A Quick History and Some Gentle Guidelines for a Teacher-as-Researcher Project.

This paper explains how teachers can set up good research problems to study in their classrooms. The purpose of the research is to provide teachers with a tool for reflection, change, learning, and renewal in student-centered classrooms. Teacher-researchers learn to ask critical questions, collect data, document findings, and share results with other educators through professional journals and conferences. To decide upon a research question, teachers should think about what they want to know about themselves professionally, what they want to explore in the classroom, what does and does not work in the classroom, persistent problems that need attention, specific student issues, and interesting information from the professional literature to explore in the classroom. Examples of research questions include examining what activities encourage students to revise their writing, how students evaluate their peers' reading and writing, how theory meshes with classroom reality, and which areas of concern they have experienced as student teachers. To get started, teachers must examine how to begin, how to focus the inquiry, how to find time for research, when to make field notes, how to analyze data, what issues constitute stumbling blocks, and with whom to share the research. Study partners or study groups are very useful when conducting classroom research. (SM)