This study explores Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a practice that promotes collaborative knowledge construction between researchers and participants. Within this framework, a PAR experience carried out for the transformation of a school in the province of Valencia (Spain) is explored. The aim is to analyse the shared construction of…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate how educational researchers work together with practitioners in practical research projects. Design/methodology/approach: Mixed-method. Findings: Our findings suggest that researchers recognize their own limitations as well as those of practitioners and policy makers and learn from collaboration,…

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has produced a five-brief series documenting insights from their efforts to understand how educators and researchers can build relationships that support a shared action research agenda around social and emotional learning (SEL). It shares the perspectives of researchers and…

This qualitative case study utilized distributed leadership theory and Capobianco and Feldman's (2006) conceptualization of conditions for collaborative action research (CAR) to describe the implementation of CAR as professional development (PD) and school improvement strategy in two educational contexts, one alternative school and one rural, in a…

In the past decade, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have grown in number and reputation. Stephanie Brown and Annie Allen describe the varied ways partnerships facilitate more sustained and productive relationships between researchers and practitioners. They share key findings from a comparative case study of three different types of RPPs…

The past several decades have seen a substantial amount of time, resources, and expertise focused on producing sustainable improvement in schools at scale. Research on these efforts have highlighted how complex this challenge is, as it needs to attend to building teacher support and participation, aligning with the organizational context, and…

This paper introduces the goals of the research project on which this special issue of "Linguistics and Education" is based. A case is made for considering contemporary education as saturated by and dependent on oral and written language, and on beliefs and practices that relate knowledge, talk, reading and writing. The project is directed at a…

In this chapter, the authors focus on a multiyear teacher-researcher collaboration. They analyze the collaboration as oriented toward "phronesis," or wise action used to solve practical problems. The three practical problems they emphasize in this chapter are: (1) How did they use their work together to improve teaching and learning? (2)…

Teachers hold the key to school reform. Professional learning communities--as well as other related strategies, including collaborative and distributive models of leadership--offer much that is promising. Yet, weaknesses documented in research require attention. We conducted a study of teachers in two elementary schools identified as exemplary…

This article takes the history of teacher research in one large urban school district over a period of 20 years as a telling case of the intensely local character of this work. Beginning with an overview of the variations and different conceptions of teacher research in the USA, we argue that teacher research is continually being invented and…

In the past decade, an increasing number of Danish public, private and independent schools have introduced regular compulsory education outside the classroom for children aged 7-16 as a weekly or biweekly "outdoor school" day--known in Danish as "udeskole." An analysis of this form of outdoor education, its impacts and…

Effective teaching in mixed ability classes has dominated much of the Cyprus government's agenda for educational reform. However, there remains widespread dissatisfaction with Cyprus teachers' ability to teach in mixed ability classes. A factor behind the unsuccessful attempts of the Ministry of Education and Culture to improve teaching in mixed…

How researchers view the teacher informants with whom they work on studies of educational improvement was examined by placing the researchers themselves in the roles of informants. Responses of approximately 40 researchers show differing attitudes, but the teacher informant was not generally considered a true research partner. (SLD)

This paper describes partnerships created by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) that were designed to facilitate school improvement through collaborative action research. After analysis of these partnership experiences, several recommendations were developed for creating and sustaining effective partnerships between research…

This article highlights the British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference, which took place on September 15-18 at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) campus in Manchester. In this conference, delegates were told that the UK teaching profession needs to develop new "standards of evidence"…