Teachers Doing Research: An Introductory Guidebook

This brief text is for teachers who will carry out research and produce persuasive answers to educational questions they encounter in their classrooms.

Observant teachers, from their daily experiences in the classroom, compile a wealth of educational problems to solve, topics to investigate, and issues to ponder. From those experiences, they also gain valuable insights into potential solutions to such problems, various methods of investigating topics, and ways to settle issues. Some teachers are not satisfied to ponder such matters in a casual, cursory fashion. Instead, they yearn to investigate issues in a systematic manner that qualifies them to share the outcomes of their study with other people-with fellow teachers, administrators, readers of professional books, educators who subscribe to professional journals, and the general public. These teachers wish to “do research” on significant educational matters and to disseminate the outcomes of their investigations to broader audiences. However, they often feel poorly prepared to tackle the task and that is why this book was written. Its purpose is to prepare teachers to be efficient classroom researchers and to produce persuasive answers to educational questions. The book performs that task by describing typical steps in the conduct of research on schooling topics, with each step accompanied by a host of specific examples of what the step entails in the study a wide variety of questions about life in elementary and secondary schools.