Linda Hammersley-Fletcher
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Linda Hammersley-Fletcher is a Reader in Educational Leadership and Management at Manchester Metropolitan University. Linda has a long association with BELMAS having been a Council member and edited MiE for many years. Linda's interests include the ways in which teachers can be empowered through research activity; and the tensions arising between the ethical and values-based positioning of educators versus the dictats of market driven policy making.
This paper considers the role of teacher as researcher looking at how this operates in practice in one teaching school alliance in the North-West of England. Whilst there have been concerns about teacher research based on issues of quality and its value/usefulness (see for example Fenwick & Farrell, 2012; Goldacre, 2013; Bridges et al. 2009), we argue that collaborative partnerships between teachers and academics engaged in practice-based research can extend and develop the thinking of both parties. Through reconceptualising knowledge and practice teachers learn to synthesize knowledge and insights in ways that add to teacher professionalism and which in turn not only improve practice but increase their understandings of it (Winch et al.. 2013; Durbin & Nelson, 2014). This in turn facilitates the academic researcher to reconceptualise their understandings of school staff and practices.
This paper reports the teacher/author’s perspective of becoming involved in leading a research project spanning two academic years, which aimed to provide professional development for those running the project, and for those who became involved in these projects along the way. During the project, teacher researchers were educated to utilise observations, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and focus groups. Teachers really appreciated the opportunity to explore their teaching and pedagogy in new ways and felt that the methods employed helped challenge their preconceptions about what was going on in their classrooms. This paper draws on research diaries and project reports to explore the ways in which teacher confidence and enthusiasm grew as a part of this work and illustrates this journey with specific reference to the experiences of the first author with the second author acting as the academic critical friend exemplifying the role played by the second author to the wider teacher researcher group. Theory is used to help unpack the data and investigate in further detail how teacher development is reflected in this work.
Following involvement in the project, teachers reported feeling revitalised and re-energised, and empowered to make changes in their own settings, and more widely. As the project developed and grew, staff appreciation of the importance of research in educational settings also increased, and they began to see the value of questioning our practice, and not just continuing to do what we have always done, simply because it is what we have always done! We argue that taking a research approach is a sustainable way to engage in positive professional development.
