A Call to Action: Why We Need More Practitioner Research. A Response to " A Teacher Educator Uses Action Research to Develop Culturally Conscious Curriculum Planners".

As teachereducators we need to embrace practitioner (action) research of our own classroom practice. Such research serves to improve our practice, inform the teaching profession, and serve as modeling for future teachers to become practitioner researchers in support of their efforts to meet the learning needs of the students with whom they work as well as have a voice in policy decisions that impact their professional lives. This article is a response to: Simms, M. (2013). A Teacher-Educator Uses Action Research to Develop Culturally Conscious Curriculum Planners. Democracy & Education, 21(2). Article 3. Available online at http://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol21/Iss2/3. In our current educational climate of Common Core Standards and increased pressure on teachers to ensure that students pass standardized tests, teachereducators face hard questions about how best to prepare beginning teachers as well as to sustain practicing teachers. What do teachers really need to know? What is the best way to support the continued development of teacher knowledge? How do we prepare teachers to meet the needs of the diverse learners with whom they will work? There is much discussion about teacher preparation options, including multiple routes into teaching, schoolbased residency programs, and calls for more attention to clinical practice. There is also continued debate about the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of professional development for practicing teachers. The role of classroom inquiry is part of these conversations, in support of teacher preparation and continued professional development. This attention to classroom inquiry, or action (teacher) research, is not new to teacher education. A number of teachereducators have written about the need for teacher research as part of teacher preparation (Graham & HudsonRoss, 1999; Kosnick, 2000; Monroe, Gali, Swope, & Perreira, 2007; Moore, 1999b; Ostorga & Lopez, 2009). This research recognizes that teachers are uniquely positioned to provide an insider’s view that “makes visible the way that students and teachers together construct knowledge and curriculum” (CochranSmith & Lytle, 1993, p. 43). Several features define or explain teacher research: (a) teacher researchers have an insider, or emic perspective; (b) they mix theory and practice (praxis) while teaching and researching within their classroom worlds; (c) teacher research is pragmatic and goaloriented— there are practical classroom problems that need to be solved; and (d) teacher research involves disciplined inquiry (Shulman, 1997) which means that studies are intentional and systematically conducted. (Baumann & Duffy, 2001, p. 611) Simms’s (2013) article “A Teacher Educator Uses Action Research to Develop Culturally Conscious Curriculum Planners” illustrates well these features of teacher (action) research. The question “How do we support teachers in developing culturally conscious curriculum within our teacher education coursework? ” frames Simms’s action research study of veteran teachers in a master’slevel course focused on curriculum. Simms’s (2013) study serves as a call for more selfstudy by teachereducators. In these complex times of accountability, changing student demographics, and questions about teacher preparation, selfstudies inform our own classroom practice; model the importance of classroom inquiry, including risktaking Kimberly Hill Campbell has taught high school and middle school language arts in a rural school district and served as the founding principal of a small, urban high school. She currently teaches in the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, where she works with graduate students who are learning to be language arts teachers at the secondary level.