. Where possible the subcategories should also be exhaustive – that
is, there should not be examples that do not belong in any subcategory. It may be
possible that, for the sake of completeness, you might consider including a
subcategory for which no instances/examples can be found in the data in order to
draw attention to that very fact.
1 3 4 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

In the home–school partnership project mention earlier (McNamara et al., 2000),

for example, the authors identified the subcategories shown in the example below
in relation to the category ‘parents supporting their children’s learning’.

Example: subcategories of ‘parents

supporting their children’s learning’
encouragement, ‘he gets 110% encouragement in everything he does’;

praise, ‘I told him it was great’;

surveillance, ‘he is not allowed not to do his homework. I check his book a lot and his
journal’;

criticism, ‘I sent him back many a time and told him that’s rubbish’;

teaching, ‘I don’t tell them the answer I help them to figure it out for themselves’;

resource support (material) ‘I bought extra books’

(and strategic) ‘I read a bar of chocolate helps, the sugar boosts’; and,

bribery, ‘If he goes to school he gets £1.50 spends in the evening for going’ (McNamara
et al., 2000: 478).

Writing analytical memos is a vital form of aide-memoire in the analysis process.

They are akin to field notes in the data collection process and should record
recoding activity, relationships between categories, the development of theories,
evaluative or reflective thinking. Analytic memos, like field notes in a research diary,
should always be dated and contain references to any related documents. The
example below illustrates analytical notes made for a meeting early in the analysis
phase of the home–school links project described above. It was an example of an
analytical framework derived from a ‘market driven’ model. The idea was rejected
because it was relatively limited in its applicability to the data, as its explanatory
power in relation to the entire data set was not extensive enough.
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 3 5

Example: analytical notes

3.01.99

The internal market of performance indicators was complex for parents to interpret and
navigate. They found it ‘very hard to understand’. It required an understanding of the
exchange rate/reference system and knowledge of the value of the child within it:

‘5 credit:1 letter home then silver, gold and prize’.

Parents habitually experienced problems of calibration concerning:

measurement (‘I wasn’t actually sure how it was measured’);

consistency (‘I beg your pardon I have just been told the opposite’);

frequency of calibration (‘once a year [for reports] is not good enough’);

meaning (‘it went up to 6.3 which Dominic was very pleased about. 6.3 what?’).

Sometimes they rejected information on the basis that it made them anxious about how
much their child was valued: ‘I do and I don’t . . . information makes you more anxious about
how well your child is performing.’

Once the initial phases of the open coding and category development are complete,
you should begin the validation processes. It is important to examine the data
actively for ‘negative cases’ to ensure that you have not been overtly biased in your
selection of examples. Once you are convinced your analysis has been fair it is time
to establish your ‘findings’: the statements you can make in relation to your data
analysis. A final stage, and one that is probably not appropriate or necessary for
most limited-scale practitioner research projects, is developing a theory from the
analytical framework: finding a way of conceptualising the data as a whole that
integrates the categories you have identified. We will now look at each of these
elements of the process in a little more detail:

 Theoretical sampling.

 Negative case analysis.

1 3 6 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

 Interrogating data to ascertain findings.

 Developing theory.

Theoretical sampling

This is the stage in the analysis process when the theory drives the data collection
rather than vice versa, where the data can be scanned quickly and compared to the
categories. Have you identified all examples of categories and subcategories? With
your categories in mind, sieve through the data and ask questions about additional
categories or subcategories or boundaries between categories. Have you categorised
all the data relating to the initial questions? You may decide to go out and find data
that have not so far emerged naturally to answer one of your initial research
questions. Or perhaps the data that have emerged in particular categories may lead
you to pose further research questions that need to be answered.

Through this process of sampling and constant comparison of categories by

examining their boundaries and looking for similarities, differences, explanatory
usefulness, etc., categories may be combined or regrouped and new categories
discovered or developed. When no further categories appear to be emerging the
theoretical framework is said to be saturated (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). It is also
vital during this phase of analysis always to be on the lookout for counter-examples
or negative cases, which appear to contradict the themes that are emerging. So, for
example, in the home–school data above we looked for examples of occasions when
parents felt it inappropriate to support their children’s learning.

Interrogating data

Interrogating data will be the final stage for most limited-scale practice-focused
research projects. This can be carried out once you have settled with confidence on
your complete analytical framework, which may have emerged predominantly in
response to the initial research questions you posed. You are now in a position to
ask yourself what statements or claims you can make in respect of it. So, for
example, if you were inquiring into parents supporting their children’s learning one
of your initial research questions might have been to discover the extent of parents’
involvement in homework activity. One or more of your analytical categories would
most certainly have related directly to this. It could be that your prime interests in
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 3 7

this area related to the differences in parental support of boys and girls, or the
variation in their support of children at different phases of their schooling. If this
was the case these over-riding interests would have guided the configuration of your
categories.

The types of claims you may wish to make about the data include descriptive
claims such as the approximate number of parents who help their children with
homework and the average amount of time spent each night by these parents. It is
important to qualify such descriptive statements, not necessarily with percentages,
but most certainly with adjectives such as ‘nearly all’, ‘most’, ‘many’, ‘a few’. You
might also want to break down the reporting of these data in relation to key
variables such as gender and age. Alternatively, you may wish to make explanatory
claims about the reasons that parents claimed they did, or did not, become involved
in their children’s homework. Again, this may be with respect to age and/or
gender. You may want to make claims about children’s or parents’ attitudes towards
parents helping their children with homework. Finally, you may wish to make
evaluative claims about the effect, or effectiveness, of parents supporting their
children with homework from the perspective of the parents, the child or perhaps
the school.

Developing theory

This is the final stage of this process and involves identifying the main theme of the
data. Generally, it will be one core category or categories that integrates most of
the other categories and has the greatest potential to explain or describe what is
happening. So for example, in the home–school project described above, which had
as its central focus parents supporting their children at home, having rejected a
theory based upon an internal market (and a couple of other ones along the way)
we settled for the twin core categories of ‘mobilisation’ and ‘demobilisation’. These
military metaphors seemed to have considerable explanatory power for the data set
as a whole and a matrix was developed involving parent, child, teacher and school.
Categories of mobilisations and demobilisations were identified between each of
these participants and theoretical sampling was undertaken to explore further
categories or properties of categories.

So, for example, we identified that school mobilised parents by enlisting their help
as supporters, decision-makers, supervisors and teachers. On the other hand, and
1 3 8 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

sometimes simultaneously, schools alienated their children’s parents in a number of

ways, some of which are illustrated in the following example.

Example: the ways in which schools

alienated their children’s parents
academically, ‘the whole system and language around the system is very difficult, they
all alienate us’;

physically, ‘the thing that upsets me the most was that I couldn’t get up the stairs’;

culturally, ‘forcing house of the middle classes . . . hidden curriculum . . . preparing kids
for company life’;

religiously, ‘whether mums aren’t appreciative of me because of me not being Catholic’;

psychologically, ‘you need a lot of confidence to contact a school’;

technologically, ‘there were computers everywhere and it was dead hi-tech’;

socially, ‘it’s all like the boundary/demarcation . . . bringing your social life into school;

ideologically, ‘if this link project is about asking parents to do the job that teachers are
getting paid to do I think it is unfair’.

We will continue this chapter by considering very briefly three other types of
analysis that you may find useful to employ alongside the basic open coding
technique.

METAPHOR ANALYSIS

Metaphor analysis is ‘good as a way into understanding how participants concep-

tualise and feel about their activities and roles’ (Somekh, 1995: 65). Metaphors
depict one thing in terms of another and, because of this, they often exaggerate or
parody the way people feel about what they do and they draw attention to features
of particular significance or pathos. Somekh (1995: 65) suggests that the researcher
should:
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 3 9

1. search for and highlight every metaphor in the transcript/text/notes;

2. identify one overarching or significant metaphor;

3. use this metaphor as an analytic tool to gain further leverage on the data. How
far does all the data ‘fit’ the metaphor? Where/how does it not fit?

In the case of the home–school link project we used the military metaphor
‘mobilise’ as a core category (or meta-metaphor) but examples of other metaphors
used in the data of the project are italicised in the excerpts shown in the example
below.

Example: metaphors identified in

home–school project data
Parent of school:

I think there is a lot of pressure for parents, I think parents are hunted as extra help to
make sure that their child is pushed. I do all sorts of things for the children because at the
end of the day you feel as if your children should be at a higher level than they are.

Parent of child:
She is a leech a bloodsucker . . . she takes advantage. James is the postman but the
letters always get lost!

Parent of teacher:
A latter day Wackford Squeers . . . machiavellian, he ruled by fear.

In another research project, focusing upon the training of primary teachers, a

number of metaphors were identified with varying degrees of explanatory usefulness
for different purposes and occasions. The metaphor of ‘game’, for example, featured
very prominently in a number of trainee accounts such as the excerpt shown in the
example below.
1 4 0 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

Example: metaphors used by trainee

teachers
Well I know I know in school, I know definitely part of the game for me, and I had to
learn the hard way, was you know, if you are gonna get through this you better be
submissive. Sometimes you might need to have to go to someone for some advice when
you didn’t need the advice. You knew the answer but maybe you needed to go and ask that
person, to make that person feel good about themselves. So in school I realised that the
game, the game in school, when you go in school is really to get on get on the
best side you can with the teacher. Don’t rock the boat, because from the minute you
rock the boat, that’s it you don’t stand a chance at all of getting anywhere. So that’s the
game there.

Finding this theme in the data together with much reference to ‘ordeals’ and
‘symbolic acts’ and ‘ritualised behaviours’, we subsequently drew on a theoretical
perspective from anthropology and worked with a notion of initial teacher training
as a rite of passage. You will find this referred to briefly in Chapter 10.

DILEMMA ANALYSIS

Another useful way to get into the data is through looking at tensions or dilemmas.
Somekh (1995: 66) describes dilemma analysis as: ‘good for understanding the
values and tensions which frustrate or fascinate the participants. Very useful if the
patterns are later used to focus discussion between concerned participants who have
differential power/status in the same institution or social setting.’

She advises analysts to:

a. Search for and highlight any passages in the transcripts/text/notes which

show hesitancy, puzzlement, uncertainty, a sense of difficulty or stress in the
participant.
b. List each of these ‘dilemmas’ on a sheet of paper expressed in the form:
One the one hand . . .
On the other hand . . .
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 4 1

c. If you can manage it, the two statements should be balanced in being as far
as possible neutral statements of each opposing point of view/belief/value
(i.e. even if you can see the participant leans more heavily to one point of
view than the other).
d. If possible, carry out dilemma analysis of a number of interviews with
participants who have differing perspectives and differential power/status in
the situation.
e. Put dilemmas into a single list, without indicating from whom each originated,
and use this list as a discussion document with all the participants.

In the project relating to the trainee teachers a number of dilemmas were identified,
such as the ones shown in the example below.

Example: dilemmas identified in data

from trainee teachers
The ‘ideal’ v. the ‘real’
College doesn’t always prepare you for going in and actually teaching. They always
give you an ideal model and you can’t always apply it to your class.

College is very much a child centred approach and it’s OK in theory but once you get
into a classroom and you have 30 children . . .

Recipe knowledge v. repertoire of skills

If they are not going to tell you – how will you learn?

Metaphor and dilemma analysis can be useful to give an extended understanding of

the complexities presented in the data and they are described in more detail in
Altrichter et al. (1993) and summarised in Somekh (1995) in her helpful and very
brief review of analytic techniques. Another analytical technique presented by these
authors is pattern analysis. Valuable as a way of identifying ‘routinised or ritualistic
behaviour’, they suggest identifying patterns occurring in the data and discussing
the meaning they may have with participants and how other people might regard
them.
1 4 2 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

PEN-PORTRAIT ANALYSIS

Biography, pen-portraits and fictional critical writing, mentioned briefly in Chapter

6, are useful devises to employ if you want to illustrate and disseminate participants’
perceptions, experiences and feelings in a lively, authentic, meaningful and
accessible way. Traditionally, research and evaluation projects report an analysis of
issues, activities and contexts that characteristically fragment and decontextualise
individual histories to a large degree. Biographical techniques, such as developing
pen-portraits, remedy this significant potential defect by presenting data in the form
of a vignette, or thumbnail sketch. The vignette would be fairly brief (one to three
pages perhaps) and most probably targeted at a particular aspect of the participant’s
professional life or activities rather than attempting to convey a wide-ranging life
history. Aside from serving a reporting function in themselves, pen-portraits can be
used as professional development materials in order to highlight particular issues.
An alternative to this straightforward biographical account is to create vignettes
from amalgams of individual characteristics across the entire data set, thus
developing ‘fictional’ pen-portraits. We will now consider the analytical steps that
would lead towards the development of fictionalised pen-portraits and, centrally,
these rest upon open coding, as outlined in the main part of this chapter.

A biographical pen-portrait will of course be drawn from just one interview.

Fictionalised pen-portraits, on the other hand, necessitate a data set of perhaps
about 15 interviews. The first three steps set out below are common to both sorts
of pen-portraits but the remaining five relate to fictional accounts only.

Learning aid: the steps involved in

creating a pen-portrait
1. The first step involves you in open coding the interview transcripts in the manner
described above to identify issues, characteristics, key factors, critical incidents,
etc. – depending on the theme of your research and nature of your interview schedule.

2. Highlight in the transcript quotations, metaphors, dilemmas, patterns of

behaviour, etc., that exemplify key issues arising from the analysis.
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 4 3

3. Weave them together in a vignette (see Chapter 10 for an example) which

depicts the individual history of the participant in respect to the matter being
considered using these key verbatim quotations, characteristic and issues, etc.

4. To create fictional pen-portraits you will need to compile lists of issues,

characteristic, activities, experiences, dilemmas, etc.

5. Highlight in the transcript quotations, metaphors, etc., that exemplify key issues
arising from the analysis as above.

6. Analyse the distribution of these issues across variables that are relevant to
your interviewees (teacher/pupil) such as key stage, age, experience, ability.

7. Create a list of ‘ideal types’ of pupil/teacher. In the example below is a list of

some of the teacher types that two of the authors constructed from data
collected in the case-study phase of a baseline survey of teachers’ perceptions
of CPD.

8. Finally ‘fill out’ these ideal types with actual experiences, quotations, perceptions,
attitudes that are relevant to the character you are depicting from across the
entire data set.

Example: ideal teacher types

identified in a baseline survey of CPD
Anna
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a 23-year-old newly qualified primary teacher just finishing
her first year. Has been superbly mentored, has extensive professional development portfolio
and a clear plan for her career progression in the next five years.

Brian
A cynic, aged 48, who came into teaching from a career in industry and has been teaching
for 18 years in 3 different secondary schools. Has a great deal of enthusiasm still for his
subject, English, but that’s about all! Doesn’t have much truck with CPD, finds INSET
days a waste of time, but thoroughly enjoys taking his pupils into London to ‘do’ the shows.
1 4 4 / Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S

Andy
Ambitious, committed and 35 years old. He has worked in the same medium-sized special
school, for children aged 4–19 with moderate learning difficulties, since joining the
profession 7 years ago. Member of Senior Management Team, Special Needs Co-ordinator
and responsibility for Personal Social and Health Education. The school has an extremely
well organised professional development programme that is based on the appraisal/
performance management system co-ordinated by the head.

Linda
29 years old, been teaching for 5 years in the same primary school. Did a BEd at the
local university. Getting somewhat jaded but recently had a ‘road to Damascus’ experience
on CPD course with thinking skills guru and is now totally enthused and sees it to have
had real effect upon her classroom practice.

We will look further at aspects of the relative value of these two approaches to
pen-portrait analysis when we consider what the completed products might look
like, and how they might be used. We will do this when we begin to look at writing
up and reporting of research.

The analysis of qualitative data is undoubtedly the most challenging research skill
to master. It will require time, sensitivity to nuances of meaning and a degree of
aptitude to accomplish well. Furthermore, facility at data analysis alone is not
sufficient; as a researcher you will need not only to be able to interpret data but also
to convert them into information, articulate that information and communicate it
to interested parties. You will find advice and support in relation to this aspect of
the research process in Chapter 10.

Alongside interviews, small-scale questionnaire surveys are perhaps the most

popular and useful form of data collection for practitioner researchers. Question-
naires are commonly used to generate both quantitative and qualitative data and in
the next chapter we will consider in some detail the management and analysis of the
quantitative data.
 Q U A L I TAT I V E D ATA A N A LY S I S / 1 4 5

Further reading
Altrichter, H., Posh, P. and Somekh, B. (1993) Teachers Investigate their Work.
London: Routledge.
This is an immensely useful guide into action research methods for first-time
researchers in education and the social sciences. In particular it has a very useful
chapter on data analysis.

Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1998) The Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and
Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
This is the main grounded theory text cited in this chapter. The first edition of this
book was published in 1980 but, sadly, Strauss died just before this second edition
was published. It is probably one of the best overviews if you want to get into
grounded theory seriously and most certainly a lot more accessible than the original
Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago, IL:
Aldine.
 9 Quantitative Data
Management, Analysis and
Presentation of Questionnaire
Surveys
OVERVIEW

In this chapter we consider how to manage and analyse quantitative data

generated from questionnaire surveys, but the techniques described are equally
useful for quantitative data from sources such as structured observation. Building
upon the discussion in Chapter 6 we identify key types of survey questions and
consider how the data generated by them might be coded and recorded. We offer
one way of calculating some simple descriptive statistics using Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet and, finally, we describe how Excel’s Chart Wizard can produce simple
graphs, bar charts and pie charts to portray the data in an accessible and attractive
format.

Introduction
Questionnaires are a very versatile data-gathering method; they are cheap, easy to
administer, whether it be to three people or 300, and can be used to gather a great
variety of data of both a qualitative and quantitative nature. Data collection is, of
course, not the only function of a questionnaire: they can serve to raise awareness
of particular issues and make respondents feel valued and important elements of the
decision-making process. Questionnaires, as well as gathering information, can also
be instrumental in educating – opening respondents’ eyes to particular ways of
looking. So, for example, the authors were part of a team that conducted a baseline
survey of teachers’ perceptions of continuing professional development. In the
construction of the questionnaire we thought carefully about the way the balance
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 4 7

of questions relating to traditional (conferences, courses, etc.) and non-traditional

(peer coaching/observation, reading, research, etc.) CPD was informing respon-
dents’ perceptions whilst they were completing it.

Chapter 6 alerted you to the kinds of things you need to think about when
constructing your questionnaire and outlined some basic design features. It made it
clear that there was a balance to be had between response rate, on the one hand,
and length, complexity, density and coverage on the other. Every question you put
into a questionnaire is at the expense of another, so it is important to prioritise the
information you really need. Psychologically, for a small-scale questionnaire, two
sides of A4 is really the maximum and it should be attractive (colour and Clip Art
if you can manage it), structured into sections if it lends itself to partitioning, and
include instructions relating to completing and returning that are easy to read and
understand. Include, if possible, an addressd envelope or a fax-back number to
facilitate ease of response.

A questionnaire can be used to generate a number of different types of data. You

may want to gather descriptive data, which would include information about
preferences, personal histories, events, etc.: the ‘what’, ‘how often’, ‘where’, ‘when’
type of question. Alternatively, you may want an insight into respondents’ attitudes
and perceptions – ‘how do they feel?’, ‘what do they think?’ etc. Or you may want
explanations – to know, for example, the reasons why prospective pupils and their
parents choose your school. Finally, you may want evaluative information –
how effective or valuable did the parents find your open evening?

We will now consider five question response types that are generally considered the
mainstay of questionnaire design, namely:

1. category

2. quantity/information

3. rating scale

4. ranking

5. open response.
1 4 8 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

A questionnaire may contain just one type of question response or could, and most
usually does, have a mixture. The advantages of using a mixture of response-type
questions – in terms of gathering a range of data, maintaining a reasonable level of
interest and avoiding patterned responses – must be weighed against the disadvan-
tage of requiring respondents to understand and respond appropriately to different
instructions. We will shortly think about each type of question and consider how
you would go about coding, recording, analysing and reporting the data gathered.
Data analysis, as noted in Chapter 6, is an important factor to consider when you
are designing a questionnaire. You need a clear view of how you would code and
analyse each question before you commit yourself to it; there is no point in asking
a question if you haven’t got the capacity to process the data generated by it.

Data management and coding

CATEGORY RESPONSE

The age and gender questions in the example below are category response
questions. In compiling such questions you must ensure that the categories you
choose are mutually exclusive (i.e. there is no overlap between categories and only
one response is legitimate for any one respondent) and exhaustive (i.e. coverage is
total and every respondent can find a relevant category). If there is any doubt
regarding the exhaustiveness of the possibilities on offer, a category labelled ‘other’
should be added.

The analysis of closed response questions, like that of the qualitative data we saw
in the last chapter, begins with a coding process. The difference is that in the case
of closed response questions coding is a very mechanistic process. So, for example,
in questions 1 and 2, in the example below, the respondent was a male and aged
between 30 and 39.
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 4 9

Example: category response

questions

1. Age group 20–29

30–39 ✓
40–49
50–59
60–65
2. Sex Male ✓
Female

Supposing 39 people responded to these particular questions; the information could

then be collated in a simple tally chart, as shown in the example below.

Example: tally chart to record

category response data

Category Tally Frequency

1. Age group 20–29 1111 11 7
30–39 1111 1111 10
40–49 1111 1111 11 12
50–59 1111 5
60–65 1111 5
2. Sex Male 1111 1111 1111 1111 20
Female 1111 1111 1111 1111 19
1 5 0 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

The disadvantage of recording data in tally charts is that potentially valuable

information, relating to the responses of individuals across a number of questions, is
lost. So, for example, analysis of the pattern of responses of men/women or
younger/older respondents as distinct groups would not be possible.

An alternative recording system involves allocating a code to each category response

using a simple coding system. A coding strip attached to the grid in the example
below (to the right of the grid) shows how the responses to those questions might
be coded using a simple system in which 30–39 would be coded ‘2’ and male ‘1’, etc.

Example: category response

questions with coding strip added

1. Age group 20–29 1

30–39 ✓ 2

40–49 3

50–59 4

60–65 5

2. Sex Male ✓ 1

Female 2

Instead of using a tally chart such as the one shown above, the coded data would
then be entered into a grid. A small part of one such grid is shown below. In this
example each row represents a different questionnaire response (T1, T2, T3) and
each column represents a different question number (1, 2, 3, etc.). It will be helpful
when you are setting up the grid to attach a simple descriptor to each question
number. A grid recording system such as this will allow you to retain all the details
of the information supplied on individual questionnaires.
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 5 1

Example: grid to show recording of

coding data

1 age 2 sex 3 school 4 KS 5 role

T1 2 1 2 3 2

T2 3 1 1 4 4

T3 1 2 5 3 3

You can enter this information on a simple grid drawn using the ‘Table’ facility in
Microsoft Word or, alternatively, and more powerfully, you can use a spreadsheet
such as Microsoft Excel. Excel is an excellent software package in which to record
and manage data – not only because, as a spreadsheet, it is a ready-made grid and
has the facility to work out frequencies but also because it can very easily produce
a variety of attractive graphs for the subsequent presentation of those data.

QUANTITY OR INFORMATION RESPONSE

The ‘length of teaching experience/time at present school’ and ‘main post of

responsibility’ questions shown in the example below require an open response but
of a very restricted nature: a quantity in the case of questions 3 and 4, and
information in question 5. Questions 3 and 4 can, if helpful, be retrospectively
grouped into time categories and coded in a similar way to questions 1 and 2 above.
Question 5 can again be coded retrospectively giving posts of responsibility that
occur most frequently an individual code and grouping and coding minority
responses together into an ‘other’ category.
1 5 2 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

Example: quantity or information

response questions

3. Length of teaching experience years

4. Length of time in present school years

5. Main post of responsibility in present school

LIST RESPONSE

Question 5 above specifically asks for the ‘main’ post of responsibility in the school,
thus forcing a singular response. It may be that the respondent actually had multiple
responsibilities and this would be particularly useful to know. In this case the
question could be rephrased as a list question, such as question 6 shown below,
where it may be appropriate to tick more than one response.

Example: list response question

6. During 2002 I was:

Literacy/numeracy co-ordinator
Assessment co-ordinator
On the senior management team
On a management point
A leading teacher
An ITT/induction tutor
A SENCO
An advanced skills teacher

Other responsibility (please specify)

 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 5 3

Since respondents to question 6 may tick more than one box, each of these
responses will require an individual response column in your grid. The responses
in the ‘other’ category can be coded retrospectively if sufficient numbers or
important themes emerge. The coding of such a question is shown below. Here the
codes 0 and 1 are used to indicate nil and positive responses to the question from
the six respondents. Respondent 6, for example, was an advanced skills teacher on
a management point who was also an induction and ITT tutor and a governor of
the school (retrospectively coded as 3 in the ‘other’ category).

Example: coding a list response

question on a spreadsheet
Question 6
Post of responsibility during 2001
Lit/num Assess SMT Man pt Lead T ITT/IND SENCO AST Other
T1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0
T2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
T3 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0
T4 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0
T5 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0
T6 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 3

RATING SCALE RESPONSE

Questions which ask respondents to rate their feelings or attitudes against a

prepared scale are the mainstay of questionnaire design. The correct name for such
a scale is a Likert scale. One decision to take here is whether to have an odd (usually
three or five) or even (usually four) point Likert scale. This will generally depend
upon whether you think it valuable, for your purposes, force respondents to come
down on one or other side of a positive/negative ‘divide’ or to give them the option
of a more neutral ‘don’t know/not sure/no change’ central position. A second
decision you must make is whether to attach descriptors to categories, such as the
ones shown in question 7 below.
1 5 4 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

Example: descriptors
7. How have CPD activities over the last 5 years impacted upon your
motivation to teach?

very positively positively no impact negatively very negatively

This can be very expensive in terms of space on the questionnaire but, where you
can combine a number of such questions with the same descriptors in a grid-type
format (such as in question 9 below), it becomes more feasible. Question 8
illustrates an alternative format in which only the extreme ends of the scales have
descriptors.

Example: descriptors at the extreme

ends of the scales
8. How do you find the thought of being involved in educational research?

Too much work 1 2 3 4 Easily manageable

Not at all valuable 1 2 3 4 Very valuable

Very boring 1 2 3 4 Very interesting

 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 5 5

Example: rating scale question

9. How much information about teaching do you gain from . . .

None Little Some A lot

Professional journals 1 2 3 4

OFSTED/HMI 1 2 3 4

DfES 1 2 3 4

LEA 1 2 3 4

Books 1 2 3 4

Press and media items 1 2 3 4

Professional unions 1 2 3 4

Universities 1 2 3 4

Colleagues 1 2 3 4

Conferences 1 2 3 4

Other . . . (please specify) 1 2 3 4

The coding strategy for these questions is self-evident and often (as is the example
above) the code is included in the question cells and is actually circled by the
respondent. Some researchers believe that, so as not to confuse respondents where
you have a number of such questions in a questionnaire, you should maintain the
same coding strategy – that is, a 1 for a ‘negative’ response and the highest score
for a ‘positive’ response (or vice versa). An alternative argument is that varying the
coding strategy keeps the respondent alert and avoids ‘patterned’ responses.

The example below shows how question 8 and part of question 9 would be entered
in a grid or spreadsheet. You will notice that the columns relating to question 9 are
shaded. The reason for this is that it is helpful to put down markers (shading or an
1 5 6 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

alternative format) on particular questions in order to help you keep a check that
you are entering the data in the correct column where you have a long string of
numbers.

Example: coding of rating scale

response question on a spreadsheet
Question 8 Question 9

The thought of being involved in research Information about teaching gained from

Manageable Valuable Interesting Journals HMI/Ofsted DfES LEA Books

1 3 3 1 2 2 3 4
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3
3 4 4 4 3 3 3 3
3 4 4 4 3 3 3 2
2 4 4 4 3 3 3 3
3 4 4 3 2 3 3 2
1 2 2 3 3 3 2 2

RANKING RESPONSE

These questions require respondents to rank a number of options in a particular

order. Question 10 is an example of such a question but do beware when you
include rating scale and ranking questions in the same questionnaire that you make
the distinction between them very clear. Once set into a particular pattern (e.g.
rating), respondents often need a real jolt to alert them to the fact that the question
requires a different kind of response. Ranking response questions again force a
particular coding strategy; that is, of course, 1, 2, . . . 6 in this example.
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 5 7

Example: ranking response

10. Below are some immediate responses from teachers when asked what
they thought of as CPD activities. Please RANK them in order from 6 (your most likely
immediate response) down to 1 (your least likely immediate response).

Courses/conferences/workshops [ ]
Watching and talking with colleagues [ ]
School INSET days [ ]
Personal research and reading about education [ ]
Online learning [ ]
Training [ ]

OPEN RESPONSE

Open response questions are a must for questionnaire surveys if only as a ‘catch-all’
at the end to give respondents the opportunity to reveal any ideas/comments/
suggestions they have been harbouring and not had the opportunity to articulate.
But they are also valuable to explore more freely perceptions and attitudes.
Questions such as ‘What image does educational research conjure up for you?’ can
generate so many rich data that they make the extra effort required in the recording
and analysis worth while.

This particular question was used in a questionnaire eliciting teachers’ experiences

and perceptions of being involved in research (reported more fully in McNamara,
2002). Indeed, a number of the examples in this chapter have been taken from that
particular questionnaire. In the case of this specific question, the responses were
collated and themes identified. Typing the responses as a list is very time-
consuming but does make the analysis process much easier. We chose to partition
the emerging themes into the six broad categories, which each had a number of sub
categories, as outlined below.
1 5 8 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

Illustration: what image does edu-

cational research conjure up for you?
1. Researchers as:
 academic

 utopian

 out of touch with real classrooms.

2. Research process as technical:

 statistical data

 scientific jargon controlling variables and testing hypotheses

 questionnaires, graphs, surveys, observations, asking questions.

3. Research process as teacher/school-based:

 action research as instrument of change

 assessment of current practice and justification for good practice

 looking in detail at teaching/learning.

4. Impact on education:
 no evidence of impact

 implications for action not clear

 teachers on the ground left to implement.

5. Feelings towards research:

 exciting and interesting

 worthwhile

 hard work.

6. Politicised context:
 misinterpretation of findings

 manipulation of findings

 ignoring implications that didn’t find favour.

 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 5 9

Having identified such themes it is important to complete your analysis by

calculating the relative weighting of each theme in the data: was the image of
research as ‘technical’, for example, more prevalent than research as ‘teacher/
school-based’? The degree of accuracy with which you do this will be a matter of
choice and dependent on factors such as audience and style of reporting. For most
purposes descriptors such as ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘few’, etc., will be quite sufficient. At
the other extreme you could allocate each theme a number and code the open
response questions in the grid with the rest of the data in order to use the statistical
and graphing facilities of the spreadsheet.

Data analysis
CALCULATING FREQUENCIES

Having discussed at length different types of questions typically used on a

questionnaire, and how to code and record data generated from each, it now
remains to explore how to compute some simple descriptive statistics in relation to
those data. A small portion of data is shown in the example below and you should
be able to follow the instructions given in this section if you copy these data into
an Excel spreadsheet. The data show the response of ten parents from St John’s
primary school to questions 1–5 of a questionnaire. The column (A–F) and row
(1–12) identifiers (shaded in the example) are part of the pre-existing structure in
the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The identification given to each questionnaire as
it was entered is in column A (J5, J6, etc.). The question numbers are written into
row 1. Question 1, for example, asked ‘what is your relationship to the child?’ and
four categories of response were offered: mother, father, carer and other. Question
2 asked the sex of the child. So, for example, the 2 in cell C9 tells us the child
referred to in response J11 was a girl and the 1 in cell E7 tells us that the parent in
response J9 was not at all satisfied with the preschool provision her child attended.

The maximum number of codes used in any one question in this questionnaire was
five. In order to work out the frequencies of the responses to each question the
numbers of responses categorised as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 need to be totalled (i.e. the
frequency of response in each category calculated). Nil responses should be left
blank. Importantly, if you wish to code and total nil responses then enter them with
a zero but the response codes will now, of course, be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
1 6 0 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

Example: a section of a spreadsheet

showing the coding of data from a
questionnaire
A B C D E F

1 1 relation 2 sex 3 preschool 4 satisfied 5

2
3 J5 1 2 3 3 5
4 J6 1 1 2 4 2
5 J7 1 2 3 3 2
6 J8 1 2 3 2 3
7 J9 1 2 1 1 3
8 J10 1 2 2 4 5
9 J11 1 2 3 3 3
10 J12 1 1 4 3 3
11 J13 1 2 1 2 2
12 J14 1 2 1 4 3

We are now going to consider how these codes can be totalled to discover the
frequency of each response to a question. Some questions might only have two or
three possible responses and thus codes; question 2 is one such example. Indeed,
every question could be dealt with separately and the formula used to find the
frequencies customised but, in order to take advantage of the power of Excel to
repeat operations, we will describe how to total each question as if there were the
same number of responses (in this case five). If there were fewer than five possible
responses, the frequencies of the codes that were not used will not be a problem as
they will appear as zeros. If there are additional codes over and above five because,
for example, you decided retrospectively to partition the ‘other’ category of one
question and used extra codes (over five), the numbers of these will be collected
together in an extra ‘bin’ as we will see below. A most valuable feature of the Excel
spreadsheet is that if you change any data number after the frequencies have been
calculated the frequencies will change automatically.
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 6 1

First copy the small section of data shown in the example above into a Microsoft
Excel spreadsheet and follow the procedure for working out frequencies as follows.

The first step is to input the codes you are going to total:

1. Leave a row below the bottom of the data entered in rows 1–12 and, in column
B rows 14–18, key in the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in cells B14–B18.

2. Highlight the cells in the block B14–B18 and along to F14–F18.

3. From the Edit drop-down menu, select Fill and from the Fill submenu, select Fill
right.

All the cells you highlighted should now be filled with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (as
shown in the example below).

The second step is to prepare the array in which your frequencies will be dumped:

1. Highlight cells B20–B25. You need to highlight six cells in this example: five cells to
collect the frequencies of the responses coded 1–5 and one to dump any higher
values you may have entered (always highlight one more cell than you have codes).

2. With this array highlighted, put your cursor in the formula line (at the
top of the screen directly beneath the toolbars). Enter the formula:
:FREQUENCY(B3:B12,B14:B18). This will tell the program to total the numbers in
rows B3–B12 with respect to the numbers in rows B14–B18 and to dump the
frequencies in the highlighted cells B20–B25.

3. When you have entered the formula correctly, press Control;Shift;Enter. Totals
(the frequencies for each code) should appear in cells B20–B25, in this case (10
0 0 0 0 0). Curly brackets will also appear automatically around the formula.

The final step is to copy this formula across the rest of the data:

1. Highlight cells in the block B20–B25 and across to F20–F25.

2. Go to the Edit menu and select Fill from the drop-down menu. Select Fill right from
the submenu.
1 6 2 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

The frequencies of the different responses to questions 2–5 should now appear in
the cells highlighted, as is shown in the example below.

Example: a section of a spreadsheet

showing frequencies of responses
A B C D E F

1 1 relation 2 sex 3 preschool 4 satisfied 5

2
3 J5 1 2 3 3 5
4 J6 1 1 2 4 2
5 J7 1 2 3 3 2
6 J8 1 2 3 2 3
7 J9 1 2 1 1 3
8 J10 1 2 2 4 5
9 J11 1 2 3 3 3
10 J12 1 1 4 3 3
11 J13 1 2 1 2 2
12 J14 1 2 1 4 3
13
14 1 1 1 1 1
15 2 2 2 2 2
16 3 3 3 3 3
17 4 4 4 4 4
18 5 5 5 5 5
19
20 10 2 3 1 0
21 0 8 2 2 3
22 0 0 4 4 5
23 0 0 1 3 0
24 0 0 0 0 2
25 0 0 0 0 0
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 6 3

Further help on the topic of ‘Array formulas and how to enter them’ can be found
on the Help package in Microsoft Excel. You will find there are alternative ways in
which to calculate these totals and one is through the COUNT function which can
also be found on the Excel Help package.

MEAN SCORE

Before we go on to consider how to present this information visually it is perhaps

worth mentioning briefly a measure you might want to consider calculating for
rating scale questions and this is a mean score or average of the responses. For many
questions, such as numbers 1 (relationship of respondent to the child) and 2 (sex of
the child) there is no meaning to be assigned to an average response. For rating
scale questions such as the ones shown in the example above, however, you can
calculate an average score that is both meaningful in itself and also allows you to
compare the responses to different questions, or indeed the responses of different
groups to the same question. It is, of course, easier to compare across questions if
you have used the same number of points on all the rating scales (e.g. either all four-
or all five-point Likert scales).

The calculation of mean scores is very simple. Let us take as an example question
4, in which respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with their child’s
preschool experiences against a four-point scale. To calculate the mean score, all
you have to do is divide the total of the scores (in this case
3;4;3;2;1;4;3;3;2;4:29) by the number of respondents, in this case
10, giving an average of 2.9.

This can again be worked out quickly on Excel using the AVERAGE function.
Working on the same data recorded above, highlight cell B26 and enter
:AVERAGE(B3:B12) in the formula line at the top of the screen. Then press
‘enter’ this will take the numbers in cells B3–B12, work out the arithmetic mean
and put the answer in cell B26. Using the Edit, Fill, Fill Right procedure, the rest
of the averages for questions 2–5 can be computed giving the answers below (most
of which you will recall are not actually meaningful):

B C D E F
26 1 1.8 2.3 2.9 3.1

Note: A combination of the SUM and COUNT functions

:SUM(B3:B12)/COUNT(B3:B12) will do the same.
1 6 4 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

If you are using a tally chart rather than a spreadsheet you can also calculate the
mean score quickly and simply. You already have the scores grouped and the
frequencies (total numbers) in each group so you can use that information: 1 person
responded 1, 2 responded 2, 4 responded 3, and 3 responded 4. In order to find the
sum of the scores everyone gave to question 5, simply multiply the frequencies (the
number of people in each group) by the respective scores and add them together.
To find the mean score, divide that sum of scores by the number of people who
responded to the question (that is, the sum of the frequencies). The calculation is
set out in the example below.

Example: calculation of mean score

Score Frequency Score;Frequency

1 1 1

2 2 4

3 4 12

4 3 12

Total 10 people 29 score

The mean or average score for this rating scale question is then calculated by
dividing the sum of the scores (the total of the score;frequency column) by the
number of people who responded (the total of the frequency column), which gives
29/10 or 2.9.

Data presentation
The final step in the research process is of course the reporting stage, and Excel is
very effective at generating graphs and charts to represent data. We will take you
through one such operation but encourage you to explore the many different types
that are available. You should by now have a copy of the table we have been working
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 6 5

on in an Excel spreadsheet. We will use as an example the data in column D relating

to question 3: ‘What preschool provision did your child attend?’ The frequencies
of the responses to question 4 are in cells D20–D23. Highlight these cells and click
on the Chart Wizard (the bar chart icon) on the toolbar (or, alternatively, on the
Insert drop-down menu). The wizard is very user-friendly and instructs you through
each of its four steps. In the first step you are offered the possibility of 15 or so
graphs and charts of ‘standard types’ and another 20 or so ‘custom types’ (the actual
charts offered will vary slightly with the version of Excel you are using). You are
also offered the possibility of seeing a sample of what the graph would look like for
the data you have highlighted. Click on some of graph types to explore the
possibilities. As you will see, most of the standard and custom types plot the raw
scores – that is, the number who responded to question 3 with a 5, 4, 3, etc. If
instead you would prefer a diagram that gives you percentage responses for each
category, go for a pie chart. In the ‘standard types’ window the pie option has six
different types and there are two further options in the ‘custom types’ window – a
black and white pie and an expanding blue pie chart. We will now draw a black and
white pie chart from our data but all the pie charts basically follow the same four
steps.

You should still have cells D20–D23 highlighted (the responses to question 3). In
the Chart Wizard go to the ‘custom types’ window and take the option of the black
and white pie; you will see a model of what it will look like. Select the Next option,
which relates to the data source. The Data Range and Data in Columns buttons
should be highlighted as default options. Select the Next option again and you will
be offered the possibilities of entering ‘titles’, ‘legends’ and ‘data labels’. Select ‘title’
and enter the title ‘What preschool provision did your child attend?’ on the title
bar. You will see the title appear on the model. Move to the ‘legend’ window and
you will be given the option to choose whether or not to include a legend and if so
where to place it. Tick the legend box and you will see it appear on the model.
Deselect the legend box on this occasion as we don’t want to include a legend and
instead move on to the ‘data label’ window and highlight the ‘show data label and
percent’ button. Select Next and you will be presented with options relating to the
location of the new chart. You can choose to put it as an object in either the same
sheet that the data are currently located in or a new sheet (chart 1). Choose the
Same Sheet option and select finish and the chart will appear immediately in the
middle of the page; you can now move it and/or resize it as you please in the same
way that you would any object.
1 6 6 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

The final stage of the process is to make the pie chart more meaningful for,
although it already has a title, the data labels with each percentage are numbers. In
order to replace the data labels with pertinent words, single right click over data
label 1 and all the labels will be selected. You will be given the option of formatting
the data labels. Select this option and you will be given the choice of various
formatting features such as font size. Deselect format at this point, and left click on
label 1 instead, a text box will appear around it. Place your cursor in the text box
and replace the label ‘1’ with the more meaningful identifier such as ‘day nursery’
(take care not to delete the percentage). Repeat the procedure replacing labels 2, 3
and 4 with ‘playgroup’, ‘child minder’ and ‘children’s centre’ respectively. If need
be, return to the reformat option to change the font size or style. In addition to
changing the format features of the pie chart, you will also be able to change other
features. As well as resizing the frame (that is, the chart area), you can also resize
the plot area – the pie chart itself. If you single left click just below the pie you will
see highlighted the plot area, which directly inscribes the pie chart. By manipulating
this you can resize the pie as a whole or individual sectors of it.

Your pie chart should now resemble that shown below. Having prepared the pie
chart you can copy it into a Word document to use it in a report or print it on to
an overhead transparency for presentation at a conference or in-school meeting. It
is important to note that if you leave the pie chart on the Excel data sheet any
changes you make to the data will automatically alter the frequencies and the sizes
of the sectors on the relevant pie charts. However, depending on which pie chart
you choose, the changes do not always alter the written percentage in the data label.
In the case of the ‘blue pie’ on the ‘custom types’ window the percentages are
written on the sectors of the pie itself in the plot area and they will change
automatically as the size of the sectors change when the data are altered. If the
percentages in the data labels do not change automatically they will have to be
altered manually using the procedure outlined above for changing data labels. Once
the pie chart is pasted into a Word document you will have even less flexibility to
change it, certainly with the earlier versions of Excel. The best solution is simply
to keep copies of the charts in Excel, make any changes there and paste revised
versions into the Word document. It is worth noting that Word files with Excel
charts in can grow to quite some size.
 Q UAN TI TATI V E DATA M A N A G EM EN T / 1 6 7

Example: chart 1: pie chart to show

the data relating to question 3

There are many other options to explore for drawing graphs using Excel and you
will find that you can quickly become a confident user of the charting function.
Accessible information that looks very professional can be produced quickly and to
great effect from raw data. Should you wish to produce illustrative charts from
existing data that have already been collated you can simply enter them as a column
in Excel and go through the procedure for drawing charts outlined above.

In this chapter we have introduced you to some possible ways of recording,

managing and analysing quantitative data in order to prepare simple descriptive
statistics. In particular, we have introduced you to some of the features of
spreadsheets such as Excel. If you require any more complex statistical tests to be
carried out on the data a package such as SPSS, a statistical package for the social
sciences, would be required but it is very complex and you would need professional
training to use it. We have also described how you can use Excel’s excellent
graphing features to represent your data in an attractive and accessible format in
1 6 8 / Q UA N TI TAT I V E DATA M A N A G EM E N T

written reports and persuasively in presentations. We take up the theme of the oral
presentation of data further in Chapter 11 and talk about written reports in Chapter
10.

Further reading
Munn, P. and Driver, E. (1995) Using Questionnaires in Small Scale Research.
Edinburgh: Scottish Council for Educational Research.
This is a useful sourcebook which gives a practical guide to using questionnaires in
small-scale research.

Bell, J. (1999) Doing your Research Project. Buckingham: Open University Press.
This immensely popular research methods reader has been mentioned before but
particularly note that it does contain useful chapters on ‘Designing and administer-
ing questionnaires’ and ‘Interpretation and presentation of evidence’.
 10 Writing up, Reporting and
Publishing your Research
OVERVIEW

In this chapter we look at the writing up or the reporting of the research process.
It is a vitally important stage yet it is one that many very busy practitioners, driven
by the desire to improve their practice, will find it difficult to prioritise. We consider
the types of research writing that you may become involved in and the factors that
will influence your decision, such as intended purpose, audience, genre, etc. We
focus particularly upon three different forms that your writing up may take:
reporting, writing for publication and the construction pen-portrait materials that
could be used as catalysts for professional development activities as well as serving
a reporting function. We discuss the process of writing itself and the different ways
the literature you have read and used in your research can be incorporated, and
we alert you to some of the issues you need to think about with regard to finding
an appropriate publishing outlet and tell you what the process might involve.

Writing up: genres, purposes and audiences

Stenhouse’s (1980) seminal definition of research as ‘systematic inquiry made public’
takes as implicit and fundamental that your ultimate ambition will be to disseminate
the findings of your research in the public arena. This may involve an oral
presentation at a conference/meeting or a written (used in the widest possible sense)
account in the public domain. You may well have discovered for yourself by now
that the reporting of research is extremely varied in nature, style, quality, length,
accessibility and relevance to practice. At worst it can be impenetrable, a
consequence not always of the author’s preferred style, but of current funding-
related pressures on academics in the UK to publish in prestige journals, where high
competition can lead to esoteric intellectualism.
1 7 0 / W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G YO U R R ES E A R C H

Bassey (1995) suggests there are three types of research writing:

1. Academic mode: to be found in academic books, refereed journals and conference

papers. The audience is largely other academics.

2. Professional mode: to be found in professional journals, magazines and newspapers.

Its purpose is to ‘add to practical knowledge’ and its audience is mainly practising
professionals, teachers and others engaged in the educational service.

3. Pedagogic mode: to be found in research assignments, dissertations and theses. Its

purpose is to ‘demonstrate to a tutor, and possibly an external examiner, that the
student is learning to conduct systematic, critical and self-critical enquiry’.

The likelihood is that your writing may combine elements of at least two of these
three genres. It is in fact very difficult to be prescriptive about the form your writing
might take because, of course, this will vary considerably depending upon its:

 aim – e.g. to describe a situation, to inform action, to report to parents, etc.

 purpose – e.g. accountability, accreditation, pleasure, impart knowledge, etc.

 audience – e.g. principally practitioners and their immediate professional contacts

(such as teachers in their school, other teachers, parents, pupils or other
educational stakeholders, academics, etc.).

 form – e.g. entirely textual or multimodal, containing perhaps video or audio

recordings, links to websites; entirely web based, etc.

 length, style and genre etc.

 eventual destination:

 whether you hope to publish and, if so, whether in a newspaper, professional

or academic journal, website, electronic journal, etc.;

 whether you intend to present at a conference and, if so, who will be the
audience and what technological facilities will be available.
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It is important that you are clear in your mind about these issues and if you have
been commissioned/awarded a grant to do the research by someone else (e.g. your
school, a funding body), it is important that you also consult them regarding their
understanding of these issues (preferably before you accept the commission). So, for
example, do they want you just to conduct a baseline survey or come up with some
recommendations? In the case of grants awarded for research, the form and,
hopefully, the audience and purpose, of the final report will have been thought
through and most probably defined in the tender document or the contract.

If you are a free agent it is not necessary, and perhaps not even helpful, to decide
on the exact format of your report before you begin writing up. We make this point
because it is unrealistic to consider matters such as your aspirations to publish your
report before you have even identified your findings; but it is very important that
you do not leave all your reporting/writing until this stage. There is nothing so
intimidating than an imminent deadline and a blank page – even seasoned writers
can find this quite threatening.

There are certainly sections of the writing up that can and should be put together
before the final stages of the analysis are complete. You may feel you have plenty to
do at this stage and not see writing as your priority, but not only will this strategy
preclude writing blocks potentially occurring at a later stage, it will also help you
think though methodological issues and may perhaps expose weaknesses. It is often
at the stage when you set things down on paper, or rehearse a presentation, that
you begin to firm up your line on exactly what you are doing and ask yourself
challenging, and yet sometimes very obvious, questions about the methodology.

It is vitally important for the wellbeing of practitioner research, especially in

education, that teachers themselves, or teachers in collaboration with HEI
colleagues, should not only become involved in doing research but also be seen to
be involved in its dissemination. Teachers have traditionally been reluctant to
become involved in this final phase of the research process, and Somekh (1993:
176–9) outlines a number of reasons why it is especially important for them to make
their knowledge public:

 Public reporting prevents teacher knowledge from being forgotten.

 The process of reporting teachers’ knowledge increases the quality of reflection

on practice.
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 Through reporting research, teachers clarify their own position and bring influence
to bear on educational policy by means of rational augment.

 By reporting their research knowledge, teachers meet the requirements of

professional accountability.

 By making their research knowledge public, teachers can play a more active role
in teacher professional development and initial teacher education.

 By reporting their research knowledge, teachers reinforce their professional

self-confidence.

 By reporting their research knowledge, teachers improve the reputation of the

profession.

Legal and ethical considerations

It would perhaps be useful at this point to remind you briefly of issues relating to
legal and ethical considerations, specifically as they relate to confidentiality,
ownership and management of data, copyright and intellectual rights. These
matters can be tricky to negotiate and there is clearly potential for concerns relating
to them arising in a close-knit community such as a school. The situation is complex
and always subject to local individual agreements but, generally, you will always
have ‘intellectual rights’ over your ideas and writing (unless the research is carried
out for your employer and your contract of employment specifically waives your
right to this). If you publish in a journal or book, however, the copyright may reside
with the publisher. This means that, technically, if you wish to reproduce the article
elsewhere, you will have to ask their permission and they may, although it is
unlikely, ask for a small fee. If you were commissioned or awarded a grant to do
the research you may need to consult your contract – it could be that the funder
retains ownership of the data and copyright over the report. The funder may well
also want to vet other publications.

Complications in relation to copyright are extremely unlikely in small-scale

practitioner research but one thing you will need to be aware of is the new Data
Protection Act 1998 which came into effect in the UK in 2000. The new Act has
W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R ES E A R C H / 1 7 3

extended the scope of the previous Act in a number of ways. The regulations now
apply to non-computerised records – including microfilm, videotape and electronic
data, as well as computerised records. Individuals must be informed of the purposes
for which their personal data will be processed and to whom they may be disclosed.
Processing here means obtaining, recording or holding the information or data or
carrying out any operations on it, including alteration or disclosure. The processing
of sensitive personal data, including those relating to racial origin, religion, political
opinions, physical/mental health, etc., has been made subject to even tighter
control. Finally, the rights of data subjects have been extended, including their right
of access to the data and to have them erased or rectified, or to prevent them being
processed in certain circumstances. If you are in any doubt about the data you hold
and the way in which you intend to process them it is very important that you read
the regulations in detail (http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk) and perhaps take advice
on the matter. Research in the UK that involves access to any part of the National
Health Service in particular is now subject to very strict ethical protocols and
guidelines to which you have to adhere (see the examples at http://www.mmu.ac.uk/
rdu/).

Be particularly vigilant if your research includes questionnaire and interview-based

research involving confidential or sensitive issues, or contact with subjects who
might be regarded as dependent, such as children or persons with some form of
disablement. Additionally, if your data include any image-based records of clients,
especially children, this can be a very sensitive matter to negotiate. You will
obviously have requested permission to collect data before you embarked upon your
enterprise. You may not, however, have been specific at that point about exactly
what the data collection involved and what was to be done with them – or indeed
your plans and intentions may well have changed during the course of the project.
Go back to check exactly what parents/teachers/pupils have given their consent to.
Were you very clear when you sought permission what you were to going to do
with the data (e.g. restricted use of data within school, publication, publication of
video images, publication as still images, online images, etc.)? Remember that when
it comes to sanctioning such a request clearly the appropriate line manager (e.g.
headteacher) bears the ultimate responsibility.
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Writing for a report

It may be that the format of your research report is prescribed in detail and leaves
little to the imagination. If this is not the case then perhaps, as a starting position
for teachers, we could suggest the following possible format for a standard
four-page summary report which could be distributed around your school, other
schools in the LEA or posted on a website. You will find an example of a completed
report using a similar style of proforma in the resources for research.

TITLE

If possible make it short, snappy and lively with perhaps a more explicit subtitle
(e.g. ‘Fun and phonics: teaching reading to poor readers in Year 5’).

AIMS OF THE PROJECT

Include here the central aims of your research (which may include pedagogic as well
as research aspirations). They may change slightly over the course of your project
so don’t necessarily feel obliged to stick to the wording of the ones you identified
initially. If the aims have changed considerably and your work was externally funded
you may perhaps need to consider consulting the funder before making the decision
to change tack. In most cases all that will be necessary will be an admission that
your original plans changed and an explanation of why. This could be included in
the ‘reflections on the research’ section or at some other point.

FINDINGS

Include six or eight bullet points here. For example:

 Girls responded positively to a female role model.

 Parents reported pupils showed increased confidence and self-esteem. Staff

involved claimed to be more confident in teaching science.

 There was no evidence of raised numeracy levels as a result of the booster

programme. (Note: Don’t feel you must only report the positives.)
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This first section would be akin to an executive summary in a traditional report and
the remaining sections would fill in the detail regarding background and evidence
base.

BACKGROUND

Give a brief synopsis here of the background to the research inquiry. Describe the
educational situation in your department/class/year group. You will probably need
to include relevant details of the school context. Include information on the issue
of concern, the research question(s) and what led you to ask these particular
questions.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Outline what understandings (if any) you gleaned from an initial review of the
literature. Summarise other research projects that have been carried out in the area.
What were the findings? How did the review inform your understanding of the
situation? What are the practical, educational and political implications surrounding
the area in which you are researching?

THE PROJECT

Describe the planned developmental process (if there was one). Give details of the
intervention programme. Who was involved? When and where did it take place?

The research process

Describe the data collection process. How did you decide upon the sample – which
pupils and/or classes to track? Did you have any baseline data? What methods did
you use – interviews/questionnaires/video/observation? What issues arose for you
as a teacher doing research? Were there any conflicts/ethical issues between your
teacher and researcher selves?
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RESULTS

Include in this section the themes that emerged from the research, which will relate
to the findings/results outlined on page 1. A short paragraph focused upon each will
be sufficient. Make the results as interesting, meaningful and accessible as possible.
Don’t just stick to prose. Where possible include easy-to-interpret tables of data and
charts (if appropriate). Likewise, include vivid and detailed descriptions of
individual case-study data (if that is appropriate for your study). You may have
interviewed some children or got them to complete diaries, so include some short
quotations – they make compelling reading.

REFLECTION/EVALUATION ON THE RESEARCH

Did you carry out your research as planned or were there any unanticipated hitches?
Were there or may there in the future be any unanticipated outcomes? One of the
themes should most certainly be a reflection upon your/your colleagues’ increase in
knowledge, skills and understanding of curriculum and research matters and
professional development generally.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHERS/TEACHING

These might just expand on the findings and might include: suggestions or
reflections on what you would do differently next time; how you could further
improve your intervention programme; or the costs and benefits of getting involved
in teacher research.

IDEAS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Things you didn’t get round to; what other related avenues need investigating.

FURTHER READING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

It can be useful to separate these two. Aside from a conventional bibliography

teachers find a ‘further reading’ section helpful. This should not be extensive, just
three or four curriculum/research-focused articles that you found particularly
interesting or informative, with perhaps a brief sentence about each, similar to the
style we have adopted in this book.
W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R ES E A R C H / 1 7 7

Writing for publication

It may be that your aim is to publish an account of your research, in which case a
narrative form might be more appropriate than the report style outlined above.
Generally speaking, your options are threefold: academic journals, professional
journals or the popular press. The latter would include publishing in a newspaper
or commercial journal such as The Times Education Supplement or Child/Junior
Education. Sometimes such outlets pay for contributions and commission work, but
don’t give up the day job as the remuneration will not be substantial.

If your aspiration is to publish in professional or academic journals then clearly the

‘higher’ your ambition – in terms of publishing in prestige journals – the more
competitive you will find it. Generally speaking, any articles you submit to academic
journals will be subject to peer review and be more competitive to access than
professional journals that tend to be managed by editorial teams alone. Having said
that, a number of academic educational journals like to publish the work of teachers,
and may, like Educational Action Research, offer editorial support/advice to teachers
in preparing their articles for publication.

Identifying an appropriate journal to target is not always easy; it may be that there
are some specific to your area of interest, in which case searching the library
journals catalogue will help you to identify them. It is important, having located
them, to spend time flicking through recent issues on the library shelves to become
familiar with the house style, more of which below. If no outlets come to light
immediately you will have to do some research. This is particularly important in
the case of general education journals because they are a lot more difficult to typify;
the territory may be largely unfamiliar and you may not even recognise the names
of the contributors. Browse the shelves of the library, ask the journals librarian for
help, as they may be able to direct you, and look at the journals that are coming up
most frequently in the reading you are doing. Whilst browsing the library shelves
for possible outlets, try to get a sense of the house style of the journals; there may
well be some explicit information regarding what kind of articles the journal is
willing to consider and also the intended audience. What is most difficult is fixing
the standard of the journal. In order to attempt to do this, look at the quality of the
writing, the length of the articles and the eminence of the contributors. If they are
all professors from top-flight universities perhaps you should not target it for your
first attempt at publication.
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Apart from what you will glean from scanning the articles themselves, at the front
or the back of the journals you will find a page of information for authors. This will
vary greatly in its comprehensiveness. There will always be basic information such
as formatting details for the typescript like spacing, style of references, need for an
abstract, key words, preferred length, etc. There will most likely be, as we
mentioned, some statement relating to the scope of articles the journal accepts and
the submission and review procedures. Be advised of the time the review process
sometimes takes. This can commonly be six months, although one top general
education journal pledges to give a decision within six weeks. The proportion of
articles rejected by some journals can be considerable, as can the time to publication
once the article has been accepted. These measures generally increase with the
prestige of the journal; the first can vary from virtually none rejected to as many as
90% rejected and the latter from almost immediate publication to well over a year.

Equally well, the nature of the content of the articles accepted by journals varies.
For many professional journals, and some less prestigious academic referred
journals, an interesting, well written and structured, relatively straightforward
account of the methodology and findings will be acceptable. As a general rule a
top-level academic referred journal will, apart from the obvious relevance/interest
for the readership and a sound empirical base, be looking for a research report with
either an original theoretical perspective or an illuminative analytical framework
(and, of course, quality in all other respects).

Using literature
We considered in Chapter 5 four different types of literature that you may want to
use in your research and as a consequence perhaps cite in your writing: research
reports, methodological texts, theoretical accounts and literary works. In a simple
research report, such as the one outlined above, a very limited amount of literature
would characteristically be cited and, in the main, it would detail the findings of
previous research in the area. One of the central characteristics that differentiate
professional, pedagogic and academic modes of writing is the use of literature. As
a very general rule the more prestigious the journal, the more extensive the
literature bases of the articles it publishes. You would not overall, however, expect
to find even the more erudite of articles referenced as extensively as pedagogic
writing, such as an academic thesis.
W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R ES E A R C H / 1 7 9

Characteristically, your article would begin with a review of the literature relating
to the area. There is no need to leave this to the writing-up stage to complete; we
suggested in Chapter 5 that as you read articles and books you should be making
notes about the central features of the methodology/findings/theoretical argument,
etc. It is from these notes that you will be able to construct a review of the literature
relating to the area of your interest. Literature can also be used to effect if it is
threaded through as an integral part of the account rather than all presented in an
initial review. Key quotations could be employed throughout to buttress the
argument or you could develop a dialogue between two opposing perspectives from
the literature, perhaps resolving the dilemma in a ‘third way’ of your making.

We recommended in Chapter 5 ways in which you could identify appropriate

quotations and included in the resources for research are instructions as to how you
should cite them in the text and reference them in the bibliography. Quotations, if
they are small, can be put in inverted commas and inserted in the text but, as a rule
of thumb, if they are about four lines/forty words in length it is customary to indent
them. In order to keep the quotation brief you may need to cut phrases/sentences
from it, in which case you should replace them with ellipses.

An alternative approach to using literature involves taking a particular theoretical

framework as a lens through which to read the data. Be imaginative in your search
for sources of ideas: they do not have to be that original, just used in a different
context for a different audience.

Illustration: taking a particular

theoretical framework
Foucault has a lot to say about the way that ‘discourses’ (e.g. OFSTED, National Numeracy
Strategy) and power within society position people in particular ways. Jones and Brown
(2001: 719) use Foucault’s ideas to effect when interpreting play activity in a
‘kitchen homebase’ in a nursery classroom:

the girls were not willing to be passive participants in the play. Melissa, for example,
tries to take some of the dough that the boys had been ‘cooking’ with. This prompts
1 8 0 / W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G YO U R R ES E A R C H

Nathan to declare: ‘No they’re not cooked.’ Furthermore, he uses a loud and firm
voice and in doing so perhaps lends authority to his role as ‘cook’. His tone of
voice reminds the children, particularly the girls, that as cook it is he who has the
knowledge and thus the power to decide when the pies are cooked.

Another example would be McNamara et al. (2002) who employed a contemporary

anthropological lens to talk about initial teacher training in England. They saw it
not as a linear progression but as a complex process of ‘in-between-ness’ that
involved the performance of symbolic acts and the undertaking of ‘ritual ordeals’.
In particular, the article explored the most recently imposed ‘ritual ordeal’, the
Numeracy Skills Test.

Illustration: using an anthropological

lens
A trainee teacher describes how she prepared herself physically and psychologically for
the day ahead. This is followed by the authors’ reflections:

It was just . . . getting up in the morning, getting dressed, putting on something

[so] that I looked like somebody, doing my hair and then struggling with the books
and the briefcase and all the things that I need for the day . . . and then from
that point when they came in, in the morning and said good morning and I took
the register, that’s when I felt like a teacher (final year trainee).

Here we have examples of the symbols that signify teacher status. The sartorial
appearance of the ceremonial robes: getting dressed to look like ‘somebody’, ‘doing
my hair’. The canticles and responses prescribed in the rites: verbal refrains
associated with teaching/learning behaviours such as ‘good morning everyone’,
‘good morning Miss Smith’. The wielding of instruments of surveillance such as
‘taking the register’ and, finally, ‘books’ and ‘briefcase’: the symbols of power and
knowledge often subsumed in myth/ritual (McNamara et al., 2002: 871).
W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R ES E A R C H / 1 8 1

The process of writing

Writing is a very personal pursuit and being prescriptive can be difficult, although
Chesebro (1993) displayed no such reluctance in his article, ‘How to get published’.
He commenced his list of recommendations with ‘write’, making the case that, in
order to be published, it is necessary to engage in certain physical behaviours and, in
particular, writing: words, sentences, paragraphs and pages. This advice is not as
trite as it may seem – as you will remember we strongly recommended that you
should not wait until your project is done and dusted to begin writing up. Write
continuously from the outset: notes about your methods, readings, diary entries,
musings, quotes, data, etc., will be a sound foundation on which to start constructing
your report or article. Chapter 6, you will recall, gave you some suggestions about
the writing of research diaries. Chesebro recommends devising a ‘rigorous writing
schedule’ and, indeed, many writers (and academics) would claim that they need to
set aside quality time of considerable length to make any progress, whilst others can
make do quite adequately with a snatched hour or so here and there.

‘Be willing to be criticised’ is another of Chesebro’s tenets and, although we would

not express it in such stark terms, it is an issue that requires consideration. If you
submit an article for publication you will receive feedback, which sometimes can be
quite harsh and perhaps painful (even when the reviewer likes it!). Generally
speaking the more prestigious a journal you aim for, the more rigorous the review
process. Articles submitted to professional journals are not formally peer reviewed
– a process that defines academic journals – but they are subjected to editorial
scrutiny, to a greater or lesser degree. So when you submit your writing do so with
the mindset that it is just ‘another draft’; don’t get so attached to each comma and
apostrophe that you can’t bear even to think about restructuring it for resubmission.
Although a few people write fluently in perfectly formed sentences, most writers go
through an extensive process of drafting and redrafting before they attain a
satisfactory product. Looking on the positive side, peer reviews offer valuable
personal advice on writing style, research methodology, literature, etc., but don’t be
too surprised if, in the case of two reviewers, they completely disagree.

The important message to take from this is don’t be put off: even the most highly
acclaimed academics have their work roundly condemned from time to time; the
criticism is not about you, it is about the writing, so don’t take it personally. Indeed,
what we are going to suggest next is perhaps more threatening: ask a friend or
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colleague to read your work in its early drafts and to give you some informal
feedback. Ask for general comments but also be specific on the features of the
writing that you want feedback on. We talked in Chapter 7 about using your critical
community during the earlier phases of the research and it is just as important at
this stage to use that relationship.

Pen-portraits: an alternative genre of writing

We discussed pen-portraits as an analytical tool in Chapter 8 and there are many
reasons why they are an attractive and useful form of data management and
reporting. This is particularly so in your situation as a practitioner, perhaps
reporting on practices within your own institution and/or classroom. The approach
involves using data from semi-structured interviews with teachers, or perhaps
pupils, to produce a vignette of a particular individual in respect to a specific aspect
of his or her biography or role. The abridged pen-portrait below is one developed
as part of a longitudinal study of trainee teachers that followed them from entry
into the course to their first year in teaching.

Illustration: mathematics – a victory

narrative fought in three phases?
For 19-year-old Helen school mathematics was about ‘numbers and how they work’. It
required very particular attributes: ‘you had to be committed . . . to sit there and work out
the problems . . . have patience to not give up half way through.’ Helen saw the pursuit
of victory as a lonely and demanding personal crusade: ‘I like a place where I can get
somewhere on my own, and just keep going until I get there . . . you’ve got to be able to
work it out on your own because if someone does it for you, you might be able to get
the answer but you don’t know how you got there.’

Junior school mathematics ‘was easy, there was no algebra and calculators with lots of
buttons . . . it was just plain, simple text books . . . you progressed through to the next level
and wanted to get better because you would get a better colour book than your friend
W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R ES E A R C H / 1 8 3

had’. The competition didn’t always go Helen’s way, however. There had been at least one
major defeat in these early days: Helen ‘could never get the hang of’ tables which ‘everyone
else used to do really fast’. It was a failing that she attributed to lack of effort on her part.

Secondary school saw the emergence of the ‘scientific calculator’ and ‘scary words’, like
‘sine’ and ‘cosine’. Salvation was at hand, however, in the form of a really good mathematics
teacher who ‘always explained everything very clearly and took time if you couldn’t do it
to go over it step by step’. Victory was again assured: ‘you tackled and you understood
it, you could just do exercise after exercise and get them all right and it was a good
feeling being able to do it.’ The ‘working out was important’ but getting the ‘right answer
was the best thing, getting the whole exercise right was really good’. Helen again used
to ‘like maths a lot’, even ‘algebra . . . shocking, but I felt really good’.

That’s not to say there weren’t still minor skirmishes, ‘times when I just couldn’t work out
how to get what x equalled and when you went wrong and you’d done a whole, long
sum and you get a different answer to everyone else and you just can’t understand where
you went wrong’. Disillusionment set in, however, when Helen failed to get her coveted
grade A at GCSE; she had ‘thought she was really good’ and even ‘considered doing it to
A level’. But now Helen was embarking upon a new phase of the campaign, that of
becoming a teacher of mathematics.

The idea of fictionalising pen-portraits is less well established; it is based on

methodological approaches developed by Bolton (1994) and Campbell and Kane
(1998). We discussed in Chapter 8 how analysis of interviews of teachers or pupils
could be achieved with a view to developing a set of ideal typical characters that are
representative of the amalgams of characteristics, views, opinions and experiences
of the interviewees. By creating fictional characters in this way, it is possible to use
verbatim reports and anecdotes from a number of different sources to produce
lively, authentic accounts to facilitate easy access to the research data. One major
advantage of fictional pen-portraits is that they maintain the anonymity of
individuals; even in a relatively large secondary school this may be an issue – for
example, it would be quite common for there to be only one female religious
education teacher. An abridged version of a fictional pen-portrait, developed as part
of a baseline survey of CPD in which the authors were involved, is shown below.
It concerns Julia, who is aged 30 and has been teaching in a small rural secondary
school for four years.
1 8 4 / W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G YO U R R ES E A R C H

Illustration: a baseline survey of CPD

CPD to me is about advancing my skills, keeping up to date with current
developments, finding new ways of teaching, using resources. I’ve been here four years.
I’m the history department basically. I started off in PR then worked with adults with learning
difficulties for about three years, that’s what got me interested in teaching really. I try to
keep updated but don’t go on that many courses, the problem is time really, with all the
stuff you have to get on with every day. And the government ICT training has annoyed
me, it was a complete and utter waste of time. Compared for example with one ICT
course I went on and what made that great was that he was a historian and a classroom
teacher you could use it with the children. You felt you had learnt something new, and
it wasn’t just ‘sharing ideas’ – that’s another thing that annoys me there was one
history course that was absolutely appalling no ideas, no materials. I feel very strongly
that someone delivering a course shouldn’t be relying on the audience to be part of the
delivery.

The best training days are the ones when you have time to prepare or go on the net,
there’s so much good stuff there. We also had OFSTED a couple of years ago and the
training was all about getting through, which in all fairness focused me into making sure
I was on target. But it’s difficult for me on my own, in a small school like this. I think it’s a
lot better in maths because they seem to have more going on there are more of a close-knit
community. I have to rely on things like the history group which meets once a term in the
LEA. Also I had a student this term and she’s been good, bringing ideas.

What’s interesting is that the CPD co-ordinator has been pretty good when I’ve asked
about going on courses, but he’s never come to me with any suggestions. Within this
school I feel very much if you’re interested that’s fine but it’s another question whether
they are interested in you. So it’s not that management aren’t supportive when you ask for
something but you need extra responsibilities at my level to develop your management
skills and there’s not much room for development for me at the moment. And to be
honest I’m not prepared to lose out on having a life . . . in fact I’m not really sure I will
stay with the job.
W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R ES E A R C H / 1 8 5

Such materials, apart from being a vehicle through which to report research, were
planned in this project as a professional development resource. They were intended
to stimulate discussion of CPD between heads, CPD co-ordinators and teachers, to
help them understand the complexity of the dynamic relationship between factors
such as school culture and structures, national/school priorities, performance
management, planned career development, etc. Using this approach can allow the
voices of staff to be heard anonymously, and in a non-confrontational way, through
issues rather than personalities. Some of the issues for discussion arising from the
vignette above might relate to themes such as:

 Time and, implicitly, workload – Julia felt too busy to engage in CPD.

 Perceptions of CPD – Julia had a traditional notion of CPD as courses/conferences,

etc.

 Key features of successful CPD – for Julia this was applicability in the classroom.

 Key features of unsuccessful CPD – for Julia this was ‘sharing ideas’ courses.

 ‘Training’ – ICT training got a particularly bad press.

 School culture – Julia as the only history teacher in the school felt isolated.

 Watching and talking with colleagues – Julia had little opportunity.

 School management of CPD – Julia felt the co-ordinator was not proactive enough
in providing systematically planned opportunities.

 Personal career management – Julia sees no clear career pathway. It is hard work
and frustrating and she doesn’t know if the rewards are sufficient.

Concluding remarks
In this chapter, we have considered at length some of the genres of writing you may
adopt when reporting your research and identified some key issues with regard to
the use of literature, the writing process itself and getting published. As our journey
through the processes and practices of practitioner research draws to a close we will
1 8 6 / W R I T I N G U P, R E P O RT I N G & P U B L I S H I N G YO U R R ES E A R C H

move on to consider the final stages of (self-) evaluation and dissemination. Writing
up, and even publishing, is not synonymous with dissemination although it is well
on the way. You may consider if you get as far as writing up, as we very much hope
you will, that your work is done – that you have completed your academic
dissertation and received your award, or submitted the report on research you were
commissioned to do for your employer. Yet your work may have implications for
others and you will undoubtedly have expended a lot of time and effort on it, too
much to allow it to be wasted! You need to ensure that your work gets an airing;
you cannot rely upon the people that need to know finding out about it, you must
be proactive in the dissemination process. Additionally, as we mentined earlier, it is
often only when you distance yourself from your work by articulating it to others,
or writing things down, that you begin to evaluate what you have done – ask
yourself those difficult questions! In the final chapter, we shall now consider these
issues in more detail.

Further reading
Altrichter, H., Posh, P. and Somekh, B. (1993) Teachers Investigate their Work.
London: Routledge.

A very useful guide to action research methods for beginning researchers in

education and the social sciences. In particular, it has a useful chapter on ‘Making
teachers’ knowledge public’.

Bell, J. (1999) Doing your Research Project. Buckingham: Open University Press.
This immensely popular research methods reader again contains a useful chapter
on ‘Writing the report’.

Campbell, A. and Kane, I. (1998) School-based Teacher Education: Telling Tales from a
Fictional Primary School. London: David Fulton.
 11 Evaluating and Disseminating
Research
OVERVIEW

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, Lawrence Stenhouse (1975) defined research as

‘systematic inquiry made public’. The last two words of this definition indicate the
importance of disseminating research. The ostensible process for making research
public is that of peer review or evaluation by submitting findings either orally or in
print through publication. It is only in the last 30 or so years that educational
research has had substantial funding and has therefore been more widely reported
in the public domain. It is really only in the last ten or so years that practitioner
researchers have had opportunity to do so. It follows, therefore, that practitioner
researchers are fairly new to dissemination and the processes of peer review and
evaluation. Thus teacher researchers should seize every opportunity to share
practice and developments with other practitioners and to influence and shape
policy at classroom, school, local and national and international levels.

The professional agenda

From the outset of the design of a research topic or project, it is useful to consider
the opportunities for evaluation and dissemination in order to prepare strategies.
Mortimore (1991: 228) provides a useful list to consider before publication, some
of which will be pertinent to practitioner researchers and the arena in which they
wish to disseminate. He advises early identification of opportunities; awareness of
and preparation for controversies which may arise from the findings; consultation
with ‘stakeholders’ in the research; and recommends the use of an advisory group
or critical community.

Before disseminating one’s research, one should evaluate that research. The level of
sophistication of the evaluation will depend on the stage of the research. In the early
1 8 8 / E VAL UATI N G AN D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H

stages evaluation may be tentative. Towards the end things should have hardened
up. Evaluating research provides evidence of rigour, reliability and transparency of
approach. There is a variety of ways ranging from self-evaluation and peer
evaluation to more formal external evaluation processes undertaken by funding
bodies or councils or by people from other institutions, such as universities. In
consideration of self-evaluation and monitoring of small-scale practitioner research
projects, a number of the following ideas should help and support researchers and
are well worth considering.

The evaluation and dissemination that you are being urged to undertake should be
honest about disasters and modest about triumphs. It should share doubts and
inconsistencies and recognise ambivalences. At its freshest it will contain anecdotes
told against oneself. Above all, as practitioner engagement it will, hopefully, draw
frequently upon material that reveals the actions and responses of children and
participants woven in and out. Teachers will most certainly be interested in how the
pupils have responded, so make sure the evaluation and dissemination recognise and
do not lose sight of why the research is being undertaken and the perspectives of
the pupils.

Care must be taken to make the processes of evaluation and dissemination accessible
in two ways. It should be comprehensible in respect of the language used: resist the
temptation to parade a mastery of new research jargon that you might have picked
up. It should also be published where teachers can hear it, read it and find it. It is
an irony of some traditional research that, although it may be about teachers’
practice or children’s performance and published in journals or forums of albeit high
standing, it is rarely visited by teachers themselves. Practitioner research hopefully
brings with it a new philosophy of dissemination. Therefore, please note the ‘health
warning’ before proceeding to consider the practicalities of dissemination.

If you are still in doubt about how to adopt a suitable tone or find a suitable
mode of presentation, look inwards. All evaluation should start with the ‘self’.
What sort of things do you and your colleagues like to hear about? Remember
these need not be at the heart of your research. They could quite simply be
interesting by-products but will make your presentations, in whatever form, more
living and real.

You could certainly come up with your own list but it may be useful to draw upon
the Campbell and Jacques (2003) study of teachers setting out their expectations
 E VA LUATI N G A N D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H / 1 8 9

and subsequently reporting and evaluating their interim findings. This small group
of 19 teachers had expectations of improvement in pupil performance, a generic
term with several subcategories of meaning.

Slightly less than half the teachers in the study expected an improvement in pupil
behaviour and in pupil collaborative skills. About a quarter expected their pupils to
have a better understanding of the learning process and to acquire specific
knowledge or skills. A small number of teachers expected improvement in
communication skills or a change in pupil attitude to the subjects they were being
taught.

Other individual responses from teachers about impact on pupils identified the
following expectations:

 An improvement in concentration.

 Longer time to be spent on task.

 Improved access to the curriculum.

 Greater pupil responsibility for their own behaviour.

 Increased pupil awareness and self-evaluation.

From the above list and from the detail of the responses, it was evident that most
teachers responding expected that the research project would impact on pupils in
some or all of the following ways: more engagement in learning; higher achieve-
ment in the subject; and an increase in subject knowledge with some impact on
social and learning skills. Many of the teachers were expressing hopes and
aspirations because they were not exactly certain what really to expect: they
anticipated an upward turn in everything rather than focused outcomes relating to
their particular research.

That is the road on which these practitioner researchers set out. It constitutes, we
would argue, an ‘agenda of interest’ which you could bear in mind when telling your
own story. It is worth repeating that these issues may be tangential to your research,
but helpful reminders to you of the sorts of things that engage an audience of
teachers. Many will say ‘Well that’s all very well, but what actually happened?’ This
is where honesty of reporting matters, and presenters win their audiences through
1 9 0 / E VAL UATI N G AN D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H

triumphs of serendipity. Again we have an ‘agenda of interest’, perhaps an even

more interesting one. The majority of teachers in the study reported improvement
in teaching as follows:

 A better clarity of what was being taught.

 More pupil-centred planning for teaching.

 Focused evaluation.

 More appropriate classroom routines.

 Being more aware of the use of praise.

 Giving pupils more time to think.

 Developing more focused teaching strategies.

 Having more specific objectives and targets for teaching.

 Making more careful observations of pupils.

 Enabling reflection and questioning about teaching.

 Adapting and changing teaching strategies and trying different ones.

A quarter of teachers in the study reported improvements in a better team spirit in

school and more opportunities for learning about learning. Possibly they were
thinking of their own team spirit. A smaller number of teachers reported outcomes
which were more specific and would not constitute an ‘agenda of interest’.

About a third of teachers in the study reported a rise in pupil attainment and an
increase in pupils’ perceptions of their own skills and self-awareness. Evaluation
indicated that it had been more difficult than first imagined to find real evidence of
the raising of pupil achievement.

Having spent some time on what we would argue is a ‘professional agenda’ that you
should always have as a frame of reference when evaluating and subsequently
disseminating, it is now time to look more closely at the mechanics.
 E VA LUATI N G A N D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H / 1 9 1

The mechanics of evaluation

Evaluation of research should report honestly on progress and whether the research
has met its initial aims and objectives. It should address the effectiveness, worth or
value of the research project. It may be timely to revisit some aspects of qualitative
and quantitative issues for discussion. Not all research seeks to measure outcomes or
phenomena. It may be appropriate to illustrate or illuminate outcomes or phenom-
ena for interpretation or for interrogation by the profession or critical community
in order to further the knowledge or understanding in the area of research.

The evaluation of your research might answer some of the following questions:

 What are understood to be the outcomes of the research?

 How do these relate to the aims and/or objectives of the research?

 What can be identified as the effectiveness, impact or influence of the research?

 How can the effectiveness, impact or influence be illuminated, illustrated or

measured?

 Who has critically appraised the research?

 How has this critical appraisal been integrated into the research process?

In order to self-monitor and self-evaluate, a number of strategies can be employed.

Learning aid: self-monitoring and

self-evaluation
The seven most common strategies for self-monitoring and self-evaluation:

1. The keeping of a research diary that documents the conduct of the research
project in dated entries is, as we have explained earlier, a key tool for your
1 9 2 / E VAL UATI N G AN D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H

1. research. One of the matters you should keep under close scrutiny is the
consideration of whether the project has kept to the initial brief. If not, why not?

2. The keeping of a log of the changes, dilemmas and problems and the resolution
of these will also help your evaluation. There should be plenty of scope here
for the ‘warts and all’ approach advocated earlier.

3. Where possible give regular, brief, oral or written interim reports on the progress
towards objectives to your mentor, tutor or critical friend. Remember the concept
of critical friend is an intellectual concept to be explored in detail (see Chapter
7) rather than a social diversion.

4. You should give consideration regularly to whether sufficient, relevant and

appropriate literature has been consulted. Chapter 5 gives advice on how to
consult and review literature to support and enhance your argument and case.

5. Be sure to review regularly your research methods and whether they are
appropriate for the study. Do not remain locked into the predetermined pattern
simply because that is what you committed yourself to in the beginning.
Flexibility is a key feature of research.

6. As findings emerge and as you collect data, give consideration as to whether

the data you are acquiring are robust and of good quality.

7. Try to construct, either by oneself or with a critical friend or community, a set

of searching questions for evaluation purposes.

Certainly for practitioner research, good evaluation practice should contain an

element of peer evaluation. When thinking about peer evaluation there are a
number of ways of approaching the involvement of others. In more informal
situations the following strategies would contribute to, or make use of, peer
evaluation. Consider enlisting one of the following:

 A critical friend.

 A critical community group.

 A colleague or co-researcher in own or other school or LEA.

 E VA LUATI N G A N D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H / 1 9 3

 A local adviser or advisory teacher.

 A mentor or tutor at university if enrolled on a course or research degree or being

mentored.

 A network contact from Classroom Action Research (CARN) or a local variety set
up by practitioner researchers.

The value of having a peer involved in evaluation is dependent upon his or her
ability to connect with the topic or area being researched. Collegial exchange and
discussion of the detail of a project enable concrete and precise language to be used
and shared. Researchers may choose a peer with specialist knowledge of their area
in order to gain more depth in their study. Alternatively, a person who has little
knowledge of the area but who is an experienced researcher may offer different
viewpoints and perspectives on the research in progress. Checking out the research
with others can significantly enhance the process and the findings. However, as in
the discussion in Chapter 7 on critical friendship, peer scrutiny and collaboration,
steps have to be taken to ensure that undue influence is not exerted on the
researcher and the research project by peer evaluators.

The role of the peer evaluator could be to undertake some of the following:

 Asking questions about the research process and progress.

 Acting as a ‘sounding board’ for developments.

 Being a source of questions about why certain decisions have been taken.

 Providing feedback on research plans and interim reports.

 Liasing with other researchers and projects which could facilitate comparison.

 Providing a different perspective to challenge thinking and actions.

The degree of informality in the context of monitoring and evaluation will be

dependent on the style, scale and scope of the research being undertaken and the
relationships formed between researcher and peer evaluator. Often in small-scale
practitioner research projects, the pattern is for informal arrangements. Care should
be taken to ensure that the relationship does not become too cosy and that there is
sufficient challenge in the evaluative exchanges and interactions as well as support.
1 9 4 / E VAL UATI N G AN D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H

It would be as easy to conduct this peer review by email, telephone and fax, or
through a discussion room on a website, as it would be to meet on a regular basis.
Many networks already exist and are on the increase as initiatives such as
educational action zones, Excellence in Cities, Beacon schools and training,
technology and specialist schools all develop and start to look for partners and peers
to share their ideas with and to help them develop and evaluate their plans.

More formal types of peer review could be obtained through publication of

‘research in progress’ for in-house or professional journals. There is a clear
difference between the two. In-house journals are generally much less formal and
often anxious for copy. The ‘house’ you are in might be no more than your own
school, possibly your local cluster. It might be a regular LEA bulletin. Most
universities have scope for publishing details of local teachers’ work, particularly if
those teachers are registered on courses at advanced level.

However, a professional journal is more formal, but not normally to the level of
formality of needing academic ‘referees’. Where referees are used, good practice is to
feed back their comments and these naturally help to serve as evaluatory comments.
Alternatively, an editorial board may give evaluative feedback. Responses from peers
should be welcomed. Do not shy away from being put in a position of being
criticised. Provided you read the criticism as constructive, it should always help.

Another approach is the presentation of interim findings or research in progress at

seminars for discussion and debate. Once again, do not be shy about seeking and
finding such opportunities. Your own staffroom is probably as good a place to start as
any. Provided you do not concentrate on telling people how clever you are (see earlier
warning) there is every chance of a sympathetic hearing. Other potential sources of
seminar presentations will again be clusters, networks, LEAs and local universities.

It can hardly be overstressed how important it is that you share your research work.
Disseminating your research has become very much more significant as increasing
numbers of practitioners are engaging in classroom and school-based research.
There is also more recognition of the connection between action research and
practitioner research and professional development and the need to learn from others
who have successfully harnessed research to promote professional development.

However, as we explained earlier, engaging in research into your own practice and
professional development is a risky business and can mean exposure of your
 E VA LUATI N G A N D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H / 1 9 5

unsuccessful initiatives as well as the successful ones. This said, we agree with Elliott’s
(1991) view that early, practitioner action research projects like the Humanities
Curriculum Project, the Ford Teaching Project and the Teacher–Student Interaction
and the Quality of Learning Project significantly enhanced the professional
development of the teachers involved in them. This was especially true where teachers
were ‘in the lead’ and had ownership of the design and conduct of the research and
when they were able to tolerate the inevitable loss of self-esteem when being observed
and researched by colleagues. Elliott (1991: 35) maintains that: ‘in order to adopt an
objective attitude to their practice, teachers need to be able to tolerate the existence of
gaps between their aspirations and practice, with a consequent lowering of their
self-esteem.’ More recently, Campbell (2002), in her exploration of research and the
professional self, found that teachers’ participation in a research project: ‘had had a
significant effect on their professional lives . . . For some it has meant a long hard slog
to see the light at the end of the tunnel; for others while not quite equating to a
‘‘Damascus’’ type of experience, it has certainly resulted in enlightenment.’

The culture in schools, in groups of schools, in educational action zones and similar
project and initiative groupings is changing to be more collaborative and collegial,
as evidenced by Day (1999: 175) who refers to ‘networking through partnerships’
as an important learning mode, and can also be seen in the proliferation of action
learning sets or groups in schools. The recent English CPD Strategy (2001)
promoted ‘schools as learning communities’ and provided opportunities for teachers
to become funded researchers. Explicit in this strategy is the emphasis on
dissemination of good practice through collaboration and collegial exchange.

Learning aid: disseminating good

practice
You may find it helpful to think that ways of disseminating practitioner research at various
levels can be achieved through a ‘ripple effect’. You might like to think of it as follows:

 Tell the staff/your department via an oral presentation.

 Develop or contribute to a school newsletter.

1 9 6 / E VAL UATI N G AN D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H

 Circulate a written account to staff.

 Tell other schools in your cluster/network in similar ways.

 Inform your LEA, and maybe get them to provide a forum for you and others
like you.

 Tell your local subject association/professional group or professional association,

many of whom have individuals with issue and subject development and research
personnel and interests. Give an oral or written report or write an article.

 Tell the wider versions of these associations (for example, submit an article to
History Today or Nursery World).

 You could use the medium of The Times Educational Supplement by writing a
letter or short article, with a contact/email address for correspondence.

So far we have given consideration to issues of disseminating whilst remaining safely

within a practitioner/professional context. You could be more ambitious. You could
go beyond professional journals and submit an article to a nationally refereed
journal. A refereed journal has a set of guidelines for potential contributors that
state the conventions and ‘rules’ for submission of articles. Examples can be found,
amongst many others, in the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ), the
Education Action Research Journal (EARJ) or the European Educational Research
Association Journal. The editor or editorial board (mainly UK based) will send
submissions to experienced people in the research area who will referee them – that
is, read them and assess their quality and recommend whether the articles should
be accepted as they stand, or amended in some minor or major way for
resubmission, or whether they should be rejected. It would be sensible to seek some
advice from university tutors or other researchers who have published in these
journals or to seek mentoring support if you are unfamiliar with procedures. A
useful strategy is to team up with someone else. Co-writing and joint publication
between new and experienced researchers are an option to explore, especially if you
are engaged in a master’s or research degree programme.

Most universities run seminar programmes for researchers and these can be useful
meeting places for gaining advice or finding research partners. People at such
 E VA LUATI N G A N D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H / 1 9 7

seminars can explain to you what opportunities exist to publish or present. So be

bold. After all, as a practitioner you are already deeply into disseminating as part
and parcel of your practice. Present a paper to a conference, either individually or,
as described above, in collaboration with a colleague researching in the same area,
or with a mentor or more experienced researcher. There are many conferences
ranging from professional, subject conferences to international, wide-ranging
gatherings. As with journals, some conferences are refereed and select papers against
rigorous assessment criteria but others favour a wider participation approach.
Conference organisers and committees produce guidelines for presenters which
help you to write a paper that would be acceptable (for conference information, see:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol).

By now you are an experienced disseminator. You have also discovered that if you
have something to say there are people who wish to pay attention. Your morale is
high, so seek to progress further. Tell the wider world via international journals.
Writing for an international audience requires a different perspective from writing
for a local or national one. An international journal will have an editorial board that
comprises international experts in the field covered by the journal and the standard
of research will need to meet very rigorous and high-level criteria and, of course,
the research will have to be of interest to an international audience. Much inquiry
about journals and the type of articles previously published would be necessary
before submission. However, once again, support, mentoring and co-writing are
strategies that could prove to be useful at this stage. Times are changing too.
Whereas international journals have largely been forums for traditional research
rather than practitioner research, Educational Action Research is an international
journal that wishes to publish more practitioner research in the future.

Perhaps it is time to come down from the rarefied academic heights and return to
more mundane practicalities. Much of what has been alluded to lies within
established procedures. Yet new traditions are emerging by which you can tell
people about your research.

Tell the Internet through the school website, LEA website, mentoring university
website, the DfES research website (or even your own website). Tell your mentoring
or tutoring university organisation through their website, action research networks,
research forums, conferences, in-house journals, dissertations or assignments.
Search out like-minded people on the Internet, through the TES, through your
neighbouring university and through correspondence.
1 9 8 / E VAL UATI N G AN D D I SS EM I N ATI N G R ES E A RC H

Make a video or CD-ROM. Naturally it helps if your material is visually

stimulating. Moreover, there is expense involved but perhaps you have planned,
have been well informed and have obtained funds which would help you fund the
making of CD-ROMs and video tapes. Find opportunities for poster sessions. Many
conferences invite less experienced researchers to present a poster for informal
discussion. These sessions provide a supportive environment for beginner re-
searchers. A poster is constructed which summarises the research you are doing and
identifies some discussion points and issues. This you display in some conference
assembly point or thoroughfare. Most of the time you stand by it and engage in
discussion with interested colleagues as they pass by.

Concluding remarks
As we noted earlier, there is a tendency for much practitioner research, but
especially small-scale action research which is designed to improve an individual’s
practice, not to see the light of day. This is perhaps understandable, but we believe
it is important that even research which is highly specific to a particular situation
should still at least be shared within the wider context that provides a setting for
that situation. It is for that reason that we close our contribution to this book by
suggesting ways in which you might wish to share your findings, if only to
encourage others to carry out research which we believe to be absolutely necessary
for practice to develop in ways that are informed by research, rather than to ossify
into a kind of unthinking, unreflective behaviour which, over time, will lose
whatever force it once had.
Resources for Research

Harvard referencing: questions and answers

As a rule of thumb you should bear in mind that your aim is to give the readers the
information they will need to find for themselves all the quotations and references that
you have used. Note that you can use either underlining or italics (as here) but not both.

1. How do I make reference to a quotation from a book? In your essay you would
write:

(Austin, 1955: 26)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Austin, J.L. (1955) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. How do I make reference to a quotation from an article in a journal where there

are more than two authors? In your essay you would write:

(Cooper et al., 1977: 248)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Cooper, W.E., Eimas, R.D. and Corbitt, J.D. (1977) ‘Some properties of linguistic
feature detectors’, Perceptions and Psychophysics, 13(2): 247–52.

3. How do I make reference to an article in an edited collection of papers? In your

essay you would write

(Hirst, 1970: 113)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Hirst, P.H. (1970) ‘What is teaching?’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 13(1)

(reprinted in his edited Knowledge and the Curriculum, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1974, 101–15).
2 0 0 / R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H

4. How do I make reference to a quotation (for example, from Handy) that I have
found in another source (for example, in Slee) but have not read in the original
myself? In your essay you would write:

(Handy, 1989, cited in Slee, 1992: 89)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Handy, C. (1989) ‘Missing ingredients’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 10

March: 26 (cited in Slee, P. (1992) ‘Apocalypse now? Where will higher
education go in the twenty-first century?’, in P.W.G. Wright (ed.) (1990) Industry
and Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press, 88–92).

5. How do I make reference to an anonymous report? In your essay you would

write:

(Anon, 1991: 39)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Anon (1991) Singapore Polytechnic FY 91 Annual Report. Singapore: Singapore

Polytechnic Press.

6. How do I make reference to quotations from someone who has written two
pieces in one year (for example, in a newspaper), especially in the case of ‘Anon’?
In your essay you would write:

(Anon, 1993a: 30)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Anon (1993a) ‘Time for government to license and control education agencies’, The
Straits Times, 10 April: 30.

Later you might have to cite another piece from the same paper, so you would have
to write in your essay:

(Anon, 1993b: 30)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Anon (1993b) ‘What if Caucasian who punched me and damaged car leaves the
country?’, The Straits Times, 10 April: 30.
 R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H / 2 0 1

Notice that in your references you have to list the ‘Anons’ in chronological order
so that Anon (1991) will come before Anon (1993a). The same applies to a named
author who might have published more than one piece in his or her lifetime, so you
would also put their publications in chronological order.

7. How do I make reference to a quotation from an essay or dissertation which has

not been published? In your essay you would write:

(Roche, 1992: 1)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Roche, C. (1992) ‘My own reflection on learning.’ Unpublished paper for the
Diploma/MEd course, Sheffield University and Singapore Polytechnic, 11
December.

8. How do I make reference to material in the modules? In your essay you would
write:

(Clough, 1992: 20)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Clough, P. (1992) ‘My own learning’, Module 1, Unit 2, Understanding Learning and
the Learner. Sheffield: Sheffield University Division of Education Press, 10–20.

9. How do I make reference to a source written in a different language? In your

essay you would write:

(Untersteiner, 1949)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Untersteiner, M. (1949) Sofisti, Testimonianze e frammenti (The Sophists). Turin: Turin

University Press.

10. How do I present a long quotation in my text? Unlike ordinary short quotations
(where you would use quotation marks and allow the material you are quoting from
to fit smoothly within your own text) longer quotations need to be presented
differently. You need to indent from the left, use single space and you do not use
quotation marks. Such a quotation in your essay would look like the example below.
2 0 2 / R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H

Example: quoting a lengthy extract

. . . and so we do in fact need ‘carefully controlled empirical research’
(Hirst, 1970: 101). However, it is clear that there are many different types of research.

In education:

the essentially practical, problem-solving nature of action research makes this

approach attractive to practitioner-researchers who have identified a problem during
the course of their work, see the merit of investigating it and, if possible, of
improving practice (Bell, 1987: 5).

We now need to examine this popular form of research and see how it can apply in my
country.

11. How do I reference material I have taken from the Internet? In your essay you
would write:

(Vann, 1994: 20)

and in your references section you would translate this as:

Vann, A.S. (1994) ‘Curriculum and textbooks: a happy marriage?’, Principal, 73(4):
20–1, National Association of Elementary School Principals, Reston, VA (online
– http://www.enc.org/reform/journals/ENC2410/2410.htm – accessed 18/10/
00).

12. How do I reference a personal communication? In your essay you would write:

. . . the event structure. It has been suggested (Green, pers. comm., 1997) that a new
type of information may need to be added . . .

You do not need to include anything in the references section for personal
communications unless there is some extra essential information you need to add.

When you have completed your work you need to construct your references section.
 R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H / 2 0 3

Learning aid: constructing your

references section
When constructing your references list, bear the following points in mind:

1. Every author you have used must appear here

2. in alphabetical order of surname

3. with initials (not first or personal names)

4. followed by the earliest year the reference was published.

5. If you have used more than one piece of this author’s work you have to use
chronological ordering (see question 6 above).

6. You must provide full details of the references used.

7. Italicise (or underline – when you underline text this is meant to indicate to
a typesetter that the text should be italicised) book, journal and newspaper
titles.

8. Do not italicise or underline the titles of articles in books, journals or

newspapers.

9. Single spacing, with a single blank line between references.

10. If possible, use a hanging indent (where the second line is not against the
margin) as this makes it easier to read your references.
2 0 4 / R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H

Example: completed references

section
Anon (1991) Singapore Polytechnic FY 91 Annual Report. Singapore: Singapore Polytechnic
Press.

Anon (1993a) ‘Time for government to license and control education agencies’, The
Straits Times, 10 April: 30.

Anon (1993b) ‘What if Caucasian who punched me and damaged car leaves the
country?’, The Straits Times, 10 April: 30.

Austin, J.L. (1955) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clough, P. (1992) ‘My own learning’, Module 1, Unit 2, Understanding Learning and
the Learner. Sheffield: Sheffield University Division of Education Press, 10–20.

Cooper, W.E., Eimas, R.D. and Corbitt, J.D. (1977) ‘Some properties of linguistic
feature detectors’, Perceptions and Psychophysics, 13(2): 247–52.

Handy, C. (1989) ‘Missing ingredients’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 10

March: 26 (cited in Slee, P. (1992) ‘Apocalypse now? Where will higher education
go in the twenty-first century?’, in P.W.G. Wright (ed.) (1990) Industry and Higher
Education. Buckingham: Open University Press, 88–92).

Hirst, P.H. (1970) ‘What is teaching?’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 13(1) (reprinted
in his edited Knowledge and the Curriculum, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974,
101–15).

Roche, C. (1992) ‘My own reflection on learning’. Unpublished paper for the
Diploma/MEd course, Sheffield University and Singapore Polytechnic, 11 December.

Untersteiner, M. (1949) Sofisti, Testimonianze e frammenti (The Sophists). Turin: Turin

University Press.

Vann, A.S. (1994) ‘Curriculum and textbooks: a happy marriage?’, Principal, 73(4):
20–1, National Association of Elementary School Principals, Reston, VA (online –
http://www.enc.org/reform/journals/ ENC2410/2410.htm – accessed 18/01/00).
 R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H / 2 0 5

Summary report from the Friars Primary School:

‘Improving Literacy: Intervention for
Low-achieving Pupils’
AIM

To devise teaching strategies to improve the literacy of low-achieving pupils at Key

Stage 2.

BACKGROUND

This research was set in an inner-city area of great social deprivation. The school
intake is characterised by high pupil mobility, 63% uptake of free school meals
(three times the national average) and one third of the pupils on the special needs
register. Poor phonological awareness and the need to develop oral language skills
were identified by Ofsted (1998) as action points. The improvement of literacy
standards was a high priority in the school development plan.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

 Ability to decode polysyllabic words is a critical skill at reading age 8;.

 Individual test results can be unreliable – long-term trends are more valuable.

 Humour is an important motivating factor and an aid to memory.

 Active engagement in poetry through performance is a valuable teaching medium.

 Short-span focused tasks improve motivation and increase time on task.

 Focus on spelling increases the capacity for phonic and reading skills.

 Children of low ability respond well to challenging work if it is appropriately

presented.

 Children of low ability respond well to oral group work and it leads to solid
learning outcomes.
2 0 6 / R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H

RESEARCH DESIGN

The Year 5 class was selected as being in particular need of attention. A skills audit
was conducted on the class: reading tests identified 17 low-achieving pupils (reading
age less than chronological age); phonological awareness tests were carried out on
the 17 project children; and self-esteem and non-verbal reasoning tests were given
to the whole class. The project children were split into two roughly equivalent
groups (A and B) for teaching purposes and an intensive booster programme,
equivalent to a daily one-hour lesson over a four-week period, was delivered to each
group in turn. The pupils were interviewed at the end of the booster programme
and their reading age changes recorded. The research aimed to monitor the
differential effectiveness of the literacy booster programme in raising reading
standards. A secondary focus of the research was to question how informative and
reliable these tests were when compared with teacher assessment in identifying
learning difficulties and assessing pupil performance. The main problem areas
identified in the pupil skills audit and by teacher observation were:

 decoding of polysyllabic words;

 low vocabulary level;

 poor phonological awareness;

 deficiencies in short and long-term memory; and

 rhyme recognition, awareness of pitch and sense of rhythm.

Non-verbal reasoning

The N-VR test (NFER) was cheap and relatively quick and easy to administer and
as an overall indicator of ability it was a useful guide against which to measure
progress in reading. The correlation between N-VR and reading age was marked
and indicated no particular evidence of underachievement. A small number of
results did, however, seem unreliable – e.g. one child with an RA of 10.6; and
three other children with an RA of 8; achieved no score in the N-VR test. One
statemented child of very low ability with a reading age of 6.4 did, however, score.
The table below shows the distribution of N-VR scores for the whole class.
 R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H / 2 0 7

N-VR No 74–79 80–84 85–89 90–94 95–99 100–4 105–9 110–4 115–9
score score

Project 3 1 3 4 3 2

Non-project 1 1 2 5 1 2 1 2 2

Self-esteem

The self-esteem test (Harter-Anglicised version standardised in Scotland) didn’t

throw any particular light on the project children’s reading ability. Analytically it
included six categories: scholastic, social, athletic, appearance, behaviour (whether
the child saw him or herself as well or badly behaved) and global (an overall
measure). The girls in the class as a whole showed a fairly standard distribution, the
project girls appearing to demonstrate no particular pattern of response except in
scholastic performance where 8 out of 11 had a lower-than-average opinion of
themselves. The boys in the class as a whole had in general much poorer opinions
of themselves than average. With respect to athletic competence and scholastic
ability none scored above average and for social acceptance only two boys scored
notably above average. If any pattern was apparent in project/non-project children
the former had a slightly higher opinion than the others of their athletic
competence and their physical appearance. The test was done with adult support:
the brighter children were in small groups and the less able individual. Yet there
was evidence that some of the results were unreliable: a few children appeared to
have ticked the boxes in a particular pattern down the page and in other cases the
responses were apparently contradictory.

Phonological awareness

The PhAB test (NFER) identified six specific areas of phonological difficulty. It was
administered individually (25 minutes per child) to all project children and the
results were scored and collated. Some 11 out of the 17 children scored in one or
more categories. Two children of exceedingly low ability scored higher than the
ones whom staff had previously identified as having phonological problems.
2 0 8 / R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H

TEACHING PROGRAMME

An intensive course of 20 lessons each of 50 minutes duration comprising four

components:

1. phonics

2. spellings

2. sentence construction

2. poetry and performance.

The phonics component focused on a different group of word endings each week.
Each lesson started with a list of around 30 words that were discussed, decoded and
their meanings explored:

week 1: endings that say ‘ur’: -er, -ar, -or, -our

week 2: endings that say ‘us’ and ‘shus’: -us, -ous, -ious, -cious, -tious, -scious, -xious
week 3: endings that say ‘shun’ and ‘zhun’: -tion, -sion, -ssion, noting that many of
these words have the same second-last syllable, eg. -ation, -iction, -ension, -ision,
etc.
week 4: endings in y: -y, -ly, -ity, -vity, -arity, -icity, plus revision of all endings.

Three words from the weekly list were written down each day for four days as
spelling homework. On day five of each week there was a spelling test. Words from
the list were combined in sentences, first orally then in written form, the more
outrageous the better: ‘Mrs Jennings is ancient but decent, different and intelligent.’
‘Paul’s feet are odorous.’ ‘Are you a criminal? What if I am – it’s personal!’ ‘Mrs
Jennings is glorious and not hideous or tedious.’ The hard work of sentence writing
thus became fun.

The final part of each lesson entailed studying a poem (one per week) and practising
it for performance to another class. Poetry was chosen because it provided a short,
manageable and complete piece of text and also because the children found it
enjoyable to practise and reread repetitively. Poems were selected for their humour
and interesting content; their strong sense of rhythm and regular rhyme patterns;
and because they contained a reasonable number of polysyllabic words from target
lists and other new vocabulary. They included The Shark by Lord Alfred Douglas,
 R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H / 2 0 9

sections I and III of Night Mail by W.H. Auden and Macavity, the Mystery Cat by
T.S. Eliot.

MAIN FINDINGS

The programme overall did what it set out to do. In the three (four for group B)
months preceding the programme the children made reading progress at approxi-
mately one third of the speed of the average child, but in the month of the booster
programme they made four times the expected monthly progress of the average
child. All reading ages were tested using the Salford Sentence Reading Test. The
tables below show the reading progress of the 16 project children over a period of
18 months.

Group A N-VR RA Change in RA Change in RA RA

NAME 20/4/98 20/1/98 in 3 months RA during July 98 Jan 99
Jan to April May booster

SC 97 9.0 ;0.4 ;1.2 10.0 10.6;

DH 92 7.6 ;0.2 90.3 7.1 8.3

SH 85 10.0 0 0 10.6 10.6

LZ 74 6.5 90.1 ;0.4 6.7 7.0

LB 94 8.3 0 ;0.7 8.1 9.3

AH 88 9.2 ;0.2 ;0.4 9.8 10.6

NT 89 9.0 ;0.4 ;0.4 9.8 Left

MW 95 8.2 0 ;0.2 8.3 8.7

Average monthly up 1/2 month up 4 months up 5/6 month

change per pupil per month per month per month
2 1 0 / R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H

Group B N-VR RA Change in RA Change in RA RA

NAME 20/4/98 20/1/98 in 4 months RA during July 98 Jan 99
Jan to May booster
June/July

SB 86 8.4 ;0.3 ;0.7 9.20 Left

PE 80 9.0 0 ;0.6 9.60 9.2

RB 94 8.3 90.4 ;1.0 8.11 8.1

DC n/s 9.0 0 ;0.6 9.60 9.8

LE 80 8.1 91.0 ;0.9 9.30 9.1

KF 80 8.1 ;0.4 ;0.8 9.70 9.3

NG n/s 9.8 ;0.2 ;0.8 10.60 10.6;

LR n/s 8.1 ;0.1 ;0.9 8.11 9.0

Average monthly up 1/5 month up 4 months down 1/5 month

change per pupil

All reading ages are given in years and months (e.g. 9.11 means 9 years 11 months).

SOME EXAMPLES OF TYPICAL RESPONSES FROM THE CHILDREN

 ‘The sentences were really funny and weird ones’; ‘we had a laugh about it when
we called each other’

 ‘I like Macavity it’s dead funny’; ‘they clap and laugh at the end of it’

 ‘First we came in the group and I kept rushing through the words and getting them
wrong now I am splitting them up and getting them right’

 ‘Practices and trying to make the words and split them all up and when you split
them up you say . . . like operation op-er-a-tion just split them up’

 ‘We’ve been missing our experiments cause we are doing volcanoes and we are
going to make them erupt. I wanted to do it . . . but I guess my spelling is more
important’
 R ES O U RC ES FO R R ES E A RC H / 2 1 1

Further reading
Byrne, B. (1998) The Foundations of Literacy: The Child’s Acquisition of the Alphabetic
Principle. Hove: Psychology Press.
Crystal, D. (1996) ‘Language play and linguistic intervention’, Child Language
Teaching and Therapy, 12 (3): 328–44.
Johnston, S. and Watson, J. (1999) ‘Reading’. Literacy and Learning, April/May.
McGuinness, D. (1998) Why Children Can’t Read. London: Penguin Books.
SOEID (1996) Methods of Teaching Reading: Key Issues in Research and Implications for
Practice. Interchange 39.
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London: Routledge.
Walford, G. (ed.) (1991) Doing Educational Research. London: Routledge.
Whitty, G. (1999) ‘Teacher professionalism in new times.’ Paper presented at the
Annual Conference of the Standing Committee for the Education and Training
of Teachers, Dunchurch, Rugby, 26–28 November.
Wilkin, M. (1992) Mentoring in Schools. London: Kogan Page.
Winter, R. (1988) ‘Fictional critical writing: an approach to case study research by
practitioners and for in-service work with teachers’, in J. Nias and Groundwater-
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Woods, P. (1993) Critical Events in Teaching and Learning. London: Falmer Press.
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Woods, P. (1994) ‘Adaptation and self-determination in English primary schools’,

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Wragg, E.C. Wikeley, F.J., Wragg, C.M. and Haynes, G.S. (1996) Teacher Appraisal
Observed. London: Routledge.
Index

academic mode, of writing 170 British Education Index (BEI) 75, 76

accountability 13, 14, 15, 29 British Education Research Association (BERA)
action learning sets 195 54, 74, 87, 99, 107
action research 24, 25, 26, 44, 45, 81, 132, 194, British Library 73, 74
195
actions, recording 89–90 CARN see Collaborative Action Research
agenda of interest 189, 190 Network
aims of research, in reports 174 categories
alerting services 74 conceptual 131
analytical commentaries 37–8 creating 133
analytical memos 134, 135 descriptors 153–4
anonymous reports, referencing 200 developing 133–5
anthropological lens 180 category response questions 148–51
appraisal 20, 22 CD-ROMs 198
assumptions 5, 6–7 central control, of teaching profession 16
ATHENS 76 CERUK see Current Educational Research in the
attitudes, exploring 30, 32, 116–17 UK
audiences, research 32, 169–72, 197 challenge
authenticity 84, 118 critical community 118
autonomy see licensed autonomy; professional critical friendship 110, 115
autonomy for development 107
chapters, recording details of 69
background to research, in reports 175 charitable foundations 75
Bath Information and Data Services (BIDS) 75, Chart Wizard 165–6
76–7 chartered teachers 15
BEI see British Education Index classroom observation 94
beliefs, exploring 30, 32, 116–17 closed questions 99, 102
BERA see British Education Research Association closed response questions 148
bias 83, 84, 101 co-inquiry 123
bibliographic databases 75, 76–8 co-writing 196
bibliographic indexes 75, 76–8 coaching 107
bibliographic referencing systems 67–8 coding
bibliographic software packages 71 qualitative data analysis 130–2
bidding, culture of 15 quantitative data management 148–59
BIDS see Bath Information and Data Services coding strips 150
biographical pen-portraits 142–3 collaboration 41, 88, 106, 107, 122
biographies 91–2 Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN)
Blunkett, David 16 107
books collaborative cultures 122
literature reviews 78 collaborative research 24, 25
recording details 68–9 colleagues
2 2 0 / I N D EX

importance of relationships with 16 validation of research 108, 110

informal interviews with 35–6 critical friends
involving in research 85, 106 colleagues as 85
see also critical friends informal interviews with 36–7, 41
collegial discussion 106, 107, 193 qualities to look for 111
commentaries, informal interviews 40–1 role of 106–7, 109
commercialisation, of education 29 skilled helper model 112
commonsense tradition 3–7 as supervisors x
communication, critical community 120–1 as trusted persons 115, 117
communities of practice 123 typical questions asked by 113
competing agendas, professional development 15 critical friendship
conceptual categories 131 basis of 106–7
conceptual frameworks 88 examples 114–17
conceptualisation, teacher education 14 how it works 109–10
conference proceedings 54 issues and friendship qualities 110–11
conferences, presenting papers to 197, 198 in research methodology 108
confidentiality 84, 88–9, 99, 110, 121, 172 role 85
confrontation, for development 107 starting 109
context critical incident analysis 89–90
contextualist tradition 7, 8 critical incidents 45
for observation 97–8 critical pedagogy 108
see also political context; social context critical reflection 25
contextualist tradition 7–9, 10, 126, 128 criticality 25
continuing professional development criticism 181, 194
baseline survey of 18 cross-checking, research 85
CPD strategy 14, 195 culture of inquiry 26
fictional pen-portrait 183–5 Current Educational Research in the UK
funding 20 (CERUK) 75
lack of autonomy 47 curriculum development 9
recognition of importance 14 curriculum discussions 108
control curriculum vitae (CVs) 18, 33–5, 92
research questions and design 25
teaching profession 16 data analysis 83–4
conversations 101 from interviews 102
copyright 172 methodological texts 66
core features, professional development 18–19 qualitative 125–44
counselling interviews 100 quantitative 159–64
CPD see continuing professional development data collection 81, 82f, 83, 146, 175
craft knowledge 26 data management, quantitative 148–59
crises, professional identity 29 data presentation 164–8
critical appraisal 122 Data Protection Act (1998) 172–3
critical community 118 data subjects, rights 173
collaborative cultures 122 databases
colleagues as members of 85 bibliographic 75, 76–8
communication 120–1 for managing literature 71
illustrations 119–20 deduction 3, 4f, 5, 6, 127
organisation 121–2 democratic professionalism 16
role of 85, 120, 121 deregulation, teaching profession 16
 I N D EX / 2 2 1

descriptive statements, qualifying 137 field notes 94, 129

descriptors, to categories 153–4 findings
designs see research designs in research reports xii, 176
DfES 54, 57, 74, 75, 123 reviewing 79
dialogue 41 writing up 174–5
diary interviews 100 see also interim findings
diary keeping 32, 43–6, 88–90, 114 force field analysis 43
dilemma analysis 140–1 foreign languages, referencing sources 201
disclosure 107 formal evaluation 188
Discourse on the Positivist Spirit 3 frame of references 7, 8, 190
dissemination of research 188, 195–8 frequencies, calculating 159–63
Friars Primary School, summary report from
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 205–10
75 funding 20, 24, 25, 123
education, commercialisation 29
education journals 73 General Teaching Council (GTC) 16, 54, 74, 75
education theory and practice 66 generalisations 7, 8
Educational Action Research 197 genres, research writing 169–72
educational action zones 195 good practice, disseminating 195–8
educational research see research government policy, professional development 14
electronic journals 73–4 grounded theory 128
electronic resources xi, 74–6 group interviews 101
End Note 71 GTC see General Teaching Council
ePolitix 75
ERIC 76 Harvard System 68, 199–204
error eliminations 7, 8f, 9 Hay McBer Report 20
ESRC see Economic and Social Research Council health warning, dissemination of research 188
ethical codes 87 higher education personnel, importance of 26
Ethical Guidelines (BERA) 87, 99 hypothesis testing 3, 4f, 5, 127
ethics 81, 84, 88–9, 121, 172–3
ethnographic interviews 100 identifying research topics 49–51
Europe, professional development 14 identity see professional identity
evaluation image-based records 173
of research 83–4, 176, 188, 191–5 image-based research 66
see also self-evaluation impact of research 189–90
evidence, recording 89–90 in vivo codes 131, 132
Evidence for Policy and Practice Information in-house journals 194
(EPPI) Centre 75 in-service education 47
evidence-based policy 5 index systems 68–71
evidence-based practice 24, 25 induction 3, 4f, 5, 7, 127
expectations, of interim findings 188–9 inequalities, provision for development 15
experts, critical community 118 inference 97
external evaluation 188 informal interviews 36–7
analytic commentaries 37–8
feasibility 84 commentaries 40–1
feedback 107, 108, 181–2 questions
fictional critical writing 45–6, 92, 93 for constructing 37
fictional pen-portraits 142–3, 183–5 for eliciting information 39–40
2 2 2 / I N D EX

informal participant observation 93–4 journals (diaries), keeping 32, 43–6, 88–90, 114
informality, monitoring and evaluation 193
information gateways 75, 76 knowledge 3, 4f, 5, 6, 7, 10, 26, 41, 44
information response questions 151–2 knowledge creation process 108
initial teacher education and training 29, 123
Initial Teacher Training Partnership 71 language 128
innovation overload 47 learning communities 14, 16, 26, 51, 55–6, 121,
inquiry 122, 123, 195
challenges of 41–2 learning support assistants 108
process of 7, 8f Learning and Teaching: A Strategy for Professional
teacher-initiated 25–6 Development 14, 16
see also co-inquiry; narrative inquiry; systematic legal considerations, research writing 172–3
inquiry libraries xi, 71–2
insiders 94 library catalogues 72–3
institutions, web-based sources 74 licensed autonomy 15–16
interim findings life histories, importance of 35
expectations of 188–9 life history interviews 100
presentation of 194 Likert scale 96, 153, 163
Interlibrary Loan Scheme 73 list response questions 152–3
international audiences, writing for 197 literary works 67
Internet literature 65–79
access to xi managing 67–71
disseminating research 197 in research reports 178–80
referencing material from 202 reviewing 78–9
interpretation, of data 129 searching for 71–8
interrogating data 136–7 types of 65–7
interventionist policies 25 literature searches
interviews 98–102 problems with 54–6
analysing data from 102 research reports 175
bias 101 log of events 32, 90
confidentiality 99, 173 ‘logic of discovery’ 128
formats 100–1 ‘logic of verification’ 128
planning and preparation 98–9 loneliness, of researchers 106
questioning 99–100
tactics 101–2 master teachers 107
tape recording 129 mean scores, calculating 163–4
see also informal interviews measurements, scientific research 127
media interest, teachers and teaching 28
joint publication 196 mentoring 106, 108, 110, 122–4, 197
Joseph Rowntree organisation 75 meta-metaphors 139
journal articles metaphor analysis 138–40, 141
databases 76 methodological texts 66
recording details of 70 Microsoft Access 71
referencing 199 Microsoft Excel 151, 160–6, 167–8
journal catalogues 73–4 Microsoft Word 71, 151, 166
journals modular material, referencing 201
peer reviews 194 motivation x
writing for 177–8, 196, 197
 I N D EX / 2 2 3

narrative 91 peer evaluation 188, 192–3

narrative inquiry 30 peer evaluators 193
National College of School Leadership (NCSL) peer review 22, 85, 106, 107, 194
121, 123 peer scrutiny 106, 107, 109, 110
National Curriculum 13, 14, 22, 29, 108 pen-portraits 91
National Foundation for Educational Research analysis 142–4
(NFER) 74, 75 illustration 38–9
national testing 13 research reports 182–6
NCSL see National College of School Leadership sharing 32–3
negative cases 135, 136 writing 36
networked learning communities (NLCs) 14, 51, performance management 20, 29
55–6, 121, 123 performance management review 47
networking 122, 195 personal 60–1
networks personal communication, referencing 202
action research 197 personal data 173
peer review 194 personal dimensions, teachers’ lives 29
teacher learning 22, 23, 26, 52, 85, 118 personal index systems 68–71
teachers, pupils and parents 16 pie charts 165–7
new managerialism 29 political context, research and development 13–17
new public management 29 Popper, Karl 7, 8, 116
newspapers positivist tradition 3–7
sources 74, 75 posters 198
writing for 177 practitioner research 24, 26, 61, 80, 104
NFER see National Foundation for Educational dissemination of 188, 195–6
Research methods 81–3
nil responses 159 principles, professional development 17
non-computerised records 173 problems in research
noticings 95 contextualist tradition 8
identifying topics 51
objective knowledge 3, 4f, 5, 6 positivist tradition 5–7
objectivity 94, 126, 195 professional agenda 187–90
observation 5, 7, 8, 93–8, 108 professional associations 75
open coding 131–2 professional autonomy 20, 22–4, 25, 29, 47
open ended questions 99, 102 professional codes of practice 94
open response questions 126, 157–9 professional development ix, 12–26
opportunities, SWOT analysis 42 element of choice in 47
oral history interviews 100 exploring personal 30–5
organisations, web-based sources 74 mentoring 122–3
outcomes of research 191 political context 13–17
outcomes-based view, of education 24 principles 17, 18
ownership professional autonomy 22–4
of research 172 reflection 41
of teaching 13 teacher researchers 24–6
types of activity 18–20
paper copies, journal articles 70 interrogating value of 20–1
partnerships 16, 23, 26, 52, 85, 118, 195 professional identity 28–47
pattern analysis 141 exploring professional development 30–5
pedagogic mode, of writing 170 image of teachers and teaching 28–30
2 2 4 / I N D EX

telling your story 35–46 quotations 179

professional journals 194 referencing 199, 200–3
professional knowledge 10
professional landscapes 92 ‘raising standards’ agenda 14, 15, 22, 25, 28
professional mode, of writing 170 ranking response questions 156–7
professional practice 1 rating scale response questions 153–6, 163
professionalism 16–17, 23, 32 rating scales 96
professionality 32 reality 3, 4f
project descriptions, research reports 175 refereed journals 196
pseudo-scientific methodologies 128 referees 194
publication, writing for xii, 177–8, 196 reference sections
pupil achievement constructing 203
discussions 108 example of completed 204
raising 15, 190 referencing systems 67–8, 199–204
pupils reflection
expected impact on pupils 189 challenges of inquiry 41–2
response to evaluation and dissemination 188 insufficiency in itself 41
purposes, research writing 169–72 in research reports 176
reflection-in-action 10
qualitative research 2 reflection-on-action 10
authenticity 84–5 reflective practice 9–10
data analysis 125–44 reflective practitioner 9, 10, 87
observation 95 reflective writing 87–8
subjectivity 94 The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think
qualities, critical friends 111 in Action 10
quantitative research 2 relevant research, locating 65–6
data collection 127 reliability 84
observation 95, 96 replication studies 66
viewed as only legitimate research 25 reporting research 169–86
see also questionnaires describing research process 175–6
quantity response questions 151–2 genres, purposes and audiences 169–72
questionnaires 146–68 legal and ethical considerations 172–3
data analysis 159–64 pen-portraits 182–6
data management and coding 148–59 process of writing 181–2
data presentation 164–8 using literature 178–80
legal and ethical considerations 173 see also research reports
small-scale 144, 147 representation 84
using 102–4 research
questions consequences of xii
critical friends might ask 113 disseminating 195–8
for identifying research objectives 56–9 evaluation, mechanics of 191–5
informal interviews literature see literature
for constructing 37 methodologies 66, 81–3
for eliciting information 39–40 professional agenda 187–90
in interviews 99–100 reporting 169–86
for reflective writing 87–8 format 174–5
for research designs 83 genres, purposes and audiences 169–72
for writing pen-portraits 36 legal and ethical considerations 172–3
 I N D EX / 2 2 5

pen-portraits 182–6 SARA 74

process of writing 181–2 scale of research 52
research process 175–6 Schön, Donald 9, 10
using literature 178–80 school culture 195
resources for 199–210 school improvement 23
stages 83–4 school self-evaluation 22
techniques 87–104 schools, as learning communities 195
biography, stories and fictional critical scientific research 3, 85, 127
writing 91–3 Scotland, professional development 14–15
interviewing 98–102 Scottish Council for Education Research 74
observation 5, 7, 8, 93–8 search strategies 77
questionnaires 102–4, 146–68 selection, in research 94
topics self-determination 23–4, 47
concluding remarks 62–4 self-esteem 195
identifying 49–51 self-evaluation
individual ways of approaching 60–2 by teachers 25, 30, 47, 188, 191–2
literature searches 54–6 schools 22
research objectives 56–60 self-monitoring 25, 191–2
scale of the proposal 52 self-worth, lack of 13
timelines 53 semi-structured interviews 100, 182
traditions 1–10 seminar programmes 196–7
contextualized approach 7–9, 10, 126, 128 significant others see critical friends
positivist approach 3–7 skilled helper model 112
quantitative and qualitative approaches 2 small-scale research
reflective practice 9–10 action research 198
see also practitioner research; qualitative opportunities for ix
research; quantitative research questionnaire surveys 144, 147
research designs social context, of research 81
control over 25 social science research 128
questionnaires 102–4 software packages
questions for 83 bibliographic 71
research participants, rights 83, 173 data analysis 125
‘research in progress’ 194 data management 151
research reports statistical 167
format 174–5 sources, referencing 199–204
of other projects 65–6 spreadsheets 151
for publication 177–8 stakeholders
researchers critical community 110, 118
loneliness of 106 in professional development 13
teachers as 9, 22, 24–6 standards, raising 14, 15, 22, 25, 28
resources statistical calculation 159–64
for research 199–210 statistical software packages 167
see also electronic resources Stenhouse, Lawrence 9
responsibilities, research participants 83 story telling 91, 92
results see findings story writing 43–6
rights, research participants 83, 173 strengths, SWOT analysis 42
ripple effect, dissemination of research 195–6 structured interviews 100
risks, in research 194–5 structured reading 78–9
2 2 6 / I N D EX

subcategories 133–4 theoretical frameworks 179–80

subject knowledge 24 theoretical knowledge 115–16
subject-specific journals 73 theoretical sampling 136
subjectivity 94 theory
supervision developing 137–8
critical pedagogy of 108–9 referring to literature about 66
of research x scientific research 127
support tension between practice and 26
critical community 118 thought, recording 89–90
critical friendship 110, 115 threats, SWOT analysis 42
for professional development 15 time frames, diary/log/journal entries 90
for research 122–4 time-sampling techniques 94
SWOT analysis 42 timelines, research topics 53
synopses 185 Times Educational Supplement 74, 75, 177
System for Classroom Observation of Teaching titles, research reports 174
Strategies (SCOTS) 97 toolkits, professional development 16
systematic inquiry 81, 169 trial solutions 7, 8f
systematic observation 95 triangulation 85, 86f
truth 3, 4f, 6, 8, 116
tacit knowledge 10, 41, 44
talk, critical friendship 107 United States
tally charts 149, 150, 164 professional development
tape recording, interviews 37, 129 political battles 13–14, 15
Taylor & Francis Group 74 research on core features 18
teacher biography interviews 100 Universities Council for the Education of
teacher learning 18–20 Teachers (UCET) 75
Teacher Research Grant Scheme 75 unstructured interviews 101
Teacher Training Agency (TTA) 54, 58, 75
teachers validating groups 110
development see professional development validation 45, 118, 135
expectations of research 188–90 validity 6, 7, 84, 118
identity see professional identity value, of professional development activities 20–1
as researchers 9, 22, 24–6 value judgements 97
teaching assistants 108 verification 127, 128
technical rationality 10 videos 198
technical toolkits 87
telephone interviews 101 weakness, SWOT analysis 42
tensions word documents 70–1
in action research 26 writing see reporting research
practitioner research 80
professional development 15–16 ZETOC 74