Despite the long history of the study of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), two facts remain obvious. First, there are almost as many conceptions regarding the definition of PCK as there are researchers interested in it. Second, it is largely unclear which methods enable teacher educators to best prepare teacher candidates to use PCK. Recently,…

The authors of this action research project report were teacher researchers who found student disengagement during classroom activities to have a negative effect on their classroom environments and on their students' achievement. The purpose of this action research project was to increase student engagement in classroom activities by implementing…

Despite high levels of disengagement in urban literacy classrooms, few teachers have seen fit to explore spoken word--the performance of poetry--as a tool to engage students in literacy. Spoken word poetry serves as a powerful means of self-representation for youth that are traditionally portrayed as threatening, menaces to society that do not…

Background/Context: Research on after-school programs has traditionally focused on those programs serving students in younger grades but found positive correlations between student participation in enriching after-school activities and school engagement. For older students, particularly teenagers, there tends to be lower participation. Research…

The purpose of this research project was to improve the attendance of high school students using teacher initiatives. There were two teachers and about 140 students involved. The interventions used were improving lesson plans, developing better relationships with students and positive incentives. The students at this school had a history of very…

Investigating University-School Partnerships: A Volume in Professional Development School Research, the fourth book in the PDS Research Series developed by the same editors, includes a collection of organized papers that represent the best and latest examples of practitioner thinking, research, and program design and evaluation in the field at the…

Teachers who conduct research in the context of their own teaching practices can contribute to knowledge about reform-based instruction. This article provides examples that illustrate research by elementary, middle school, high school, and college faculty as well as the use of data such as transcripts of discussion, reflective journals, and copies…

In this qualitative teacher-researcher one-year classroom study, the author focused upon the literacy strategies that four low-achieving writers used while creating and interpreting music video compositions. The students read a variety of musical and video texts as they composed their own music video project. The guiding question of this research…

Although there have been numerous studies that indicate the benefits of teachers and students working with scientists, there is little research that documents scientists' views of science education, science teacher preparation, and the goals of science education. Furthermore, little is known about how scientists' views of science education may…

In this article we explore the concept of quality in teacher action research by re-examining our participation with science teachers in several different collaborative action research projects. We conducted second-order action research and generated a series reflexive conditions for promoting and ensuring quality action research. We assert that a…

Much has been written about the value of teacher research for inservice teachers. Despite the existence of several studies affirming these words, studies that richly describe how student teachers learn to do teacher research and then investigate the impact of inquiry on student teachers and teacher educators, particularly in culturally and…

This action research project report examined strategies to motivate students from extrinsically rewarding behaviors to intrinsically motivating behaviors. The action research was conducted in two different schools by four different teacher researchers within the same district. Three teachers in an elementary building (Site A) and one teacher in a…

In this article, the authors--the teacher educators who obtained a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD)--explore what it meant for teachers and teacher educators involved in the PorTRAIT (Practitioner or Teacher Researchers As Inquiring Travelers) program to enlarge their views of teacher research and their own classrooms by being…

The author of this article was a teacher, who had taught high school English for seven years. Then she was a researcher, observing and interviewing, recording and reflecting. One incident, stretching over four class periods, took her back across that divide between teacher and researcher, and touched her personally. She was trying to understand…

This bulletin is the second of a cooperative series sponsored by the National Committee on Research in Secondary Education. With the profession of education demanding research as a basis for adaptation of school procedures, research is being undertaken by an increasing number of agencies and is rapidly involving school principals and classroom…