Teachers as researchers - how to do a research in the classroom
Every time I think of a good teacher (and I am lucky to have known such teachers personally), I cannot help noticing that although they are all very different, they have one thing in common: they all do research. The research I mean is not always formal, in fact, many of them have problems trying to formalise their research or to describe its results, but they keep doing it anyway. For some of them research means a constant search for new words and meanings, new ways of putting things in English. This helps them to keep up their proficiency in English, although very often this is not enough for any serious development as teachers. Other teachers, apart from brushing up their English, try to learn as much as possible about new things they read in new textbooks, like what is zorbing ("Enjoy English" 10) or who Squanto was ("Happy English.ru" 9) etc. This is also a kind of research because to do it you need to find some internet sites or books with the information, you need to compare the information you've got from different sources and put it together to be able to explain it to the pupils, so just using a dictionary will not be enough. Some teachers try to do formal research. There are teachers who do it because their methodological unit requires it, and there are those who do it because they are truly interested. Something tells me that the majority of our forum members belong to the latter group.
A frequent problem that such researchers encounter is that they just read whatever they can find on a certain topic and then put the information together. This is what makes it difficult for them to formalise the results of their research. In fact, such an approach would make it difficult to achieve significant results as well.
So how could a teacher work if she/he wants to do some true research, in the academic sence of the word, something that could be formalised, described and published or presented at conferences?
The first step would be to formulate a hypothesis. Of course, to be able to do that a researcher should already have substantial background knowledge of the field she/he is going to research, but since we are talking about professional teachers and research in methodology, this should not be a big problem. A hypothesis is usually formulated around a "what if" idea. That is, what happens if I use this method? Will my teaching become more effective if I use ICT? What will happen if I combine ICT and the process-oriented approach to teaching personal letter writing in grade 8? You may have noticed that with every sentence the idea becomes more concrete, more down-to-earth and manageable. In fact, if we turn the last question into a statement, we will already get a hypothesis, namely: "Teaching 8th-graders to write personal letters will be more effective if we use ICT and the process-oriented approach." This is a research that can be carried out during one academic year, and now it is time to further break it down into smaller, easily identifiable and manageable chunks.
Breaking the work down is necessary because there are stages to go through, with an identifiable result for every stage. Now that you've got your hypothesis, you need to see what other people have done in this area. As likely as not, you will find that noone else has tackled this topic yet. This means that what you do will be very interesting for those who will follow in your footsteps. But if you do find that someone has already done something fairly similar (for example, used ICT and the process-oriented approach to teach essay-writing to 10th-graders), you will be able to see how that person's findings work in your particular classroom and what you can do to apply them to teaching personal letter writing to younger students. In fact, the result of this preparatory stage would be your knowledge of what has been done in this area and what other researchers think about this problem. If no research has been done in this area yet, you will have to find what other researchers mean by ICT, how the process-oriented approach to teaching writing is different from other approaches and how it can be used to teach personal letter writing. With this done, you are ready to plan practical action.
Practical preparation for action. The main aim of every research is to see if your hypothesis works, if it is correct. In our example it would mean to make sure that the use of ICT and the process-oriented approach to teaching writing will enable you to effectively teach your 8th-graders to write personal letters. You will have learnt from your previous background information study that ICT here may mean anything from specially designed learning software to the use of e-mail and blogs. Also, you will have read about the stages of the process-oriented approach to teaching writing. Now it's your job to decide how and when the ICT will come into your teaching in your 8th grade. For example, you may choose to teach students the process-oriented approach first and then introduce ICT, or you may combine the two things and use them simultaneously. You may prefer to go along with the logic of the learning software, or you may decide for yourself on the stages in teaching. You will also see what your students already know about writing personal letters (you can always give them a task and see how well they do it - and in the end you'll give them a similar task and see what has changed during the year). In any case, this is your planning stage. After the plans are laid, the next stage is the practical testing of your hypothesis, that is, the teaching.
Testing your hypothesis. Teaching is teaching. This is what teachers are for, this is what they are supposed to be good it. The only difference between your everyday teaching and teaching as part of your experiment is that here you pay a special attention to what makes your teaching more (or less, as the case may be) effective while using ICT and the process-oriented approach to teaching writing. And also you make notes, you describe what and how your students have learnt about writing personal letters. At the end of the year you should be able to see what progress your students have made and, based on your previous teaching experience you can tell what part of the progress can be attributed to new methods and approaches. So all you have to do now is describe your experiment.
Describing the outcomes. should not be too hard to do. First, you already have your hypothesis. You have tested it in your classroom. You have been taking notes about how the teaching was going and writing down your observations. Now you have a large part of the job done, some of it is already in writing and some is in your head. All you need to do now is write it down on paper, attach examples of students' work from all stages of the experiment, and prepare areport on what and how you have done and what you think will be effective in any other classroom, and what you would not recommend other teachers to do because it is not effective.
Hopefully, this will help some young teachers to begin to do research on a regular basis. By the way, what are you planning to study/research this year?
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