Intervention research indicates that historical inquiry curricula call for different tasks, materials, and methods of teaching compared to those focused solely on content. Inquiry curricula require teachers to shift from the methods, materials, and assessments to which they are accustomed. As a result, despite intervention research efforts that…

Calls to improve relationships between education research and practice abound, among them efforts to help researchers work in partnership with and communicate more effectively with policy and practice audiences. Recognizing this need, the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have emphasized the importance of integrating…

Research shows that when students engage with mathematical inquiry their problem-solving skills are strengthened. Demands in the revised Australian curriculum raised problem-solving of new senior secondary mathematics assessment, specifically in Queensland Problem-solving and Modelling Tasks (PSMTs). The challenge for Queensland was to scale…

Integration of research into teaching is a major area of interest in the field of higher education. Considerable work has been done on how staff and students view this integration, how it can be achieved in practice and how it might best be researched by scholars. However, relatively little research has considered how research-informed teaching…

Practitioner inquiry is an alternative form of professional learning that can result in significant changes in teacher practice and student learning. We share our evolution as teacher learners within our classrooms and teacher leaders within our school as we progressed through 10 years of continuous cycles of practitioner inquiry. Beginning as…

The need to improvise and take action as a practitioner draws on Schwab's notion of deliberation and the Greek concept of poiesis. Inspired by an impromptu discussion with students at a computer summer camp, the author uses the works of Sarason, Eisner, and Stenhouse to show how practitioner performance, student audience, educational inquiry,…

This book traces the origins and activities of the longest-standing collaborative teacher group in education, the Portfolio Group. Each chapter documents, historically and conceptually, the main intellectual moments in the evolution of the idea of knowledge communities. Authors illuminate the expansive work, research, and the leading/learning…

Action research shifts the paradigm of contemporary educational reform by emphasizing inquiry and placing teachers at the center of research-into-practice. By situating teachers as learners, action research offers a systematic and intentional approach to changing teaching. When working as part of a community of practice, action researchers engage…

This paper provides an example of a global data sharing project with an educational transformation agenda. This agenda shaped both the design of the shared dataset and the experience of sharing the common dataset to support multiple perspective inquiry and enable integrative and critically reflexive research-to-practice dialogue. The shared…

This qualitative study examined how and why research experiences for teachers (RETs) influenced middle and high school science teachers' beliefs, attitudes, and values about teaching science as inquiry. Changes teachers reported after participating in the RET ranged from modifying a few lessons (belief change) to a comprehensive revision of what…

For more than 30 years, Dr. Marilyn Cochran-Smith has developed and directed research and contributed to publications about education and "practitioner research," especially about teachers' research and learning in inquiry communities. Her primary topics are inquiry communities, teacher research, teacher education for social…

This research study examines the impact of teacher research on participants in a large-scale educational reform initiative in the United States, No Child Left Behind, and its strand for reading teachers, Reading First. Reading First supported professional development for teachers in order to increase student scores on standardized tests. The…

This mixed-methods study examines how engaging science teachers in a summer Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) followed by an academic-year Professional Learning Community (PLC) focused on translating teacher research experiences to inquiry-based classroom lessons might facilitate changes in their beliefs and classroom practices regarding…

To address the need to better prepare teachers to enact science education reforms, the National Science Foundation has supported a Research Experience for Teachers (RET's) format for teacher professional development. In these experiences, teachers work closely with practicing scientists to engage in authentic scientific inquiry. Although…

Scientific inquiry involves a variety of abilities scientists use to investigate the natural world. In order to develop students' scientific inquiry, researchers and educators have developed different curricula and a variety of instructional resources, which make features and descriptors of scientific inquiry in teaching and learning even more…