Teacher Development Partnership Research: A Focus on Methods and Issues

Abstract

Our purposes in writing this article are to reflect on our own research practice and to raise for discussion some of the issues associated with “alternative” approaches to studying teaching and teacher development. Situating our work within a personal and contextual research framework that is built on the foundations of a hermeneutic perspective, we briefly review the progress towards alternative approaches to research on teaching and teacher development, and then focus on the researcher-teacher relationship in discussing collaboration in partnership research. We use three organizing frameworks: (a) examples of our own research with teachers; (b) a matrix displaying the phases of research activities and the roles of researcher and teacher; and (c) a matrix displaying the phases and scope of the issues in teacher development partnership research that suggest a series of guiding questions that we think need to be asked at the outset and throughout any inquiry.