Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning: Strategies and Tools for the Inquiry Process

This practical, "how-to" text, informed by current ideas on teacher research, outlines and illustrates strategies and experiences to foster literacy teachers' abilities to conduct action research in their classrooms or schools. Part I overviews the theory and significance of teacher research and provides a description and rationale for the various activities and experiences that support learning to become teacher researchers. Part II features chapters written by a diverse group of teacher-researchers, interwoven with short commentaries by the editors that address particularly pertinent features or aspects of these reports for novice teacher-researchers in the process of learning to do teacher inquiry. These chapters make visible the various tensions and vulnerabilities that novice teacher researchers experience and how the activities in this book may help address them.Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning:Covers the teacher research process from the initial proposal to writing up the reportIllustrates a range of literacy topics in reading and writing and grade levelsFeatures voices of teacher researchers who have gone through the process, and their candid remarks about how activities helped (or not)Offers ideas and examples on writing up the genre of teacher research as publishable or presentable work, emphasizing how to provide a credible account that incorporates not only successes, new understandings, and triumphs, but also the "bumps," tensions, and vulnerabilities in the processAddresses important concepts in teacher inquiry methodology by showing how teacher-researchers operationalized and lived them in their inquiriesDiscusses ethical issues involved in teacher researchIncludes forms readers can duplicate for use, and provides space for users to jot down their own reactions, responses, and questions