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Expert Researchers and SchoolPractitioners: An HistoricalPerspective on the Marginalizationof Practitioner Research and theSilencing of Practitioner VoicesR i chard Schmert z i ng
Why should teachers have to learn to read andconduct research?The case for practitioner research as an essentialcomponent of school reform.
IntroductionWhen asked if I would be interested in writing an essay containing my
advice to teachers, I was excited about the possibility. As an educa-
tional anthropologist, my first thought was to write about the role of
culture in education—its importance in building our understanding
of the way schools work and the way we deal with racial and cultural
diversity. However, as one who has spent the last 15 years teaching
teachers how to understand and conduct research, my second
thought, and the topic about which I have decided to write, was the
critical importance of training teachers to be expert consumers and
implementers of education research.
I was recently listening to my students report on studies they had
conducted in our graduate research class. All of them were or had
been teachers, and some were now administrators. As they told
the stories of the research studies they had conducted in schools or
districts where they worked, the room was full of animated and
enthusiastic discussion.
The first report came from a former lawyer who is now an assis-
tant principal in a local elementary school. Like others in the class, he
wanted to focus his research on a problem or issue that was currently
important in his school: in his case, it was the implementation of a
newly adopted computer-based program that was expected to solve
the literacy acquisition problems of at-risk students. He explained
that the program had been selected by a central office administrator
without any input from the teachers who would be responsible for
implementing it. A classmate asked if the program was research-
based—that is, tested against other ways of developing literacy for
similar types of students under similar circumstances. The only stud-
ies that had been done were sponsored by the company who sold the
program; perhaps not surprisingly, they all reported significant
improvement over traditional approaches. When the program was
implemented in the school under study, however, it did not produce
the expected results. What went wrong? When my student inter-
viewed the teachers, he found that most of them had been given no
training at all, and instead were expected to find answers to their con-
cerns regarding the program in an instructor’s manual that they
found totally inadequate and largely unreadable. Furthermore, when
the teachers were asked about the program’s lack of effectiveness,
most said that they thought it might have been implemented more
effectively if they had been involved in the selection process (to make
sure it would meet the needs of their students), given adequate train-
ing, and provided support throughout the process.
The other educators in the room shared their stories of how teach-
ers are asked with increasing frequency to adopt and implement new
reforms and initiatives embraced by school boards, parents, and cen-
tral office administrators who are desperately grasping at every new
program or strategy that they hope will save them from failing to
make adequate yearly progress as mandated by state and federal gov-
ernments trying to meet the requirements of the No Child Left
2 � Journal of Education
Schmertzing • Expert Researchers and School Practitioners � 3
Behind Act (NCLB). These stories led to the observation that the
relentless push to have every child make ever-increasing benchmark
scores on high-stakes tests was causing local education decision-mak-
ers to search for silver bullet solutions that would magically solve their
problems. These solutions were programs typically developed by self-
proclaimed experts and marketed by salespeople who claimed that
they had been appropriately tested and that they would work in any
context. Many of them were touted as what some call “teacher proof,”
that is, they were so self-contained and scripted that the teacher had
little, if any, latitude in deciding how to implement them. For exam-
ple, in a research report on Connecticut school improvement plans
(Lohman, 2001) it was reported that:
Many of the schools have bought and implemented, or plan tobuy and implement, highly structured, off-the-shelf reform andintervention programs such as Success for All, Direct Instruction,and Reading Recovery. These programs are used by school dis-tricts around the country to ‘turn-around’ low-performingschools. Because they are heavily scripted and have to be imple-mented in a certain way, they require extensive staff training andsupplies. (pp. 2–3)
Furthermore, in a qualitative metasynthesis of student research
done on the relationship between high school testing and curricular
control, Au (2007) notes “systems of educational accountability built
on high-stakes, standardized tests are in fact intended to increase exter-
nal control over what happens in schools and classrooms” (p. 264).
Thus, what my students were finding is not uncommon; teachers
are not included in the selection process or in decisions about the
mode of implementation, and are unable to adapt the program to
their teaching styles or their students’ needs. Yet many would argue, as
I do, that school reform depends on the support and participation of
Framing Dropouts, or McLaren’s 2003 Life in Schools), and coming
together to discuss research, practice, and policy could help open the
conversations that are needed to identify what research questions
need to be asked and what one can do to answer them. (If getting
together is often a challenge, perhaps some of this could be done
online.) The discussions could certainly be broadened to the public
arena so as to include the PTA or other interested stakeholders.
There are multiple ethnographic reports of schools (e.g., Eckert,
1989; Metz, 1978; Peshkin, 1986, 1991) that read like novels that
could be used to stimulate thought and discussion, and perhaps even
change, if that is needed.
I strongly recommend teachers further their own education
through graduate programs that emphasize research in practice. If
your undergraduate institution offers a research course (or two), take
it (or them); if not, find one online and enroll. If your undergraduate
teacher-training program does not offer a research class, take research
as an elective. Aside from developing skills in how to read, critique,
design, and conduct research, there are other benefits that accrue from
taking such a class, such as developing critical thinking skills, learning
how to gather and assess information online and in the library, and
learning to organize and construct a well-structured essay, either in
the form of a research proposal or a research study.
Last, when you apply for jobs, ask if teachers are given the oppor-
tunity and encouraged to collaborate with peers to use reflection and
practitioner research to evaluate and improve curriculum, teaching,
18 � Journal of Education
Schmertzing • Expert Researchers and School Practitioners � 19
and learning. Look for schools that engage in these activities and have
supportive administrators who are committed to distributed leader-
ship, for those are the places where teachers who want to incorporate
research, reflection, and collaboration as integral components of their
professional practice will find a home. This is a significant quest, but
it is also rewarding, and it can have an impact on education in general.
In order to make the changes suggested, we will have to make sig-
nificant changes not only in the way we educate teachers, but also in
the way we define teachers’ work. Teachers need to have the time for
reflection, collaboration, and research built into their workday. The
pressure and impetus for such change needs to come from university
educators and policy makers and, just as importantly, from teachers
themselves. Grant and Murray (1999) have made it clear that schools
work better when teachers can engage in such activities and that this
engagement produces greater job satisfaction.
I recently asked one of my students, Ms. Barbara Hannaford, who
took multiple classes with me and is now my doctoral advisee, to
reflect on the significance of research in her practice as a teacher and
administrator. She wrote:
For public schools, the turning point for school improvement andaccountability exists within the federal mandates of the No ChildLeft Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Despite its numerous flaws andlack of adequate funding, NCLB has been successful in ensuringschools are focused on student learning and academic achieve-ment. Accordingly, the current climate of high stakes accountabil-ity and accompanying public scrutiny for America’s schools arelikely to remain on the horizon for a long time. Ironically, the verypiece of legislation intended to improve educational practicesthrough the use of research based instructional strategies andinterventions may also inhibit countless classroom teachers fromengaging in research: many administrators and teachers believethey are under extreme pressure to focus solely on standardizedtest content and raising test scores and do not have time to engagein research. However, it is imperative for public school educators,from classroom practitioners to building and system level admin-istrators, to embrace and to engage in research in order to ensure
academic achievement for all students. This imperative is driven bythe uniqueness of each learner and each learning environment. Byengaging in research, teachers and administrators are able to deter-mine the educational strategies and interventions that work bestwithin their own contextual setting rather than implementing one-size-fits-all models and methods for improving student learning.
The main point I want to make is that for schools to be more effec-
tive and for teachers to be more satisfied in their work, teachers need
to take more control over their workspace—and learning how to read,
evaluate, and conduct research is a significant component of such a
change. Historically, teachers have never had much control over their
work. The often-expressed idea that when teachers close the door they
are their own bosses has been challenged by Ingersoll (2003) in his
very important research book,Who Controls Teachers’Work? Ingersoll
shows how even within the closed-door classroom, the structure of
schools continues to strongly direct the activities within. Grant and
Murray (1999) say that K–12 teachers’ work needs to be more like the
work of university teachers (who have significantly more autonomy
over and flexibility in their work environments); they refer to the
potential movement in this direction as the “slow revolution” (p. 231).
If we are to make teachers’ work more engaging, if we are to make
schools places where professional teachers want to be and want to stay,
and if we are going to find out what is best in each classroom for spe-
cific groups of students, we are going to have to find ways to give
teachers a greater say in what goes on inside their classrooms, what the
standards of their profession should be, how to evaluate their work,
and how to make evaluation second nature to instruction. The slow
revolution requires changes on many fronts, and clearly one of the
most critical changes involves training teachers to be researchers.
EpilogueThe turn of the nineteenth century brought major changes in Amer-
ican schooling as the results of major changes in the society—from
small “village” schools to large urban and suburban schools. The
20 � Journal of Education
Schmertzing • Expert Researchers and School Practitioners � 21
education establishment responded over time to those new demands
by creating an educational elite (university faculty and school
administrators) responsible for guiding schools and their teachers
into the new millennium. This process took control out of the hands
of local communities and their teachers, and placed it in the hands
of the educational elite. As part of this shifting control, educational
research was established as the means by which to create a scientific
basis for the anticipated changes. Teachers were not expected either
to be experts in the supporting disciplines (like psychology), or to
understand or conduct research; nor were they expected to take a
significant role in determining policy or designing reform. Teachers
may have been rulers of their domains once the classroom doors
closed—an assumption debated by many, beginning with Jules
Henry’s critique of schooling in the late 1950s (Henry, 1963)—but
they were not even counselors to the rulers when it came to educa-
tional policy and reform. As I argue above, this created a disjuncture
between the work and worldview of university theorists and
researchers and school practitioners. The critique of the dominant
paradigm in educational research that was mounted in the late 1970s
and continues today (Gage, 1983) resulted in a movement that
included teachers doing more research in their schools and class-
rooms and taking a more active voice in policy and reform—at least
at the local level.
Once again, the turn of the century, this time the twentieth,
brought demands for changes in American schooling to meet the
needs of changing demographics in America where schools will have
to educate the traditionally neglected bottom half of their students,
and the globalization of the economy, where schools will have to edu-
cate all their students at higher levels, particularly in math and sci-
ence, to meet the challenges posed by emerging economies, most
notably China (Friedman, 2005). Once again, the calls for reform
come from people outside the schools (primarily politicians and
business representatives) and, once again, these calls include a
demand that the changes be research-based. Such calls, however, do
not imagine teacher-practitioners who conduct problem-based local
research, or those who investigate the context-specific and socio-cul-
tural foundations of local educational problems and issues; rather,
they anticipate large-scale, experimental research conducted by
experts in search of the elusive “best practices” that can be mandated
from outside to universally address the problems of American school-
ing. For school reform to be effective, for schools to meet the chal-
lenges of the new century, I believe that both major strands of research
must be supported and maintained. Teachers can, and should, take a
major role in that process: in doing so, they will retain the right—and,
indeed, meet their obligation—to do research in their own work set-
tings; they will increase their level of professionalism; they will
improve the quality of their workplaces; and they will make their
voices heard in the all-important and ongoing debates about where
American schools should and will go in the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgements
Rarely is a thought exercise the product of one mind—this essay is no excep-tion. First I must thank my students who have been a source of wonder andinspiration for me for more than 30 years. In particular, I am grateful tothose students in my research classes who continue to ask the question,“What does learning how to do research have to do with being a teacher?” Itwas that question I attempt to answer in this essay. My deepest appreciationto Ms. Lynne Larson who, in her role as guest editor of this issue of the jour-nal, encouraged me to write this piece and helped me at all stages along theway from conceptualization to final edit. Thanks to my friend and colleaguefrom the English faculty, Gardner Rogers, who served as critic, coach, andeditor par excellence. Last, thanks to my wife and coworker, Dr. LorraineSchmertzing, without whose guidance and support I would be lost, and whohas contributed so much to this project that she should probably be namedas co-author. I, of course, am responsible for any errors of thought or writ-ing that may remain.
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