In 1990, the concept of teacher research was new to me. I was intrigued, as I listened to teachers present their research on a cold February Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania's Ethnography and Education Forum. School-based teachers had joined the forum to present their research-research that honored their "insider" knowledge of the classroom. Teachers read from journals they had kept throughout the year and talked about ways they had studied their students' learning. They spoke of the importance of collaboration and the sense of renewal they derived from their work as researching teachers. The partnerships between school-and university-based teachers were calling for new ways of thinking about what is research and who does research. I was sitting at what felt like a new intersection of research and practice, and I wanted to learn more. It had never occurred to me that teachers could research their own teaching. Had I done this? Did I know other music teachers who had conducted research in their own classrooms? Were teaching and research two sides of the same coin? The possibilities seemed intriguing.Like all inquiry, teacher research begins with questions about practice that are never far from the surface. Teacher researchers' classrooms become laboratories of learning in which teachers remain open to new ideas and discoveries about both their teaching and their students' learning. Becoming a teacher researcher essentially involves "becoming a student of teaching" (Bullough & Gitlin, 1995). Britton (1987) writes, "Every lesson should be for the teacher, an inquiry, some further discovery, a quiet form of research" (p. 15). This quiet form of investigation might not appear like other types of research but, like its qualitative ancestor, teacher research involves systematic and intentional inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). Although many definitions of teacher
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