essay on teacher as a researcher

• Our Mission

Teacher as Researcher: The Ultimate Professional Development

Seeking to learn from what happens in the classroom, teacher researchers are innovators, curriculum drivers, agents of school change, and directors of their own professional development.

Teacher researchers pause each morning as they walk into their classrooms and ask, "What will my students teach me today?" To answer that question, they listen to and watch their students engage in authentic work; collect work samples, photographs, and transcripts to document what their students say and do; and use that information to evolve their practice as they celebrate and support the voices and experiences of the children they teach. In this sense, teacher researchers are innovators, curriculum drivers, agents of school change, and directors of their own professional development.

Support and Growth

As a doctoral student, I participated on the Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum Teacher Researcher Team led by Jane Hansen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia and Reading Hall of Fame Member . For years, in preparation for our teacher research team meetings, I selected a piece of student writing that spoke to me. It would be a piece that made me scratch my head and ask, "What can I learn as a writer and teacher of writing from this young author?" or "What do I need to do next to support her growth?" I would capture these contemplations in a one-pager. That one-pager was exactly that, one page, and its content was reflective of my immediate classroom experience. During our small group meetings, every teacher researcher brought her one-pager, shared her contemplations, and elicited response from her team. We met weekly for one and a half hours. We took our work and time together seriously, because we had an internal charge to grow.

Diversity is essential in creating strong and dynamic teacher research teams. Each year our six- to eight-member group spanned across ages, gender, years of experience, grades, and content areas. Difference expanded the vocabulary of the room. As we heard our fellow researchers use new words and frameworks to discuss their experiences, we began to internalize those new ways of thinking, and thus pushed our own understandings of who and how we teach. Coming to know students as individuals and opening spaces for them to grow in their own directions is difficult work. Teachers' voices and contemplations need support. That is what teacher research teams do; they provide a place to lean and space to explore and expand.

The Best Tools

I have three primary tools that I use as a teacher researcher:

• My first tool is my spiral notebook. Here I jot notes while I conference with students, tape in samples of their work, and record insights and observations. Each evening, I reflect on my notes and use them to plan for tomorrow.
• My second tool is my iPhone. Throughout the day, I take pictures and videos of my students' writing samples, projects, and engineering feats. I often interview them as they share their innovative thinking. These visuals sometimes go in my spiral notebook, sometimes in my Evernote app, and often on my blog to parents. I also use them when I share my students' thinking and creations at our research team meetings and when I present at conferences or write about my practice. The visuals serve as an outward product of our classroom's evolution.
• My third and most important tool is my teacher research team. These colleagues focus me and serve as a sounding board and support network for my contemplations in the classroom.

Tapping Into the Power

The initial power of being a teacher researcher illuminates as you live the classroom life beside your students and realize that they have much to teach you. As you start to listen and record their thinking, you are amazed at the work that is happening in your room. Because of your amazement, you begin to more purposely structure your classroom to meet your students' needs. And because of that new structure, your students' learning is intensified, and their talk and work starts to surpass your own expectations. That power of being a teacher researcher is then clarified and intensified as you sit and discuss your observations and insights with your own teacher research team and receive their response.

Today, I am a classroom teacher and the research coach for our Saints Action Research team, part of our school's Center for the Study of Boys . In that role, I lead a team of seven teacher researchers who teach across grade levels and content areas, researching the work that gets done in their classroom, on the field, and in the studio.

This year I challenge you to join (or perhaps start) a teacher research team. Invite the experiences in your classroom, the questions in your head, and the support of your team to become your most powerful professional development. After all, the most effective curriculum is the one that follows the students, and the most successful professional development is the one that grows from the questions in your classroom.

Becoming a Teacher-Researcher

• Share article

This post is by former teacher Rebecca Smith ( @rebeccaadsmith ), now Instructor of Education at the University of Portland ( @UPortland ).

Today’s post is the practitioner perspective on Monday’s post: Here’s What Works Best in Teacher Professional Development .

The Journey

When I became a doctoral research fellow with the Multnomah County Partnership for Education Research at the University of Portland four years ago, I didn’t realize that I would be taking on a new identity. Conducting district-driven research with university faculty members was a new experience for me. My previous life as a teacher had been just that — teaching. I did not realize that I had actually been a researcher of sorts that whole time, too! Becoming a researcher in my Ed.D. program at the University of Portland meant learning a new language, new skills, and engaging with educational issues from new perspectives, but all the while my teaching background and personal teaching experiences were also shaping my research. My three years as a fellow included dedicated mentorship from faculty members, collaboration with my cohort and other doctoral fellows, and hours of revisions. Many of our district reports involved ten or more edited versions, which is a feat in perseverance for a budding research-scholar. However, these experiences shaped me into the teacher-researcher I am today.

As a teacher-researcher, I am aware that I am always collecting and analyzing data on my students that informs my planning, instruction, and assessment. These data might include formal quantitative data from assignments and assessments, or they may simply be reading the body language of the students during a lesson or having students engage in self-reflection or peer feedback sessions. The recognition that all teachers are researchers has helped me own my new identity with confidence and allows me to more effectively educate our teacher candidates with this same awareness, which can make them stronger teacher-researchers as well.

Rebecca presents her research

How Teaching Informed My Research

Upon entering my Ed.D. program, I saw my professional path ahead take shape as one involving teacher mentorship. I had previously been moving around the country and the world, with an undergraduate degree in secondary education, to teach in many different contexts. These experiences of consistently being “new” to school communities developed in me a deep compassion for those who are the outsider, longing to fit in. Thus, I endeavored to welcome new teachers and students with an open and inclusive spirit. This led to professional opportunities as an official mentor and professional development provider for new teachers.

My experiences both as a new teacher and as a mentor to new teachers led to an interest in research about teacher professional development. As I pursued an EdD at the University of Portland, I also served as a doctoral fellow, which allowed me to explore my interest in teacher professional learning through numerous district-based research projects. One of these projects was discussed in Monday’s blog post .

Another formative project for me surrounded one district’s implementation of an innovative conference approach to their beginning-of-the-year professional development days. We were tasked with examining the self-perceived short-term and long-term effects on teachers and teacher learning based on this model, which allowed teachers the freedom to choose conference sessions to attend. This mixed-methods study analyzed quantitative and qualitative survey data from teachers following two years of conference attendance. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with 94% of participants agreeing that the content they learned at the conference would benefit their students, and 76% of participants who participated for two consecutive years stating that they applied information from the first year’s conference to their teaching practice.

The combination of these two projects grounded me in research on professional development, including adult learning theory, which formed a foundation that would eventually inform my own dissertation research. I conducted a mixed-methods study that investigated the professional learning experiences of secondary school educators and compared these experiences to national learning standards. Participants in this research included 223 educators from four high schools who took the 50-item Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI), which was grouped into seven Professional Learning Standards: learning communities, leadership, resources, data, learning designs, implementation, and outcomes.

Results of the quantitative data analysis revealed that the Leadership standard was statistically significantly higher than all other standards, suggesting that participants in this study thought their administrators prioritized professional learning and were collaborative participants in the school’s learning communities. The Data standard was statistically significantly lower than all other standards, indicating a lack of teacher knowledge on if or how data are used to drive professional learning practices in their schools. This finding draws attention to the need for teachers to gain confidence with using data as an integrated part of their practice. Qualitative feedback from focus group interviews and open-ended survey items suggested that adult learners feel empowered when being able to make choices surrounding their own learning experiences.

How My Research Informs My Teaching

The successful completion of my dissertation research is thanks in a large part to my experience within the Multnomah County Partnership for Education Research. The experience of learning to be a researcher by analyzing actual district data and solving real-life problems of practice made my own adult learning relevant and meaningful. The expertise and knowledge I gained from researching adult learning, in addition to my prior teaching experiences, led me to my current position as a faculty member in the University of Portland’s teacher preparation programs. I now teach research and methods courses to student teacher candidates, and I am able to apply both the skills and the knowledge of my own experiences within the learning communities I share with my students.

A New Identity

As a teacher-researcher, I am a more effective educator. I am constantly gathering data to inform my practice. I strive to help my Education students own this identity as well, so they begin their teaching careers already recognizing the importance of data-driven learning. My professional journey has been largely shaped ( p < .05) by my fellowship work analyzing district data, and I am living proof ( n = 1) that a district-university partnership model for creating practitioner-researchers is an effective means for educating teacher-researchers.

The opinions expressed in Urban Education Reform: Bridging Research and Practice are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Sign Up for The Savvy Principal

Student Teacher as Researcher

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2015
• pp 1008–1010
• Cite this reference work entry

• John Loughran 2  

92 Accesses

The idea of student teacher as researcher should sit comfortably with the intentions of teacher education and the process of learning to teach. It seems obvious that if student teachers are placed in positions where they can learn to challenge their existing views of practice through researching their own experiences of teaching, then such learning should be both valuable and meaningful in shaping their subsequent practice. Despite the apparent common sense of such a view, there is very little literature to suggest it is the case.

Project START (Student Teachers as Researching Teachers, Cochran-Smith 1991 ) is one of the few examples of the type of approach briefly noted above. Cochran-Smith described project START as being based on the notion of “collaborative resonance” because it was designed to “Prepare student teachers who know how to learn from teaching by inquiring collaboratively into their own practices and who help build cultures of teaching that support ongoing professional...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Bullock SM (2011) Inside teacher education: challenging prior views of teaching and learning. Sense Publishers, Rotterdam

Book   Google Scholar  

Cochran-Smith M (1991) Reinventing student teaching. J Teach Educ 42(2):104–118

Article   Google Scholar  

Featherstone D, Munby H, Russell T (1997) Finding a voice while learning to teach. Falmer Press, London

Google Scholar  

Loughran JJ (2004) Student teacher as researcher: accepting greater responsibility for learning about teaching. Aust J Educ 48(2):212–220

Munby H, Russell T (1994) The authority of experience in learning to teach: messages from a physics method class. J Teach Educ 4(2):86–95

Russell T, Bullock S (1999) Discovering our professional knowledge as teachers: critical dialogues about learning from experience. In: Loughran J (ed) Researching teaching: methodologies and practices for understanding pedagogy. Falmer Press, London, pp 132–151

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Education, Monash University, Wellington Rd., 3800, Clayton, VIC, Australia

John Loughran

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John Loughran .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Emeritus Professor of Science and Technology Education, Faculty of Education Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Richard Gunstone

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Loughran, J. (2015). Student Teacher as Researcher. In: Gunstone, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2150-0_252

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2150-0_252

Published : 04 January 2015

Publisher Name : Springer, Dordrecht

Print ISBN : 978-94-007-2149-4

Online ISBN : 978-94-007-2150-0

eBook Packages : Humanities, Social Sciences and Law Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Education

Share this entry

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Teacher as Researcher

• Most Cited Papers
• Most Downloaded Papers
• Newest Papers
• HuHumanities Curriculum Project Follow Following
• Educational Improvement Follow Following
• Educational Theory and Practice Follow Following
• Rousseau Follow Following
• Jean Jaques Rousseau Follow Following
• Assessment Follow Following
• Education Follow Following
• Teacher-Student Interaction Follow Following
• Visual Culture Education Follow Following
• Curriculum Reform Follow Following

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• Academia.edu Journals
•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• News & Stories

What Motivates Teachers to Enter the Profession?

In a piece for EdSurge, researchers share their work that suggests the reason someone chooses to become a teacher could determine how successful they will be in the role.

Andrew Kwok and Brendan Bartanen

August 12, 2024

This commentary was originally published by EdSurge. (Photo iStock)

What if why you choose to become a teacher determines how successful you will be in the role?

Society has always been fascinated to learn about the motivations of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians and how they came to their profession. We think about their career trajectory and consider its relevance to ourselves or people we know. What if, similarly, we learned about the motivations of aspiring K-12 teachers, and used that to predict how effective they will be and how long they will stay in the classroom?

Persistent concerns reiterate teacher shortages throughout the nation . Recent evidence has also pointed to declining interest in becoming a teacher, aligned with the decreased professionalization, prestige and pay of the sector . Yet noble individuals press forward and choose to educate our children anyway. Why, in spite of the headwinds, do they become teachers?

As professors and researchers in university teaching and learning programs, we’re fascinated by this question. We figured that learning more about teacher motivation could help us better understand teacher pipelines and find ways to diversify and improve the quality of our nation’s teachers, so we designed a study to gather more information.

From 2012-2018, nearly 2,800 preservice teachers within one of the largest teacher preparation programs in Texas responded to an essay prompt, “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We used a natural language processing algorithm to review their responses.

Historically , people went into teaching for relatively straightforward reasons: They desired a stable career, enjoyed having summers off, or had family members who were teachers. However, across the essay responses, we found that those motivations were not the most prevalent, nor were they related to teacher outcomes — but others were.

Read the full story, including the study results, at EdSurge.

News Information

Media contact.

Audrey Breen

[email protected]

Research Center or Department

• EdPolicyWorks

Featured Faculty

• Brendan Bartanen

News Topics

• Teaching & Learning

Related News

How Summer Mindfulness Practices Can Help Mitigate School-year Stress

The History of Building Citizenship Through Education in the Dominican Republic

Introducing Tomorrow's Teachers Fund: Bridging the Gap for Aspiring Educators

Q&A With Dean Stephanie Rowley

Deserted: The U.S. Military's Sexual Assault Crisis as a Cost of War

Over the past decade, the U.S. military has implemented policies to promote gender equality, notably lifting the ban on women in combat roles in 2013 and opening all military jobs to women by 2016. Yet, even as U.S. military policy reforms during the “War on Terror” appear to reflect greater equality, violent patterns of abuse and misogyny continued within military workplaces.

This author of this report found that sexual assault prevalence in the military is likely two to four times higher than official government estimations. Based on a comparison of available data collected by the U.S. Department of Defense to independent data, the research estimates there were 75,569 cases of sexual assault in 2021 and 73,695 cases in 2023. On average, over the course of the war in Afghanistan, 24 percent of active-duty women and 1.9 percent of active-duty men experienced sexual assault. The report highlights how experiences of gender inequality are most pronounced for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of racism and sexism and are one of the fastest-growing populations within the military. Independent data also confirm queer and trans service members’ disproportionately greater risk for sexual assault.

The report notes that during the post-9/11 wars, the prioritization of force readiness above all else allowed the problem of sexual assault to fester, papering over internal violence and gender inequalities within military institutions.

READ FULL PAPER >

Executive Summary >

Looks and Gaming: Who and Why?

We investigate the relationship between physical attractiveness and the time people devote to video/computer gaming. Average American teenagers spend 2.6% of their waking hours gaming, while for adults this figure is 2.7%. Using the American Add Health Study, we show that adults who are better-looking have more close friends. Arguably, gaming is costlier for them, and they thus engage in less of it. Physically attractive teens are less likely to engage in gaming at all, whereas unattractive teens who do game spend more time each week on it than other gamers. Attractive adults are also less likely than others to spend any time gaming; and if they do, they spend less time on it than less attractive adults. Using the longitudinal nature of the Add Health Study, we find supportive evidence that these relationships are causal for adults: good looks decrease gaming time, not vice-versa.

We are grateful for helpful comments from Sarah Jewell, Simonetta Longhi, Samantha Rawlings, Rachel Scarfe, Dominik Schreyer, and Paul Telemo. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Download Citation Data

• data appendix

More from NBER

In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship  — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .

Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities committed to moral inquiry, research, teaching, and professional service in healthcare

Call for abstracts: reproductive ethics conference.

The Ninth Annual Reproductive Ethics Conference will take place in Galveston Jan. 9 and 10, 2025. The goal of this conference is to explore the range of topics addressed in reproductive ethics. We welcome individuals from all professional fields to create a rich and robust discussion. We are seeking abstracts for individual presentations, 3-4 person panels, and posters. View the flier linked below for more information.

The Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities Seminar Series Presents: "Concepts of Race in the History of Reproductive Medicine"

By Dr. Miriam Rich Assistant Professor, Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities

Thursday, August 8, 2024 12 - 1 p.m. Health Education Center 3.206 Click HERE to register

50th Anniversary of the Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities Timeline

In April of 1970, both The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Science at Houston and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston sponsored the symposium "Humanism in Medicine" that would help shape and give impetus to the new institute that would emerge at UTMB in 1973. This new institute would be dedicated to medicine and the humanities.

View Past Seminars & Events

Twitter - X, Log-in

Dr. Moses publishes essay in STAT on the history of stigma amid rising rates of syphilis

Aug 14, 2024, 10:14 AM by Cortney Martin

On May 30, 2024, IBBH Assistant Professor Dr. Jacob D. Moses and Dr. Allan Brandt (Harvard University) published an essay, “ Stigma and the Return of Syphilis, ” in the health news outlet STAT. Syphilis, one of the oldest infections known to humans, has returned to the U.S. at epidemic rates that have been climbing since 2001. In 2022, the last year with complete data, the highest number of infections were recorded in more than 70 years. Stemming the return of syphilis will take more than manufacturing more penicillin. It will require counteracting stigma, a longstanding problem that has resulted in critical failures in health care access and delivery. 

• Health Care
• UTMB Support Areas