The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Phil McRae and Jim Parsons

Teachers have been, and continue to be, expert researchers. Research (as a process of knowledge building) inspires personal growth and development in individuals and groups. Teachers bring their expertise to their classroom and by actively sharing the knowledge they have gained through research, they build a professional community and shape the minds within that community.

Always (Re)Searching as Educators

Research has often been thought of as an activity carried out by experts—people who are able to control a study, provide results and then make a claim of originality over the findings. However, good teachers have always been good researchers. In fact, any teacher who has asked a question deemed essential to practice and used a systematic method to find an answer has engaged in a form of research. Attentive teachers observe their students and, through systematic and embedded study, come to understand the culture of their learning environment.

A strong educator will analyze the individual needs of students or learning environments and, after reflection and consideration, adjust her actions to best meet student and system needs. The cycle then continues again within the same, or a new group, of students, as the teacher/researcher begins an iterative cycle of question(s), observation(s), reflection(s) and action(s). Teachers continuously empower students to create knowledge (just as teachers do for themselves). Any educator who has explored new curriculum, evaluated teaching practices, chosen one new idea over another, or re-evaluated a daily teaching choice based on evidence and a guiding question, has engaged in research. Such research is essential to both teaching and learning. Our desire is to consciously embrace these actions and call them what they are—research. Research is not just the domain of an expert outside the classroom; it is also the domain of the teaching professional. Good teachers are good researchers; if they were not, they would not be good teachers.

Our encouragement to teachers extends to a call for legitimization of such research activity, which includes naming it, doing it and sharing it. Research should be a necessary extension of the teaching profession and should make our classroom research and professional knowledge more viable to the public.

The Leadership Promise of Teacher Research

At the University of Alberta's Faculty of Education, we believe it is our work to invest rigorously in teachers as researchers. In our new graduate program, the Master of Educational Studies (MES), we set out to do three things. First, we did our research; we looked at every other flexible delivery graduate program operating in Canada. Second, we attempted to incarnate what we believed were the core foundations of graduate education into everyday practice. Third, we sought a rigorous and well-thought out research model for conducting research that would effect positive change at the sites where the research was being conducted and that would in turn aid graduate students and teachers. In an online discussion, one of our graduate students reflects on the notion of teacher as researcher:

Until I entered the MES program, I underestimated the importance of research in education. That is not to say as a teacher I did not value research, but, like most teachers, I set priorities and felt that my first priority was to take care of business in the classroom. I did some professional reading, but most of it was prompted through my administrators and/or district professional development workshops. Professional development has always been important to me, but I never really saw its connection to research. I never thought about where the data came from and the efforts put forth by educational experts to complete these research projects.

This comes to mind for me now because I have just collected my surveys and out of the 425 I distributed, 68 came back. When I met with teachers to discuss my project, they were more than willing to help me out, but I think other things took precedence. So what does this say about educational research? Perhaps educators perceive research as something outside of teaching. There is definitely a barrier between teachers and the research world, and I’m not sure this will ever change. We talk about empowering teachers to explore their research skills, but we don’t provide them with serious (time/resources) opportunities to do so. It is slowly changing, but until teachers become part of the research process, I believe they will continue to perceive research as something others do.

To address a model for action research in the MES program, we ventured no further than Alberta to find the model we felt had been weighed, measured and found worthy—the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI).

Putting Action into the Research

Although it is not perfect in practice, AISI makes good sense. We had worked with AISI and had seen it thrive in many different schools. The idea behind AISI is that teachers have the best insight into what needs to be improved at their own places of work, and they can be the forces of change in those sites—through a process of site-based action research.

The university faculties of education (Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge) have had the good fortune to participate in, support and read more than a thousand AISI annual reports over the past six years. In the texts of these project reports, we found signs of the important changes taking place in our province through a network of action research projects. At the University of Alberta, we felt that what we had learned from teacher researchers was important enough to write a book about, and we did: Celebrating School Improvement: Six Lessons Learned from Alberta’s AISI Projects (reviewed in the Winter 2006 ATA Magazine). To write this book, we explored six years of AISI reports and found that the power of the teacher/researcher is profoundly affecting the Alberta context. The following themes continually emerged from the six years of action research projects:

1. Collaborative professional development, based on community building and grassroots leadership, is the best professional development. That is, it actually does a better job of developing professionals than expert-driven (the one-stop-in-town-ideologue flogging the latest hot product) professional development.
2. Project-based (problem-based) learning, based on active engagement of students and teachers and on differentiated instruction, has the highest correlation with student learning.
3. Parental involvement is important to student engagement, and the school is a community that works best with high involvement and caring by everyone involved. However, we have not begun to involve parents as much as we could.
4. Integrating technology into the curriculum works best when technology supports and advances critical thinking, the curriculum, creativity, collaboration and problem solving. Technology is not the curriculum.
5. Collaborative leadership, as opposed to hierarchical leadership, supports student learning. AISI has shown that teachers and students can and should become leaders. Shared leadership is motivating to change and action research.
6. School culture is the most important change and relates to the way things are done within a community of learners. AISI shows that school change revolves around cultural change—from isolation to collaboration; hierarchy to shared leadership; and expert-based decisions to inquiry-based decisions.

Building upon Alberta Research

The teacher research already completed in AISI has influenced education programs at the University of Alberta. As noted, when building our Master of Education in Educational Studies (Leadership and School Improvement), we built our program on the successes of AISI. The process and the content of teacher research were fundamental to investments in school leadership and school improvement. We saw that teachers became leaders as they worked together and solved real site-based school problems. We saw that they became agents of positive change as they grew in their abilities and confidence to construct research knowledge. And we saw that site-based research was about doing good work, which in turn motivated the school community. In our graduate MES program, we built a culture upon three principles we found in AISI teacher research: community, agency and service.

From our synthesis of AISI teacher research findings, we concluded that teachers could and should form communities based upon creative and functional working relationships with other teachers as well as students, parents, school staff and other schools. Our synthesis of AISI teacher research showed that teachers gained agency as they designed, conducted and reported their AISI research. This agency included establishing a research community that was site-based; research communities were motivated by the attitude that they could make a difference. And they did make a difference, as they created teacher knowledge and used that knowledge in powerful actions of change. This research–knowledge–change process energized school leaders. Finally, we concluded that good work (work in the service of students’ learning) was highly motivating, helped build positive relationships and showed teachers for what they are—people who like kids and want to help.

Is It Working?

Our master's program is based on the keystone of site-based research, which we have come to believe is the most creative motivating activity of graduate studies. Did it work? Our research suggests that it did. Here is what our graduate students (teachers) are telling us. In a posting from a monthly progress report, one teacher noted:

This term has been a time for constructing meaning of my role as a researcher. Amazingly, the guided approach of this program has taken me from an apprentice to a proponent of research. Experiential learning has positioned us as practitioners in our unique educational situations. Through critical reflection, questioning, actual experiences, and group interaction, we are learning how we may contribute meaningfully to serve our educational community. As researchers, we are not merely doers. We are active and engaged learners.

Research: What Teachers Do

We believe AISI and our MES program show that research is something teachers can and should do. Both AISI and the MES program were opportunities for teacher growth in leadership, and presented practical opportunities to improve schools and increase students’ learning. Six years after AISI’s initiation and three years after we started our MES graduate program, our belief that research is fundamentally a human activity embedded in our practice as educators is stronger than ever. Our assessment of the MES graduate program is that research is the single most creatively empowering activity of the experience. The activity of research has engendered tremendous growth in teacher leadership and re-invigorated the lives of the people involved in it.

The idea of teachers as researchers is simple and natural, but it is not an idea that teachers readily embrace. Somehow, we have accepted the belief that we are not research experts—we are only teachers even though we undertake research projects every day. Research is a key to empowering and generating educational growth and insight. We believe that research, in all its manifest forms, holds greater promise for teachers as educational leaders.