THE POWER OF ACTION RESEARCH:
SUPPORTING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING THROUGH INQUIRY

Ron Wideman

This paper describes my emerging understanding of the phenomenology of change from the teacher's perspective and how action research has informed that understanding. In 1991, I completed doctoral research on how secondary school teachers go about making substantial changes in their classroom practices. At the time, there was considerable concern that the enormous sums (Bierly and Berliner, 1982) being spent on traditional forms of top-down, instruction-based, in-service teacher education did not result in teachers changing their teaching methods in meaningful ways (Fullan, 1982). Fullan had indicated that one substantial cause of this massive failure was a lack of understanding of the phenomenology of change – that is, how change is experienced from the perspective of the teacher making the change. I, therefore, undertook to study change from the teacher’s perspective.

The study was exploratory because the topic was under studied from the perspective of the teacher. The methodology was based on the grounded theory approach that Glaser and Strauss (1967) developed to derive theory directly from data. To maximize the possibility that the findings would be applicable beyond the people and settings studied, I involved a diverse group of teachers and invited them to tell their stories in their own ways. Fifty-one teachers, from twenty secondary schools, participated in the study by completing open-ended questionnaires. Of this number, fourteen teachers (seven males and seven females), from twelve schools, were interviewed in depth.

The study enabled me to develop a descriptive, theoretical model of how change occurs from the teacher’s perspective (Wideman,1992, 1995). I also identified factors that help and hinder teachers in their change initiatives.

Neither the participants in my study nor myself, were aware of action research at the time that the study was conducted. When I was first introduced to action research in 1995, however, I responded enthusiastically because I recognized similarities between the process of action research and the change process I had identified. Furthermore, action research addresses key factors that help and hinder teachers in their efforts to change. In the years since 1995, I have become active in promoting, supporting, and studying action research (Delong & Wideman, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Auger & Wideman, 1999) and have been impressed with the enthusiasm, so many teachers have developed, for this powerful approach to professional development and school improvement.

I will begin the paper by describing the change process that emerged from my research, and the key factors that helped and hindered teachers as they worked to make changes in their classroom practices. I will then compare that change process to the process of action research. I will argue that action research strikes a powerful chord with teachers because it resonates with their prior experience with change, and because it enables them to pursue their investigations more effectively by systematizing and supporting the change process.

Change From the Teacher’s Perspective

Participants, in my study, changed their classroom practices through a creative, voluntarily undertaken, problem-oriented process of investigation. The problems with practice they chose to investigate were their own - that is, change was not undertaken to satisfy demands by education authorities.

Change occurred in distinct periods measuring months or years. A period of change extended from the time the teacher began to identify a problem with practice, until the problem was solved to his or her satisfaction. The problem that focused on a period of change, tended to arise from the solution developed in the preceding period. Upon reflection, therefore, teachers could identify a coherent personal history of professional learning and change, that extended back through their careers.

From the teacher’s perspective, the result of a period of change was always an innovation. Rather than adopting and implementing a change that had been developed by some authority, the teacher created practices that fit his or her professional situation. Depending on the amount of assistance the teacher was able to access, innovation felt like invention to some and like imitation and adaptation to others.

The change process, itself, was grounded in the scientific method. Garth Boomer (1987) described the scientific method as fundamental to human brain functioning. He wrote:

Human beings are born scientists. We come into the world hypothesizing. The human brain is biologically the same instrument across all but physically brain-impaired humans, and it goes about "processing the world" in the same way. When you boil down all the psychologies, including all but the most banal behaviouralism, you are left with the basic human processing formula: problem – observation – hypothesis – testing – evaluation. The surface manifestations of this basic formula are infinitely varied: the vehicles and media of learning vary from case to case; "messiness" and non-linearity may be observable features; but there is always (the) common, underlying "brain strategy." (p.9)

Participants used the scientific method, not in the stereotypical ways often attributed to scientists, but informally, repeatedly, and with many variations, as a means of continual self-correction to create personally workable solutions to the problems, with practice, they identified.

From the teacher’s perspective, a period of change comprised four overlapping phases – initiation, exploration, incorporation, and extension.

Initiation Phase

In the Initiation Phase, the teacher identified a problem with his/her practice. The problem was compelling, emotionally and cognitively, because it arose from a comparison of the teacher’s values and instructional goals with the perceived results of his or her teaching. For example, Martha found that every year exam results got worse, and the students were not writing or studying as well.

They weren’t interested. They weren’t motivated, and it showed up on exams more than anything. In a lot of the other work they did, they had the information provided. You know, they’d go home and write an essay. But on an exam, when they were asked to recall or to use what they’d learned, to analyze or synthesize, they did not have any knowledge. I was just appalled. I thought, "Are students really getting this bad or am I doing something wrong?" It really came home to me. And I would watch myself in the classroom and I would look at those dead faces and the ones who looked at the ceiling as you lectured.

Once a problem was identified, the teacher searched for a hypothetical solution that could serve as a beginning point for experimentation. The hypothesis was chosen because it resonated with the teacher’s values and personal experience. In other words, the teacher had reason to believe that it might work. For example, as a university student, Charles had never really been happy with the lecture system. When he met a challenging, general-level class that responded negatively to traditional stand-up teaching, he thought to himself, "These are students who must deal with problems. They learn by doing things. Chemistry must be a hands-on program."

So I began to re-write the course on that basis. I knew nothing about learning styles or anything like that at the time. I just knew that these kids obviously learned by doing stuff, and I started teaching from that point of view. "Here’s the equipment. I’ll cover what has to be covered in terms of introductory material – five or ten minutes of the period maybe. The rest of the time is for you, and you make sense of what you do. I’ll be there to help you if you can’t make sense of it."

Exploration Phase

In the Exploration Phase, the teacher began a process of experimentation to assess, revise, and develop the hypothetical solution. Experiments were evaluated in terms of their impact on student achievement and/or student attitudes to learning. Difficulties were met in trying to make the change work and solutions were not readily apparent. Teachers described their experience with words like "searching," "scrambling," "flying by the seat of the pants," and "learning by trial and error." Martha described the uncertain and experimental nature of the Exploration Phase vividly as involving:

repetition – keeping at it – practising – making slight modifications – using different materials, time lines, instructions to students, different evaluation. Things worked differently each time. Some attempts worked better than others. I realized that slight changes could dramatically affect results and that failure was not always because of poor technique itself, but the result of external factors, or assuming too much, or expecting too much.

One reason for teachers’ uncertainty in the Exploration Phase, was that they lacked cognitive understanding of the changes they were developing and could not respond adequately to challenges from students, colleagues, and administration. Charles remembered that feeling particularly well:

My principal at the time sat in on one of my classes to inspect me. Afterwards he said, "What is it you do? It worked so well." And I said, "I can’t tell you." He said, "Well you had better start thinking about what it is you do so well. Start thinking about putting it on paper, because if you don’t and can’t articulate why and what you are doing, you can’t defend it, improve on it, or pass it on to anybody. You had better start thinking about what you do in the classroom and why it works so well for you."

The Exploration Phase was more difficult for some teachers than it was for others. Teachers who had the most difficult time, were making changes in practice that required a restructuring of their theories of action (Argyris and Schon, 1974) and, consequently, were experiencing conflicted beliefs about education. For example, Martha, who had relied heavily on the lecture method and was now trying to develop her use of co-operative small group learning, had difficulty adjusting to classroom noise during group activities. She had believed that a quiet classroom was a productive classroom and found the amount of student talk emotionally upsetting. In addition, as she gave more responsibility to students for their own learning, she felt she had less control over the material that was being learned. In a lecture, she could be certain that all the important points were covered, but in group work, she could not be as certain of what the students were, and were not, learning.

While all teachers experienced negative feelings such as uncertainty, guilt, and fear during the Exploration Phase, teachers, whose beliefs about education were conflicted, experienced such feelings more intensely. They felt far less confidence in their ability to understand, predict, and control classroom activity with certainty because their theories of practice were in flux. The uncertainty of the Exploration Phase was so intense, that almost all teachers considered abandoning their changes, and a number considered leaving the profession entirely.

Incorporation Phase

During the Incorporation Phase, experimentation, by the teacher, continued and resulted in the development of a solution that fit the teacher’s unique situation. There were feelings of increased confidence and understanding and a more focused approach to accessing needed assistance. For example, Frank described starting to fit things together, so he knew what he was doing and why. He began to feel as though he had answers to the questions students and parents asked, and that his answers were based on results rather than simply his own beliefs.

Recognition, reward, and other kinds of positive responses from students, colleagues, and administration increasingly validated the change. For example Bruce vividly remembered the appreciation expressed by his students:

I started to see the differences more from the comments the students made - like, "Gee, I wish everybody in the school did this. Why doesn’t every teacher teach this way." This made me think that the change I was making was having some kind of effect. Not that I saw any academic improvement in terms of marks, but they were enjoying their learning more because they saw some organization to it, and they knew what was expected of them.

Extension Phase

In the Extension Phase, the teacher applied the change in contexts beyond the original. The first extension was to other classes. As confidence increased, however, the teacher became increasingly enthusiastic about sharing his/her change with others. A desire to contribute to the widespread use of what had been developed, usually emerged. As Charles put it:

I guess I started to become interested in helping other teachers shortly after my change started working for me. I can’t say why it was. I guess it was just the people I worked with. Once the stuff was developed - once I started saying, "Look, what we need is work sheets that are student centred" – once it started working, it was easy. Other people simply started to pick it up.

Some teachers sought positions of added responsibility in order to promote what they had developed. Some tried to impose their change on other teachers. For example, as a department head, Don came to realize that he was too insistent:

I wanted these people to do this and then I’m hearing that they are not. I’m trying to show by example but nobody is watching. Nobody is ready. I guess I’m just a little bit ahead of them.

What Helped and Hindered Teachers’ Change Initiatives

Teachers described four key factors that helped them change their classroom practices. These were learning occasions, student centredness, alignment with administration priorities for change, and collegial collaboration. In general, what hindered teachers was the converse of what helped - routine, self concern, non-alignment with administration priorities, and isolation.

Learning Occasions

Cyril Houle (1980), a pioneer in the development of theory about professional learning, identified routine as one of the great enemies of the continuing ability of professionals to learn from practice. Teachers in my study told me that satisfaction with one’s current practices is a key block to undertaking change. They also attested to the powerful impact of what Houle (1980) called "learning occasions" in initiating a period of change. A learning occasion disrupts the teacher’s routine and theory of action in ways that demand that he or she do things differently. For the participants in my research, learning occasions included entry to the profession, changing clientele, system wide change, promotion, and leaves of absence. These occasions helped initiate the change process, by raising troublesome problems with practice, and sometimes by providing possible solutions to such problems.

The key factor in enabling a teacher to begin the change process, was the teacher’s willingness to "own" the problem he or she was experiencing rather than seeing it as someone else’s responsibility. For example, Martha blamed the "dead faces" she saw in front of her each day on the quality of the students she was teaching and arranged a transfer to another school in which the students were reputed to be better. It was only after six months in the new school that she was forced to conclude that the lack of student involvement and initiative resulted from, "something I was doing or not doing."

Student Centredness

The participants in my study identified student centredness as a personal quality that supported the teacher in his or her ability to make changes to practice. Teachers who focused on the impact of change on themselves, found it harder to make changes through investigation. As Charles put it:

If teachers are the focus then change seldom takes place. I realize that change only starts when teachers feel comfortable enough to begin. The difficulty is that if teachers focus on themselves, the degree of discomfort associated with making the change always acts as a barrier. If they can see the benefit to the students then their personal discomfort is something they can endure.

Alignment with Administration Priorities

The more the teacher possessed personal qualities that facilitate learning through investigation - like self-confidence, self-directedness, and willingness to take risks - the less the teacher’s achievement of change depended on sources of help external to the teacher. However, all teachers seemed to benefit from administrative support, particularly those who were struggling to overcome conflicting beliefs about education. The kinds of support identified by teachers included encouraging investigation, championing specific changes, providing resources, and recognizing achievements.

Senge (1990) emphasized the importance of developing alignment of purpose within an organization wherein shared vision becomes an extension of the personal visions of individuals. When there was general alignment among school system administration in favour of a particular change, teachers, who were working on that kind of change, received substantial support. If support at one level of administration was missing, support at other levels increased in importance for the teacher.

In general, innovations, or in-service education activities, imposed by the administration were considered helpful if the teacher thought they addressed, in some way, the kind of problem with practice on which he or she was working. However, if teachers did not see a connection between what was imposed and their personal priorities for change, the administration’s initiatives were seen as hindrances because they took time and energy away from teachers’ own priorities.

Collegial Collaboration

Feeling isolated and alone made change much harder for teachers in the study. This was particularly the case for teachers who were experiencing conflicted beliefs about education and who possessed personal qualities, like other-directedness and fear of taking risks, that impede learning through investigation. Conversely, the teachers who had the easiest and most satisfying experience with change, were the ones who were able to develop strong collegial support systems. In general, the males in the study were more reliant on formal collaborative structures, like committees and subject departments, within the education hierarchy. Females, on the other hand, were far more creative about building informal collaborative networks.

The key benefits of collaboration, reported by teachers, were the opportunity to give and receive emotional support, to share experience, and to give and receive help in solving difficulties. In essence, collaboration provided teachers with the same kinds of benefits received from administration support but on a more personal level. There was encouragement for investigation within the group, collective championing of specific changes, provision of resources in the form of a number of minds being applied to a problem, and recognition by one’s peers of individual contributions.

Comparing Action Research and the Change Process

The process of change, I describe, has striking similarities with action research (McNiff, Lomax, & Whitehead, 1996; McNiff, 1992). In both, the teacher takes responsibility for his or her own professional learning. The process is initiated when the teacher identifies a problem with, or question about, his or her own practice. The teacher uses an experimental approach, trying out new techniques in the classroom and evaluating their results. The teacher develops knowledge that eventually resolves the question that drives the investigation and then shares with other teachers what has been learned.

Despite these similarities, however, the teachers in my study could not be said to be conducting action research because a number of key features of action research were not evident in their experience with change. Firstly, unlike action researchers, the teachers in my study were not self aware of their own change process. A number told me that participating in my study provided the first opportunity they had had to reflect on the process of change they had gone through. They had not planned to initiate change but were, in Campbell’s words (1973, 1988), "carried away to adventure" by the problem that drove their inquiry. They did not know, while they were in the midst of the process, whether they would emerge successfully on the other side. This was particularly disturbing to those teachers who were undergoing transformational change that involved restructuring their theories of practice (Argyris and Schon, 1974).

Secondly, unlike action researchers, the teachers in my study did not employ a systematic data collection and analysis process. Instead, their approach to data collection and analysis was largely unplanned, intuitive, and informal. Teachers often had to invent the process of their investigations as well as the content because they were not knowledgeable about research practices. This contributed to their feelings of uncertainty in the Exploration Phase and the difficulties they experienced in defending their changes from challenges by colleagues, school administration, parents, and students.

Thirdly, unlike action researchers, the teachers in my study did not record their investigations. No one mentioned systematic journaling, memorandum writing, audio taping, or other methods of ongoing record keeping. This contributed to teachers’ lack of self-awareness and self-confidence and made it unlikely that any of them could share what they had learned beyond the level of workshop leading or subject department management. No one, for example, had written articles for publication in educational journals.

How Action Research Strengthens the Change Process

Based on the experience of my research participants, I believe that many teachers are drawn toward action research for two reasons. Firstly, they intuitively recognize the resonance between action research and the ontologically rooted, investigative, learning process that they already use to improve practice. Secondly, they see that by systematizing and supporting the change process in significant ways, action research makes change easier to accomplish. Action research supports teachers’ efforts to improve their practices in the following important ways:

1. Because action research is a process that can be described, teachers can understand what they are going through as they work to change their classroom practices. As a result they can feel in command of the process even when they are not sure of the outcomes. The emphases in action research on working with critical friends and on recording one’s study, helps develop teachers’ metacognition and provides them with perspective.
    
2. Action research enables teachers to approach change systematically. The emphasis on data collection and analysis, makes it possible for teachers to design, conduct, and evaluate experiments with assurance, to assess the impact of an innovation on student learning, and to involve parents, colleagues, and administration constructively. Collecting and analyzing data and recording one’s study, also provides teachers with hard evidence to defend the changes they are making and to contribute to educational knowledge in a number of contexts.
    
3. Action research provides teachers with collegial support for change. The emphasis on the use of critical friends in action research, combats professional isolation, and also helps teachers design their studies, analyze their data, and verify their findings. Collegial collaboration also enables teachers, who may be experiencing lack of self-confidence and other troubling emotions in the midst of change, to feel that they are still a source of important professional knowledge, able to give, as well as to receive, assistance.
    
4. Action research enables educational authorities to empower teachers to take responsibility for, and participate actively in, school improvement and professional development. Administrators can champion and model action research in their own work, provide encouragement and resources to support teachers’ investigations, bring teachers, who are studying similar questions, together as critical friends, and provide opportunities for teachers to share their studies in ways that are comfortable to them.

Action research provides administrators with an alternative to traditional adoption- and implementation-based change strategies. In the Extension Phase, a number of the teachers in my study tried to employ such models to impose changes that they, themselves, had developed through inquiry and were horrified when they met resistance from teachers as a result. Administrators need to remember that from the perspective of the teacher, the same creative, voluntarily undertaken, investigative process that was used by the developers of an innovation such as, co-operative small group learning, is used by teachers who choose to develop the use of that innovation in their classrooms.

Conclusions

During the last thirty years, research has shown that top-down delivered, professional development and curriculum implementation initiatives by governments and academics, have been largely ineffective in creating substantial changes in classroom practices (Fullan, 1982, Leithwood & Cousins, 1988). At the same time, there have been repeated calls to recognize the importance of the individual teacher in the change process (Fullan, 1982, 1993; Hargreaves, 1994a) and to learn more about how change is experienced from the teacher’s perspective (Fulan, 1982; Hargreaves 1994b). If teachers are to respond to the current demand for greater accountability for achieving results, they must have greater freedom and support to direct their own professional learning to achieve those results.

Action research systematizes and supports an ontologically rooted learning process that teachers have been shown to use in changing their classroom practices. In 1980, Cyril Houle identified three modes of learning that professionals employ to achieve learning goals:

• inquiry: the process of creating some new idea, technique, policy, or strategy of action;
• instruction: the process of receiving established skills, knowledge, or sensitivities;
• performance: the process of internalizing an idea or practice habitually so that it becomes a fundamental part of the way the professional thinks or acts.

In the past, there has been a widespread tendency for in-service teacher education to be planned and implemented by educational authorities and to emphasize the instructional mode. It is this approach that has been shown to be largely ineffective in producing changes in teacher performance. The link between instruction and performance, in other words, the transference of learning to practice, has been shown, in a variety of contexts, to be tenuous at best.

My own research suggests that when educational change is approached from the perspective of the teacher, there is a Copernican revolution in thinking that places inquiry in a central position. When inquiry is so situated, the connection between learning and performance is strengthened because teachers plan and implement their own inquiries, the purpose of which is to improve their own practices. Action research provides sure and certain methods for improving practice through inquiry. In addition, within the context of action research, instructional forms of in-service teacher education can make valuable contributions to the improvement of practice because teachers, themselves, seek out instruction that is relevant to their own perceived needs.

By strengthening and supporting the inquiry mode, action research provides a powerful source of help to teachers in confronting the learning occasions that are an increasingly frequent part of professional life. Today, system-wide changes being imposed by government challenge teachers to improve student learning. Government initiatives, like publishing clearly measurable expectations for student learning, initiating standardized province-wide testing of student achievement, introducing teacher re-certification, increasing school based management, and increasing the role of school councils in school governance, all increase the likelihood that individual teachers will be frequently confronted with situations that challenge them to re-think their classroom practices. Appropriate responses by teachers to these learning occasions require them to analyze the problematic situation, to develop and implement changes in practice, and to assess those changes in terms of improved results.

Resource List

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San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Auger, W. & Wideman, R. (1999). Opening the door to life-long professional learning: Action research in the preservice teacher education program. Paper presented at the ISATT Conference, Dublin Ireland, July 1999.

Bierly, M. & Berliner, D. (1982). The elementary school teacher as learner. The Journal of Teacher Education, 33(6).

Boomer, G. (1987). "Addressing the problem of elsewhereness: A case for action research in school. Pp. 4-12. In D. Goswami & P. Stillman (Eds.). Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Campbell, J. (1973). The hero with a thousand faces. New York: Harper and Row.

Delong, J. & Wideman, R. (1996). School improvement that honours teacher professionalism.

In N. Halsall & L. Hossick (Eds.). Act, reflect, revitalize (pp. 15 – 17). Mississauga, ON:
The Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation.

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Available at http://www.nipissingu.ca/oar/

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McNiff, J., Lomax, P., & Whitehead, J. (1996). You and your action research project. London: Routledge.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday Currency.

Wideman, R. (1991). How secondary school teachers change their classroom practices. Ed.D. dissertation. University of Toronto.

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Bibiographical Note:

Ron Wideman,
Assistant Professor of Education, Nipissing University, North Bay

Academic Background:

• BA, University of Toronto,
• M.Ed. Ed.D., University of Toronto (OISE)

Areas of Current Interest: Curriculum Methods

E-mail address: ronaldw@nipissingu.ca

Mailing address: Faculty of Education, Nipissing University, 100 College Drive, North Bay, On. P1B 8L7