Learning to Do Teacher Research Independently: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Much has been written about the importance of teacher research (e.g. Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1999), how to do it (e.g. Burns 2010) and teachers’ engagement in it (e.g. Borg 2013). There are, however, relatively fewer accounts of teachers learning to do teacher research; those which are available investigate the learning process from the researcher’s (outsider’s) perspective (e.g. Kiely 2006) or take place in the context of collaborative or large-scale funded projects (e.g. Liu and He 2008; Zheng and Hu 2004). Teachers may very often, though, learn about teacher research independently and it is this process that I will examine in this chapter, drawing on my own learning experience. The perspective I adopt is a reflective one (Schön 1983) — I retrace and reconstruct my experience of becoming a teacher researcher in order to identify and to understand the processes I went through. In doing so, I examine both factors that facilitated my learning as well as the challenges I faced and the ways I responded to them.