What factors influence teachers' decisions as to whether to involve themselves in schoolbased research?Both the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) have launched initiatives to promote the idea of teaching as an evidence based profession. In the case of the TTA, this has been in the form of financial support for four consortia of schools and Higher Education institutions, to carry out school based educational research, and also, small scale grants to support research by individual teachers. The DfEE has also provided £3 million to support teacher-researchers in carrying out smallscale studies into classroom practice. (Times Educational Supplement 19 May 2000) This paper looks at the factors which have influenced teachers' and schools decisions on whether to engage in research into classroom practice, from the perspective of one of the four consortia which was funded by the TTA, the Norwich Area Schools Consortium (NASC). Each of the schools involved appointed a Research Coordinator for the project, and the schools worked with the support of several 'research mentors', from the linked Higher Education Institution.The first section of the paper provides a brief biographical account of one teacherresearcher's involvement with the project. In the second section, the teacher presents findings from his enquiry into why some teachers at his school chose to get involved in school-based research, and why others declined.Just as there were differences within the school over attitudes to practitioner research, there were also differences between schools, in terms of the extent to which the NASC project influenced school culture over the three years of its time span. The third section of the paper looks at the explanations for these differences from the perspectives of the schools' Research Coordinators, and the research mentors from the university.In the last section, some conclusions are drawn as to the factors which influenced the extent of teachers' and schools' engagement with practitioner research, and the response of teachers who had become involved with the project, which might inform future developments and initiatives in practitioner research.
Teachers' perceptions of practitioner research and factors influencing teachers' engagement with research: the context of the enquiryIn recent years, both the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) have launched initiatives to promote the idea of teaching as an evidence based profession. In the case of the TTA, this has been in the form of financial support for four consortia of schools and Higher Education institutions, to carry out school based educational research, and also, small scale grants to support research by individual teachers. The DfEE has also provided £3 million to support teacher-researchers in carrying out small-scale studies into classroom practice. (Times Educational Supplement 19 May 2000) This is not to suggest that there is universal support for...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.