A Handbook for
Exploratory Action Research
Richard Smith and Paula Rebolledo

Contents
Introduction ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3
1.

Foundations������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 8
1.1 – Successful teaching���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 9
1.2 – A challenging teaching situation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 9
1.3 – The need for information�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������10
1.4 – What’s the value of research?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������12

2.

What is teacher-research?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������14
2.1 – Demystifying research�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������15
2.2 – But what is research?����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������16
2.3 – What does teacher-research look like? Lorena’s story��������������������������������������������������������17

3.

What is Exploratory Action Research?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������19
3.1 – The value of ‘exploring’���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20
3.2 – Exploratory research: Andrea’s story part 1�������������������������������������������������������������������������������21
3.3 – Action research: Andrea’s story part 2�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 23
3.4 – So, what is Exploratory Action Research?�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 25

4.

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 28
4.1 – Motivations for doing research���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 29
4.2 – Your own motivations – and narrowing down your focus��������������������������������������������������31
4.3 – From topic to exploratory questions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 32
4.4 – Teresa’s exploratory questions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 34
4.5 – Your own questions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 35
4.6 – SMART questions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 37

5.

How can I explore?����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 40
5.1 – Different sources of information�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������41
5.2 – Mauro’s story���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 48
5.3 – Combining information from different sources������������������������������������������������������������������������� 49
5.4 – What should I keep in mind before collecting data?��������������������������������������������������������������51

6.

What do I find?�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 55
6.1 – Daniela’s story�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 56
6.2 – Analysing and interpreting qualitative data��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 58
6.3 – Interpreting quantitative data�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������61

Contents|

1

Contents continued
7.

What shall I change?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 66
7.1 – Is ‘new action’ needed?����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 67
7.2 – Javier’s story����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 68
7.3 – Planning a change����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 69
7.4 – Implementing the change as planned������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 72

8.

What happens?���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������74
8.1 – Lorena’s story – revisited������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 75
8.2 – A reminder of research methods���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 76
8.3 – Comparing exploratory and action research findings�������������������������������������������������������� 77
8.4 – Interpreting self-critically����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 79
8.5 – Reflecting on your own development – the major finding?�������������������������������������������� 80

9.

Where do I go from here?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 82
9.1 – Sharing your research with others������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 83
9.2 – Sharing your research by writing���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 85
9.3 – Consider participants’ rights��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 86
9.4 – Joining wider communities������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 87
9.5 – Continuing your research����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 88
9.6 – Your personal journey with this handbook����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 90

10. Extra material���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 93

2|

Contents

Introduction
This is a practical handbook, written in a non-academic, teacher-friendly
style, to show teachers how they can engage in practitioner research forcontinuing professional development and for the benefit of their students.
The book is unique in the literature on teacher-research in ELT in being
particularly targeted at secondary and primary school teachers working
in relatively difficult circumstances.

Difficult circumstances andExploratory Action Research
Teacher-research has long been considered a desirable formof professional development, and we will go over some of
the arguments for this in Chapters One and Two of this book.
However, one thing teachers often wonder is: ‘How can I asa teacher find time to do research when I don’t even havetime to cope with all the normal demands in my classroom?’.
The kind of practitioner research we are presenting in thisbook – Exploratory Action Research – has been developedwith and for secondary school teachers in classes of up to
40 students, where teachers are teaching up to 40 lessons
a week. The original context for this was a project withteachers in Chilean secondary schools (the ‘Champion
Teachers’ project – more below). We have strongly in mind
the difficulties faced by teachers in such circumstances.
In fact, based on teachers’ actual experiences in the projects
we’ve been involved with (in Peru, India and Nepal as well as
Chile), a major point we want to make is this: Exploratory
Action Research can in itself be an effective way to addressand cope with difficult circumstances (heavy teaching loads,
large classes, a lack of material resources, and so on) since
it enables teachers to gain a better understanding of theirclassroom contexts and so develop more appropriate waysof teaching, without waiting for solutions from outside.
We stress in this book, then, that a particular way of doing
teacher-research – Exploratory Action Research – isdesirable as well as feasible in relatively difficult
circumstances.
Teachers often report feeling rather like an octopus in suchsituations, needing to deal with the many things that aregoing on at the same time, under continual stress and with
continual pressures to act quickly to solve problems. Whensomething is not working, a quite normal response is to try
out different solutions until you find one that works. But
when problems are multiplied there comes a point where it
just isn’t possible to address all the problems you’re facing.
What to do in such circumstances? Our main suggestion is
to step back from the situation and take a good careful lookat the nature of the problem rather than jumping in with apossible solution that hasn’t been thought about enoughand may, then, be inappropriate.

1

So, what we recommend here is not adding to your existingburden with extra actions but instead taking a step back,creating a space for reflection and exploration in order tounderstand a situation better before taking action.
In short, in this book we provide an introduction to action
research while emphasising that before the ‘action’ that
‘action research’ implies, there is a need for a careful
exploratory phase. Accordingly, a large part of the booktakes you step by step through the careful explorationof a situation, only later coming to the ‘action’ phase which
is normally associated with action research.

The Chilean Champion Teachers project– and other contexts‘Exploratory Action Research’, the approach presented inthis book, was originally developed in the context of a joint
British Council–Ministry of Education project in Chile which
is currently in its fifth year.1
This programme is innovative in being directed speciallyat secondary school teachers in a public education system.
The ideas developed in the context of this programme havealso already shown their worth in India and Nepal (in thecontext of projects run by the All India Network of English
Teachers (AINET), the British Council Aptis Action ResearchAward Schemes (AARMS) in both India and Nepal, andGauhati University, Assam. They have also been incorporated
into a TESOL CALL Interest Section Electronic Village Online(2017 and 2018) and are being spread via a Champion
Teachers programme organised by the British Council in
Peru (2017–18).
The Ministry of Education in Chile is planning to distribute
this book to secondary teachers in Chile, recommending its
use within teacher ‘networks’ (teacher self-help groups). The
book will also be promoted (by the Ministry of Education and
the British Council in Chile) for use in pre-service teacher
education programmes, and will also serve as a suitable
introduction to more academic research approaches.
While particularly situated in and appropriate to Chilean
experience, and using concrete examples from theChampion Teachers project, we hope the book will appeal
also to a worldwide readership of teachers and teacher
educators in comparable circumstances.

For more information on the Champion Teachers programme and the development of the Exploratory Action Research approach, see‘Teacher-research as CPD: A project with Chilean secondary school teachers’ by Richard Smith, Tom Connelly and Paula Rebolledo (2014),
in Innovations in the Continuing Professional Development of English Language Teachers (edited by David Hayes for the British Council); also,‘Exploratory action research: why, what, and where from?’ by Richard Smith (2015), in Teacher-researchers in Action (edited by Kenan Dikilitas,
Richard Smith and Wayne Trotman for IATEFL Research SIG).

4|

Introduction

Style of presentation
The book is targeted in particular at secondary and primaryteachers (for whom few such books have been previously
produced) and is written in a jargon-free, non-academic
style, with many concrete examples.
We have deliberately tried to make this book different fromprevious treatments of teacher-research in the field of ELT,
aiming for as non-academic an approach as possible toreflect the idea that teacher-research is by teachers andfor teachers and their students, not needing to adhere to
relatively dry or ‘academic’ norms of presentation or tostandards of rigour which are imposed from outside.
As far as possible, then, rather than prescribing particular
activities in the abstract or moving from theory to practice,
we proceed from example to recommendation. The
examples are real, not invented ones, and they come fromteachers in relatively difficult circumstances, not in wellresourced or otherwise privileged contexts. Thus, we referthroughout to cases from the Champion Teachers project,in particular those represented in the companion Champion
Teachers: Stories of Exploratory Action Research book,1
which readers are encouraged to read to gain further
understanding. Instructions and examples are accompanied
by practical tasks, with answers to most of these being
provided in an Answer Key at the back of the book.
We wanted the book to be visually appealing (well-designed,
and including illustrations and photographs) in order toenhance its accessibility, given that the idea of carrying out‘research’ can be off-putting to teachers, who may feel that
it is not ‘for’ them.

Although the book does not constitute a full introduction to‘Research Methods’, our own experience with pre-service aswell as in-service teachers has shown us that engaging in
Exploratory Action Research represents a good, practicalfirst step towards more academic research methods training
and research engagement. This, of course, is not the major
aim of the book, which is to introduce teachers to thepersonal and professional benefits of researching their own
classrooms, and to show how this can be feasible as well as
useful, even for teachers in very difficult circumstances.

Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following
people, at different times, in making this Handbook a reality:
Katherine Hutter, Deborah Sepulveda and Isabel González(British Council Chile); Andrew Chadwick and Tom Connelly(both, formerly British Council Chile); John Knagg (British
Council, UK); personnel of the English Opens Doors
programme, Ministry of Education, Chile; mentors andmentees in the Chilean Champion Teachers programme pastand present, including Claudia Bustos, Lorena Muñoz, Leyla
Nuñez, Daniela Gajardo, Camila Villalobos, Javier Avalos,
Mauro Saéz, Teresa Ríos, Esteban López and Andrea Robles.
We also thank Teresa Perčić, Carolina Cid, Gemma
Maldonado and Jeannie Fernández for allowing us to use
their stories / materials. Finally, a special word of thanks to
Jason Anderson for his work as content editor for the bookand, beyond that, for his concrete, creative suggestions forcontent in several places.

How to use this book
The book has been written to be used by teachers working
on their own; in self-sustaining groups of teachers or mentee
groups; within teacher associations supporting teacherresearch; or in pre-service or in-service teacher education
programmes. The only assumption is that readers have somecurrent classroom contact with students, since tasks will
require reflection on current teaching experience.
Ideally, you will find someone else to interact with about thecontents and to answer tasks together with. If not, try toengage with the book actively and carry out tasks in yourmind, checking answers in the back of the book whenever
you see the ‘@’ symbol.

1

Edited by Paula Rebolledo, Richard Smith and Deborah Bullock (2016). London: British Council. Online: http://bit.ly/champion-teachers
Introduction|

5

Start here!
You may like to try out this self-diagnosis exercise before we begin. It gives an overview
of the different kinds of skill and ability (‘competency’) we hope you will have developedby the end of the book. The exercise is repeated again at the end of the book to help you
see what you’ve learned.

Explanation
The main purpose of the form on the next page is to help
you identify existing strengths, and identify areas where you
would particularly value professional development andsupport. The diagnostic tool is based around fifteen‘Exploratory Action Research Competencies’.

Each competency has five levels and you need to decide
for each competency which level you are currently working
at. It is expected that you will have a range of competencies
at different levels, but at the start you may not have many(or any) above Level 0.

Exploratory Action Research Competencies

Level 0I do not currently have this competency.

A. I can reflect on and analyse my practice

Level 1

I am beginning to apply this competency.

Level 2I am applying this competency but haveareas which require improvement.

Level 3I am applying this competency withconfidence.

Level 4I am applying this competency withstrength.

B. I know how to improve my teaching
C. I can identify what is good about my teaching
D. I can see what problems are occurring in myclassroom
E. I can identify a focus for research into myclassroom
F. I can consider how to turn successes, problems
and other issues into research questions
G. I can identify appropriate sources of evidence forresearch questions
H. I can decide how to gather information to answer
my questions
I. I can collect evidence to answer researchquestions
J. I can analyse evidence collected
K. I can incorporate my students’ suggestions and/or
opinions into my teaching
L. I can design an action plan based on explorationof my teaching
M. I can put an action plan into practice based on
exploration of my teaching
N. I can evaluate the results of an action plan
O. I know how to communicate/present researchfindings orally and in writing

6|

Introduction

Exploratory Action Research Diagnosis
Now please fill out the table below circling a number from 0 to 4 corresponding to the level you are currently working
at for each competency.
Competencies

Level

A. I can reflect on and analyse my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

B. I know how to improve my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

C. I can identify what is good about my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

D. I can see what problems are occurring in my classroom

0

1

2

3

4

E. I can identify a focus for research into my classroom

0

1

2

3

4

F. I can consider how to turn successes, problems and other issues into research questions

0

1

2

3

4

G. I can identify appropriate sources of evidence for research questions

0

1

2

3

4

H. I can decide how to gather information to answer my questions

0

1

2

3

4

I. I can collect evidence to answer research questions

0

1

2

3

4

J. I can analyse evidence collected

0

1

2

3

4

K. I can incorporate my students’ suggestions and/or opinions into my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

L. I can design an action plan based on exploration of my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

M. I can put an action plan into practice based on exploration of my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

N. I can evaluate the results of an action plan

0

1

2

3

4

O. I know how to communicate/present research findings orally and in writing

0

1

2

3

4

These are the skills and areas of knowledge you’ll be developing as you go through this book. So, let’s begin!

Introduction|

7

1. Foundations
You, your learners, your experience and your capabilities, are the major
foundations of this book. Understanding your practice, learning from yourown teaching, listening to your learners and developing more confidence
in your experience and capabilities will be, we hope, the main outcomesof our work together.
In your everyday teaching you engage in many activities; such as planning,
instructing, arranging activities, assessing, giving feedback, etc. Thoseexperiences – both successful and more challenging ones – are the starting
point of your work through this book. So let’s begin by looking at some of them!

1.1 Successful teaching

Commentary

Paula will share with you a successful experience from her
own classroom teaching as an example for the first task.

By asking you to reflect about a successful situation, we areinviting you to recall and describe the different aspects thatmade this experience a positive one. This exercise can bevaluable since you can later use some of these memories
to try to re-live this successful event or build new positive
events from it.

“Some years ago I was teaching a large group of
teenagers in a secondary school. I had to teach themcountries and nationalities, which seemed a rather simple
task, but it proved to be challenging for them. They not
only struggled to remember the words for different
countries and nationalities but also had problems
remembering their pronunciation. I also had the difficultyof having only a few hours left before the end of thesemester with one particular group so I had to come up
with a solution fast. Then, I thought of creating a domino
game consisting of countries on one side and nationalities
on the other. Every time learners wanted to match a flag
to a nationality, they had to say something like ‘She is from
Spain. She is Spanish’, therefore it required a lot of
repetition. After doing this game, I moved to a morecommunicative task, which they could perform more
effectively. I was very pleased with the result. Not only did
the students remember the vocabulary of the lesson andwere able to move from a controlled practice type of task
to a freer communicative task, they were also engaged.
I saw them taking notes and this showed me they were
working hard, I heard them encouraging each other topronounce the words correctly. I felt the activity reallysuited its purpose. I think that, for me, successful teachingis when students are engaged, participating actively, andwhen they make progress in their learning.”

Task 1.1
Think about a recent successful experience / activity inyour classroom. Go over it in your mind’s eye. Tell someone
about it if possible.
How do you know it was successful? What did you see,hear and feel that told you it was successful?
I saw

I heard

I feltWhat does this tell you about the meaning of ‘successful
teaching’ for you?
For me, successful teaching is when

9|Foundations

Keep in mind, that ‘success’ in teaching doesn’t just mean
helping students perform better in tests. Success can also
be defined in a number of ways which go beyond
assessment and which can also be valid. If you ‘see’ students
fully engaged and you ‘hear’ their opinions as they actively
participate in the lesson; then these signs of success are
something you may like to remember and look for in futurelessons. These are the kind of signs that we hope you will beseeing again as an outcome of Exploratory Action Research– after all, its main purpose is to help you and your students
achieve greater success in the classroom.

1.2 A challenging teaching situation
We have shared with you an example of a successful
experience and asked you to share your own. We will
now turn to less positive experiences, which can also
be effective to trigger reflection about your practice.
We will share with you a challenging teaching and learning
situation from Camila Villalobos, a Chilean teacher, as an
example for the second task. Camila teaches at a schoolin Chiloé Island in the south of Chile and she teaches pupils
aged 10 to 13.
“There are 28 students in each level approximately andin each grade I have a group of five or six students thatcome from P.I.E. (Programme for Inclusion in Education)and in each of my lessons these students did notparticipate and they were not motivated in comparison
with the rest of the class. For me as a teacher, all mystudents are important and I needed to help them all todevelop the same competences in English. The majorityof P.I.E. students come from the countryside and otherislands near to Chiloe Island; many of them never had
English as a subject and those who had English did notachieve the competences of their corresponding grade.
Most of these students live with foster families as wellas in the town boarding school during the week and travelto their houses on the weekends to see their families. I had
tried different strategies such as to let them sit with theirfriends to feel more comfortable, I changed my toneof voice and my body language with them and evenencouraged them to ask questions in class by
personalising the lessons more, but nothing seemed
to work.”

Task 1.2
Think about a recent challenging or unsatisfactory
experience in your classroom. Go over it in yourmind’s eye. Tell someone about it if you’re not alone.
Then ask yourself (or have someone ask you):
What made it challenging or unsatisfactory? Which aspectsof it proved problematic? What did you see, hear and feelthat told you it was so?
I saw

I heardSeeing, hearing and feeling give us what we have calledsigns which tell us whether a particular situation is
successful or unsatisfactory.
‘Sign’: n. ‘Something regarded as an indicationof what is happening or going to happen’1
Signs of success can include seeing your students smilingwhile doing a task, or hearing them speak to each otherabout a task or feeling the task is going well from your own
experience. This is useful and valid information. However,signs sometimes only provide a partial view of situations.
They can:■■ignore the perception of students■■

give information only about one aspect of the situation■■■■

I feltCommentary
Teachers experience many challenging situations whenthings don’t work out as we would like them to, but, as withsuccessful situations, we don’t usually have the time to sit
and think about what happened and why. A first step todoing this can be to think about what tells you things are
not going according to plan – in other words, the signs oflack of success.
You have now reflected on one successful teachingsituations from Paula’s experience, one challenging
situation from Camila’s experience and two from your own.
We have used these situations to show how, by looking at asituation closely, you can identify signs of success or lackof it so that you come closer to understanding the situation.
In the next chapter we’ll start to see where you can go fromhere – either expanding on success (as with case 1.1) ortrying to solve a problem (as with case 1.2). For now, though,let’s think a bit more about the signs that come throughyour senses about whether something is or isn’t working
and how you can collect information to understand different
situations better.

1.3 The need for information
In the examples you read above, Paula and Camila ‘saw’,‘heard’ and ‘felt’ certain things that ‘told’ them something
was working or wasn’t. In the task, we also asked you to
focus on what you saw, heard and felt since it is our senses
which tell us (teachers) what is happening in our classrooms.
When we ‘feel’ something, we are also using our intuition,
which is nurtured by years of teaching experience.

mask other aspects of a situation that cannot be easily‘seen’ or heard’
make us overlook information which can be useful to get
new understandings of a situation.

Some teachers we have been working with told us how theirinitial thoughts about a situation changed when they looked
at it more closely, from other perspectives – in other words,
when they opened their eyes and ears more and/or‘borrowed’ others’ eyes and ears. Here are a couple ofexamples;“This exploratory research helped me be more awareof what I am doing in the classroom; unfortunately, I had
been looking for what my students were doing wrong
instead of what I was doing wrong. In other words, weneed to have a look at the whole process before judging
the students’ performance.” (Leyla Nuñez)“From this exploration, the first finding was very
surprising for me. Before the research I thought they
didn’t want me to speak in class. But in their answers tomy questionnaire a little more than a half of them said
they wanted a class in English. It was a total changeof my point of view.” (Daniel Santana)“As a teacher, when we have doubts about our own
methods in the lesson, we need to focus on our students’interests before focusing on the content. We usually thinkthat the content is the problem, but it may not be that.”(Camila Villalobos)
These teachers realised that by taking a more careful lookat a particular situation, their views changed. In otherwords, the signs they previously had of what was working
or not working were incomplete or simply inappropriate to
explain a situation. This is why the collection of additional
information is important and is needed for understanding
a situation better, in greater detail and from different
perspectives. The information collected can be useful tomake interpretations of a given situation turn into evidenceof what happened.

1

Oxford English Dictionary
Foundations|

10‘Evidence’: n. ‘Information indicating whether abelief or proposition is true or valid; information
used to establish facts’.2
Let’s look again at Paula’s example of a successful situation.
Even though the things she noticed are valuable, more
information can be collected to establish with more clarity
all the features of this situation. In her example, Paula said
things like “I saw them working, taking notes, I heard themencouraging each other to pronounce the words correctly
so I finally felt the activity fit its purpose”. Such signs ofwhat worked, although valid, can be looked at in moredetail in order to understand if the strategy was effective,
and why. She cannot say for sure, for example, that:■■all students are very active / involved – if not, which
ones are, and which ones are not, and why?

■■

students are using the vocabulary words of the lesson■■

all students enjoy the class■■all students’ English level has improved■■

all students enjoy classes based on games.

In the case of the challenging situation, Camila realisedthat although she tried different strategies to reach PIE
students “nothing seemed to work” but the following things
are not clear:■■

Task 1.4 @Let’s try a similar exercise with the situation narrated by
Paula. If you or Paula would like to understand better the
successful situation she talked about in 1.1. what kinds ofinformation could be gathered?
Read some of the signs she got (box A) and then write theletter(s) of the method(s) you think she could use to collectbetter information (box B). You can check your answers in
the answer key. Note: There may be more than one answer
for each of 1. to 5.
Box A. Signs
1.

Students are very involved in what is going on

2.

Students are very active

3.

Students are using the vocabulary words of thelesson4.

Students and teacher enjoy the class

5.

Students were pronouncing words correctly

6.

Students’ enjoy classes based on games

what students thought of the different strategies
she used■■

what students’ lack of motivation looked likeBox B. Ways to collect information■■

which activities in class motivated students more/less.

A.

Take notes about what students do and say.

B.

Assess how students’ vocabulary learning has
improved with a vocabulary testC.

Ask students to write their opinions about the lessonD.

Ask a colleague to come in and take notes on whathe/she has seenE.

Make a video-recording of students in class to lookat their behaviour, attitudes and language use.

Task 1.3 @Why don’t we try to help Camila understand her challenging
situation better? There is a lot that she doesn’t know forsure. Read the statements below and write ‘know’ if weare certain, and ‘don’t know’ for the areas we don’t yet haveenough information about. You can check your answers
in the answer key.
1.

We
the different strategies she
used to motivate her students.

2.

We
the background of thestudents Camila is concerned about.

3.

We
what all of her students think
about the strategies she used.

4.

We
what makes Camila conclude
students are not motivated.

5.

We
how students actually react
in class to certain activities.

As you have probably realised, there are many things we(and Camila) don’t know for sure about this situation andthat we need to know in order to understand it better.
2

Concise Oxford English Dictionary

11|

Foundations

Commentary
As we suggested above, signs of what’s working and notworking are important in your everyday teaching, andreflecting on them can help you develop as a teacher.
However, sometimes they only give you a partial viewof a situation and to understand it better – and/or change
it if necessary - gathering more and better information
can be essential.
For this, you will need to go beyond just reflecting about
your practice ‘in your head’ and will need to do some‘research’, gathering as much good information, or ‘data’,as you can to understand a situation more clearly and fully.

to notice certain differences in their work according to
the music I played. I also gave them a survey, a simple
kind of questionnaire for them to give me their opinions.
Still, I wasn’t convinced they understood my questions.
Finally, I decided to interview them, so after each activity
we did with background music, I asked them about how
they felt, if they had trouble concentrating, if they felt themusic helped them complete the task and so on.

One teacher we’ve worked with says this very clearly:“I think when you ‘see’ something wrong in class, you
should stop, reflect on that issue, collect data, analyse it
and plan actions according to that purpose.”(Teresa Ríos)
We will come back to the nature of good information (‘data’)later in the book. For the moment, though, let’s consider an
example which illustrates how a teacher can gather
information about their teaching in practice.

After collecting all the evidence and analysing it in detail,I gave up. It was true, my students learned better andconcentrated more while listening to classical music.
They told me they felt relaxed and it helped them think,even more than if working in silence. On the contrary,
popular music made them agitated. They said they felt likedancing and singing so they could not concentrate on thetask. I informed the results to my colleagues and I had toadmit my boss was right. I did not feel I had lost theargument at all! I was proud of myself ... I didn’t do what
I was told just because.

1.4 What’s the value of research?

I researched it and found answers of my own!!”(Teresa Perčić)

We want to continue to show you the value of collecting
information, and start to show you the value of doing
research to understand your practice and possibly tochange things. We would like to share with you thefollowing short story of research which comes from ateacher – her name is Teresa Perčić – that Paula worked
with in Chile. We think it demonstrates well how
empowering research can be for teachers who engage
in it, as well as how it can show you things you didn’tknow before:“The academic manager of the school where I worked
told me to play classical music in all my classes whilestudents were doing a task. I did it and I noticed nodifference so I stopped. I was told the school’s decision
was based on research which indicated it aided
concentration and learning and therefore, I had to do it
no matter my observations. I was not convinced at all andmy colleagues and I decided to play classical music but
other kinds of music as well.
Then, I learned about classroom research and the ideaof conducting research in my classroom seemed theperfect solution to prove to my headmaster that she waswrong, so I prepared a series of tasks and different kindsof music to play while my students were working. I took
notes of everything that happened while my students
worked: their attitudes, their behaviour, etc. I latercollected their different pieces of work and started

Even though she had to agree with the headteacher in theend, Teresa felt empowered because she was no longer
just following orders. She felt she was able to makeinformed decisions about her teaching based on something
she discovered for herself. The story also reinforces thepoint made above that the information you gather canreveal things you did not expect – things which contradict
the everyday signs you had previously been getting. This is
why teacher-research is different from simply reflecting on
what you think has happened in the classroom – it can takeyou beyond your everyday experience for you to gain new
perspectives.
Now let’s take a closer look at what Teresa did to gather
more information.
She had to compare what happened with and withoutmusic, and what happened with different kinds of music.
That’s why she ‘prepared a series of tasks and different
kinds of music to play while my students were working’.
But what kinds of information, did she gather about theeffect of each kind of music?

Task 1.5 @Read the story again and fill in the table on the next page
with one of the following kinds of information:
A.

Interview notes

B.

Observation notes

C.

Students’ work

D.

Questionnaire responses

Foundations|

12

What did the teacher do?

Kind of information“I took notes of everything that happened while mystudents worked: their attitudes, their behaviour, etc.”“I later collected their different pieces of work and started
to notice certain differences in their work according to themusic I played.”“I also gave them a survey, a simple kind of questionnaire
for them to give me their opinions.”“I decided to interview them, so after each activity we didwith background music, I asked them about how they felt,
if they had trouble concentrating, if they felt the music
helped them complete the task and so on.”Summary and follow-up

Follow-up

Perhaps the main point of this chapter has been that doing‘research’ can be useful for teachers. We’ve already seen
how research might be useful in gathering information
about something that seems to be already successful orin understanding something that is not working: Now you
have begun to see how it can be useful in helping to solvea problem or puzzling situation, trying out a new idea oreven in resisting a new idea which a teacher thinks is
inappropriate.

Before you start the next chapter why not read anotherreport by a Chilean Champion Teacher, Teresa Ríos?
You can find her story here: http://bit.ly/teresa-rios

We’ve begun to see how you can understand your own
experiences in your classroom more deeply by collecting
information We have begun to call this process of collecting
information to answer questions ‘research’, and will define
this a bit more clearly in the next chapter. For now, though,we hope you have begun to see how useful research canbe for teachers.
We’ve been hearing about the experiences of several
teachers in Chile, where many of the ideas in this book werefirst developed, in the context of a British Council / Ministryof Education Chile programme called the Champion
Teachers Action Research Project. Champion Teachers aresecondary school teachers who voluntarily joined the
project, where they were invited to do teacher-researchwith the support of a mentor. You can find more information
about this programme at the following website:
http://championteachers.weebly.com/

13| Foundations

Think about the following questions:A.

What did she think was causing her students’inability to speak in class?

B.

What did she learn about her students?

C.

According to what she says here, in what way(s)was doing research useful for her, as a teacher?:“With this exploratory process I discovered that I was
expecting something from my students but I was not
giving them something they needed first. I think whenyou ‘see’ something wrong in class, you should stop,reflect on that issue, collect data, analyse it and action
plan accordingly.”

2. What is teacherresearch?
In this chapter we learn more about ‘teacher-research’ – research whichis initiated and carried out by teachers themselves into issues of importanceto them in their own work. We will emphasise that such research is by teachers
for teachers (and their students), being carried out for purposes of professional
development and improvement of teaching and learning, not primarily foracademic purposes. It can therefore follow some rules of its own, and does notneed to mimic academic research – it is research, but of its own kind.

2.1 Demystifying researchNow, how about this one?:

In the last chapter, we showed how, by collecting information,
you can explore and understand your practice in more depth,
and potentially change things for the better. Collecting
information or ‘data’ is an important feature of research.
However, many teachers have an image of research which
differs from the process we are explaining in this book.
Here are some of the images teachers say they haveof research:
Here you can see learners talking to one another in a realclassroom environment. Exploring what they do, what theysay, and what they think, is as fascinating and rich as
examining the coral reef under the sea’s surface. The factthat we see our students every day doesn’t make them lessinteresting! In fact, we recently came across this quotation:“Where the classroom has a culture as complex as thecoral reef, the teacher cannot afford to be anything but
a researcher.”1
So, we hope you can see that a laboratory is not the only
place where research can be carried out. And in this book
we are stressing the idea that teachers themselves canresearch their own teaching and learning situations.
However, there are two further common misconceptions
about research that we need to address. Below, you can see
two more images that teachers often associate withresearch:

Misconception 1. Lots of reading
Images by: Mat Wright.

Teachers often associate research with scientists, and with
science. However, research is not just done in laboratories
and universities or for ‘scientific purposes’ only – it canalso be done by teachers and learners to gain a better
understanding of the dynamic nature of classroom life andpossibly to bring about change.
Here is an alternative image to represent better the natureof research into classroom life:

It is common to think that
research involves lots of reading.
This is possible but notnecessary in all kinds ofresearch. We will show you inthis book how referring to otherpeople’s ideas about a particular
topic may be useful, but it is not
as important as looking at yourclassroom closely and collecting information from it. Also,
reading can come later – you don’t need to read or write areview of what ‘the literature’ says about a topic before
starting teacher-research!

Misconception 2. Writing a paper

Image by: Rick Carey/Shutterstock.

In this picture, the diver is carefully looking at a richly
diverse and beautiful coral reef, something which needs
to be explored in its real surroundings not in a laboratory.
1

This is another misconception we need to clarify. You do
not have to write a paper about your research. You canalways present your research project to your colleagues
at school or to a wider audience at a conference. As we willshow, you do not need to write for this purpose, you can use
images and posters accompanied by talking to explain what
you did.

Holliday, A. (1994). Appropriate Methodology and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 31.

15|

What is teacher-research?

2.2 But what is research?

Task 2.2 @A useful short definition of research is the following:

Read the following classroom situations and choose theones you think show examples of research.

‘Research’: n. ‘The organised, systematic search
for answers to the questions we ask’.2
Another definition of research is: ‘systematic inquiry
made public’.3
You can see that the word ‘systematic’ is used in bothof these definitions. In other words, research needs to beplanned, following an organised procedure. A definition
proposed by David Nunan also stresses this. Nunan defines
research as ‘a process of inquiry consisting of threeelements or components: (1) a question, problem, or
hypothesis, (2) data, (3) analysis and interpretation of data’.4
Here Nunan makes reference to the collection and analysisof ‘data’, in other words relevant ‘information’. Look at thisdefinition for clarification:‘Data’: n. ‘You can refer to information as data,
especially when it is in the form of facts or statistics
that you can analyse’.5

Task 2.1 @Now that you have read some definitions of research,
consider the situations below and tick the ones you thinkcan be considered examples of research.
1. Luis needs to buy a flight ticket to go from Bogotá
to London on the fastest and cheapest route. In
order to find what he is looking for, he searches in a
number of airlines’ websites online and also in otherwebsites to choose the most appropriate flight forhim. He makes notes about a number of choices
which he later compares before buying the ticket.
2. Francis realises he cannot see any of channels
offered by his cable provider. He only sees a black
screen. He wonders how to get the channels backon his TV so he presses several buttons on his
remote and nothing happens. Then, he remembersthat he was given a guide for the cable set box.
By looking for the instructions on how to reconfigure cable channels, he manages to watch
his favourite channels again.
3. Claudia decides to change her desktop computer
since it has been working slowly recently. She
decides to buy a laptop which is light enough to be
carried around but with good RAM capacity andspeed. A week later, she goes into a shop and buys
a desktop computer which she finds on sale.
As you can see, we do engage in research in everyday life.
So, research is not only done by academics, it is also an
essential part of our everyday lives. Now, let’s consider
some classroom examples.

1. A maths teacher has decided to start using group
work in class to allow her students to work
collaboratively and talk to each other to solve thetasks. However, she notices that students are notworking in groups properly; they do not finish thetasks assigned and one or two students per groupdo all the work. Because of this, she decides to stop
doing group work since she feels this approach is
not effective in her class.
2. An English teacher usually uses videos in herclasses. Lately, she has noticed that students are
not really engaged and do not finish the tasks
assigned. She asks her students and finds thatstudents consider the language in the videos too
advanced and they have difficulties understanding
it. She asks a colleague to check the videos. This
colleague confirms what the students had told her.
As a result, she begins to choose the videos more
carefully, based on students’ level, as well as
providing them with the language they need tounderstand the videos.
3. A science teacher receives a visit from his school
inspector. After the visit, the inspector tells theteacher that every time he asks questions, the samegroup of five or six students answer and that heshould try and make all his learners participate
more actively. After this, he decides to direct hisquestions to quieter students and to allow more
confident ones to volunteer freely.

Commentary
So, to recap, research has the following characteristics;
1. question(s) to be answered
2. systematic collection of data
3. analysis of the data
4. answer(s) to the question(s)Throughout the book, we will take you through the different
parts and processes involved in doing research but it may
be important here to remind you that collecting data is an
essential part of research, followed by its ‘analysis’.
‘Analysis’: n. ‘Detailed examination of the elements
or structure of something’.5
As we’ve been stressing, research is not something only
scientists do. We do it in our everyday lives, and it can bedone by teachers, in which case we are talking about‘teacher-research’: research initiated by teachers into theirteaching contexts.

2

Hatch, E. and Lazaraton, A. (1991) The Research Manual: Design and Statistics for Applied Linguistics. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, p. 1.
Stenhouse, L (1978). ‘Applying research to education’. Paper given to the British Educational Research Association. Stenhouse Archive,
University of East Anglia, p. 1. 4 Nunan, D. (1992) Research Methods in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 3.
5
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/data3

What is teacher-research?

|16

2.3 What does teacher-research look
like? Lorena’s story
Let’s see whether the characteristics identified above
apply in the case of one of the Champion Teachers wehave worked with.
Read this story of research by Lorena Muñoz, told in her
own words, and complete the table which follows it with
notes.
“I am a teacher at a High School in Osorno working withstudents who have a high level of vulnerability. I teachfrom 9th to 11th grades and I have more or less 38 to 40
students per group. The 9th grade students are between
14 and 15 years old. In this context I noticed they were
not working properly in listening activities. In lessons I
observed that they didn’t do the activities and I wanted
to know the reason why.
I chose four questions to work with during the exploratory
research process:1. In which listening activities do my students
listen better?
2. How is listening presented during the lesson?
3. What kind of information are my students able
to identify from the listening material?
4. How does the length of the listening material
affect students’ performance?
In order to collect information, I conducted a survey anddiscovered that they found the topics interesting, which
was surprising for me; songs were the activities they liked
the most. They were able to listen and understand theteacher’s instructions. Then I carried out a focus group
discussion to find out what they found difficult or easy
when listening. They told me that they found therecordings too long and could not complete the activity.
That is why they got frustrated and became distracted.

They also said songs were easier because they wereshorter and they could complete the tasks. I alsoorganised a session of formal peer observation where astudent-teacher observed pupils’ behavior during listening
and the instructions given by the teacher. He confirmed
the findings and also noted that students listened to the
instructions and demonstrated that they knew what to do.
I decided to start working with the audios as if they weresongs. I divided them into sections and created activities
such as order the information, filling in the gaps, etc.
By the end of two weeks I observed several changes.
The first one was that they actually did the activities,
handouts were completed with the correct answers and I
could observe many hands up to participate in the lesson.
I conducted another survey in which students answeredthat working with the listening materials as if they weresongs allowed them to work better. They also said thatthey were able to identify information from the text andthat the activities they liked the most were underlining thecorrect word, filling in the gaps and crossing out the odd
one out. They still found it difficult to order the information
because sometimes the material was too fast. The focus
group participants mentioned that they now felt motivatedand more successful because they were able to do thetasks, and do them well. This was confirmed by anotherpeer observation, where the student-teacher told me thatstudents were able to focus on the activities and they did
not get distracted by anything else.
As a reflection I learned that conducting action research
can be helpful to improve my teaching practice and mystudents’ listening skills. Students are able to improve
listening skills if we, as teachers, implement strategies
according to their needs. I was able to see a change which
motivates me to continue working like this. From now on,
the way I teach listening will be different according to what
the group requires. Finally, I realised that with a simple
action I can change and improve what I am doing in theclassroom.”

Task 2.3 @Answer these questions according to Lorena’s story:
1. What were Lorena’s initial concerns?
2. What were Lorena’s initial questions?
We mentioned above that research has the following
characteristics;

Were all these things present in what Lorena did?
Answer: Yes!

1.

question(s) to be answered2.

systematic collection of data

Who made the research decisions?
Answer: Lorena, the teacher.

3.

analysis of the data

4.

answer(s) to the question(s)17|What is teacher-research?

So this is research – and it is research initiated and carriedout by a teacher: in a word, teacher-research!

Commentary
Lorena, a teacher, did research – for herself and for her
learners. She starts with some puzzles – some questions(her own!) – including ‘In which listening activities do mystudents listen better?’ and ‘How is listening presented
during the lesson?’ and she found answers by gathering‘data’ – from having one colleague observe her class andfrom asking students. She considered this data carefully(‘analysed’ it) and came to some conclusions about what
areas to improve in the way she developed her lessons
on listening.

Summary and follow-up
In this chapter we considered the way teachers often thinkresearch is not really ‘for them’; and we tried to demystify
research, by breaking it down into stages and by showing
how one teacher – Lorena – engaged in research which
proved to be very useful for her and, potentially, for her
students. This is teacher-research – research initiated andcarried out by teachers themselves into issues ofimportance to them in their own work.

Champion Teacher; Leyla Núñez

Follow-up
We invite you now to read the story of another Champion
Teacher; Leyla Núñez. She was interested in understanding
her students’ writing abilities. Find her complete story here:
http://bit.ly/Leyla-nunez
In her story, Leyla gained insights from her colleagues.
How did she do this? In what ways do you think this is /is not valuable? Leyla also collected information fromher students. What did she learn from this information?
Finally, do you agree with the action plan she proposes?
What would you add to her plan?

What is teacher-research?

|18

3. What is Exploratory
Action Research?
In the last chapter, we considered the general characteristics of research,
and also saw what ‘teacher-research’ can look like and why it might bebeneficial. In this chapter let’s look in more detail at what is involved in ateacher exploring her own practice and then acting on her findings to improve
the situation, in a process of ‘Exploratory Action Research’.

3.1 The value of ‘exploring’
Exploratory Action Research, as explained in this chapter,is a way to explore, understand and improve our practiceas teachers. We will first discuss the value of ‘exploring’and later we’ll move on to show how this can contributeto appropriate forms of ‘acting’ for change. Let’s start bylooking at two example situations which involve a teacher
managing a puzzling or a challenging classroom situation.

Task 3.1 @Answer the question below about these situations. You cancheck your answer in the answer key.
1.

2.

A teacher feels her students are
not motivated enough in her class.
She wonders whether she could
improve this by using videos inher class so she decides to plan alesson including videos showing
songs, funny clips and film extracts.
A teacher has noticed that his
students’ speaking abilities arelimited since they hardly
communicate using the target
language. In order to change thissituation, this teacher decides to
add more group work to his classes.

What do these situations have in common?
Choose (a), (b) or (c)A. Teachers in both examples collected data about
the situation.
B. Teachers applied some sort of ‘intervention’or ‘action’ to solve the situation.
C. Teachers didn’t do anything to solve or understandthe situation.

Commentary
Acting quickly is an essential teacher skill, but it might also
be important to consider whether you’re acting ‘right’,especially for the most important decisions. In example 1
above, the teacher decided to use videos, probably in the
belief that videos would be motivating in themselves. But
what if students’ lack of motivation was more related to thefact that they weren’t allowed to be active in class rather
than the type of materials? The teacher didn’t ask thestudents about this before deciding on using videos.

20|

What is Exploratory Action Research?

In fact, one teacher in the Champion Teachers programme
in Chile was also interested in increasing students’motivation but the data she gathered made her realise thather focus should change to how to give her students more
opportunities to speak English in class: “The information I
collected told me that I was not giving them enough time topractice. I was only giving one speaking activity per class oronce a week.” So in her case, an intervention related totechnology would not have solved the situation.
In example 2, the teacher asked students to work in groups
to increase speaking in class but what if students were notspeaking out because they didn’t have the language
needed to communicate or weren’t interested in the topics
being discussed in class? The teacher didn’t check theirspeaking abilities or interests before asking them to workin groups, or whether they would feel comfortable with thisnew format.
Read the following dialogue, which has been adapted froma real conversation between two teachers talking about
a solving a puzzling situation.
A: Last year, I had to choose the titles for my class graded
readers and I didn’t know which ones to choose.
B: You had a catalogue with titles right?
A: Yes, I had the titles but I didn’t know which ones mystudents would like.
B: I see. What did you do then?
A: I showed the titles of the readers to my students andI asked them to choose their favourite. They chose astory about animals! I could have never predicted that.
B: Why? Which one did you think they would choose?
A: A story about UFOs, ghosts or something like that.
Never animals!
The examples in Task 3.1 above briefly illustrate situations
where teachers attempt to solve situations or answer aquestion by immediately leaping into action. Unlike thosesituations, in the dialogue above you can see how theteacher answered her puzzle by collecting data. In this caseshe explored an unclear situation by asking her students.
She even reported her surprise when realising that her own
choice would have been a different one. This only proves
that, sometimes, taking a decision too quickly and without
exploring the situation further, can involve incorrect
assumptions or simply assumptions which may be based onsigns and intuition (as discussed in Chapter One) instead ofreasons why this situation is happening, as can be exploredthrough the collection of data.

3.2 Exploratory research: Andrea’s story
part 1
Let’s look at an example of how a situation can be explored
before attempts are made to resolve it. And we will see how
exploring can be built into everyday practice in Andrea’s
story, which she tells in her own words:

My name is Andrea Robles, I am an English Teacher from
Iquique, Chile. I consider myself a teacher who looks for
new things, ideas, techniques and I tend to reflect about
my teaching practice.

“I decided to start this research because I had a puzzle
about my wrapping-up activities. I felt that my closure was
not efficient or maybe my activities did not engage
students until the end to ensure their learning and thereaching of my class objective: I realised that I tended toprepare my classes giving special emphasis to the warm
up and the main activities and I wondered if the wrappingup was as strong as it should be.
But my first question was: What is a wrapping-up? I had anidea about it: a wrapping-up for me was the last activity of
the class, in which students verbalise, show or present
what they learned. But maybe it was not. So I started
surfing the web in order to find some information about it.
I found a website, www.busyteacher.com. That website
has many articles written by teachers about different
topics. Fortunately I found one that concerned the topic I
was looking for. In that article, the teacher mentions that awrapping-up is the last activity and it must be done by thestudents. In this part of the class the teacher has the roleof a facilitator.
In that point I felt that what I thought was similar to whatthat article said, so I felt kind of relaxed to be not so “lost”.
However, something that called my attention was that theteacher has a secondary role as a facilitator and that thelearners are the protagonists and the most important of
all is that the information must come from the students
and not from the teacher.
After that action, I decided to also ask some colleagues
about this topic. I thought that their opinion could be

useful because I still had questions that I needed toanswer. I asked them the following:
1.

What are the components of a wrapping-up activity?

2.

Is it important to wrap up a class? Why?

3.

What are the main difficulties you face in thisphase of the class?

4.

How do your students react when you wrap up
classes?

Their answers, overall, were that the components of awrapping-up activity are (a) remembering the objectives;(b) naming the contents of the class; and (c) making asummary of the class. Two thought that wrapping-up was
not very important but two felt it was important, for theteacher to know up to what point the objectives had beenreached and for students to clearly know what the class
was about and if they had reached its goal. The maindifficulties reported by my colleagues with regard to
wrapping-up were lack of time and student misbehaviour,with students typically not paying attention to this part ofthe class.
After this short questionnaire, I understood even moreclearly that students’ participation is crucial – this part ofthe class has to be motivating and student-centered – andthat one of the most important problems is time. I also
realised that it is very important to keep in mind the classobjective at all times, so I can know how much myobjectives are achieved.
I reflected on my teaching practice and I identified someof the features of my wrapping-up activities and comparedthem with how I thought a good closing should be:
My Closings

My Ideal Closings

I tended to ask open, undirected
questions, not using nomination inthis part of the class.

All the children
should have thechance toparticipate.

It lasted 5 minutes.

They have to show
their learning.

I tended to use the same questionsclass after class, with the result thatmy students knew that the class
was about to end. My questions
were: ‘What was the class about?
And what can you tell me about thisclass? What did you learn?’

Motivating
activities.

“I decided to interview them, so
after each activity we did withbackground music, I asked them
about how they felt, if they had
trouble concentrating, if they felt
the music helped them complete
the task and so on.”Activities that help
them to remember
the contents thefollowing class.

What is Exploratory Action Research?

|21

After all that process I decided to start my “real research”– that is how I call it – which has relation with my students.
Firstly, I wanted to know more about how my students
react at the end of the lesson. So I did a class and I asked
a colleague to observe me doing the class, paying special
attention to the wrapping-up and the reaction of mystudents. He took some notes and we had a meeting
to share the findings.
I did my class and I noticed that my students were notreally engaged with wrapping-up. Moreover, not manyof them wanted to participate and some of them did notlisten to their classmates talking about what the class
was about. In fact, the ones who participated in thatstage were the same ones who really like to participate
usually without me asking them directly.
After that, my colleague and I had a meeting and he said
that he noticed that most of the students started tidying
up their desks and getting ready to leave and only a few
paid attention.
That was it … something clicked in my mind! I felt
everything added up – what I felt was right: something
was not working in my closing stage.
The next class I gave students a piece of paper and I told
them to write what happened the previous class, I did thatin Spanish so all of them had the same chances toexpress their ideas. These were my findings:■■

23 did not remember■■

3 did not answer■■

8 answered correctly

Most of the students did not remember and those who
did were the ones who really like to participate in classes.”(3)

to her colleagues, shesearched the web, and she decided to ask a colleague to(4)

her lesson. She also asked

students to recall what they remembered from the lesson.
After Andrea collected all the (5)she needed, she (6)on the situation and was able to (7)the situation better.
Let’s look more closely at Andrea’s experience and try tounderstand it a bit more. She starts with what she calls a‘puzzle’ – not a definite ‘problem’, in her case, but somethingthat doesn’t necessarily require an immediate solution.
Rather than immediately trying out new ways of ending herclass, she decided to explore the situation.
In a sense, she ‘made the familiar strange’ by doing so –she saw it in a new light. It is difficult to stand back from the
problematic or puzzling situations we face but it can be very
effective. Teachers are often tempted to jump in and solve
things – but stepping back is also important.
But what do you do when you explore? If you look atAndrea’s exploration, we can identify the following stages,
which together characterise ‘exploratory research’:
A. Plan to explore [plan questions and how to getdata]This is the stage where you review your practice anddecide on an area or situation you will focus on. Hereyou also think about the questions that need to beanswered and you plan how to gather information toanswer the questions being asked.
B. Explore [gather data]

Task 3.2 @Here you collect data to clarify the situation you
identified. The important thing is to gather data in anorderly fashion so that you can analyse and interpret it
effectively.

How did Andrea explore the situation she identified?
Check your answers in the answer key.
Read the following text and fill in the gaps using thewords provided:

C. Analyse and reflect [answer questions on thebasis of data]
This is the stage where you analyse the entire process
and reflect on what has happened. Here is where you will
be able to clarify the puzzling or challenging situation
you identified in order to later make an action plan ifneeded.
Andrea decided to do this research because she didn’tknow whether the way she (1)her lessons was effective. In order to clarify this situation,
Andrea came up with some (2)Then, in order to answer her questions, she gave a

22|

What is Exploratory Action Research?

.

Task 3.3 @Based on the stages above, read the summary of the things Andrea did during her exploration and match them with thecorresponding stage. (The order of activities is mixed up, and there is more than one activity on the left for both A. and B.
on the right.) You can check your answers in the answer key.
1. Posing questions to help her clarify her issue.

2. Asking a colleague to observe her lessons.

A. Plan to explore

3. Clarifying what it is meant by ‘wrapping-up’ on the web

B. Explore

4. Analysing all the information she obtained and making
conclusions about the effectiveness of her ‘wrapping-up’.

C. Analyse and reflect

5. Identifying the ending of her lessons as a possibly
problematic area of her teaching.

6. Giving a questionnaire to her colleagues asking themfor their perceptions of ‘wrapping-up’.

3.3 Action research: Andrea’s story
part 2
We’ve seen what research to explore a particular situation
looks like. For some people exploring the situation can beenough (they might even find it helps to solve the situation)
and we’ll be focusing on this kind of exploratory research
for the next few chapters (until Chapter Six, in fact). But inthis book we’ll also consider how such research can become‘action research’ – how you can attempt to bring aboutsome change and systematically observe what happens.
Let’s go back to Andrea and her example about how she
wrapped up her lessons. Here is how Andrea carried onwith her research:“In that moment I decided that something must be done,
I had to make a change in order to change that situation.
So I asked the same colleague to go to my classroom
again and observe my class, take notes and meet me
again to talk about the class.
This time I decided to change the activity … I started
thinking ‘what is useful for me when I study somethingthat I want to remember later?’ and I realised that theactivity that is effective for me is a Mind Map. I did myclass as usual, and at the time I had to close the class I
took more time for it; I started that activity ten minutes
before the bell. I asked them to do a pair work in which
they had to do a map with all the things they learned inclass. They talked with their partners, took notes, usedcolors, etc.

I chose a group at random to explain their map in frontof the class, they drew their map, they explained it,
and surprisingly some other groups started adding
information from the class, examples they created, andalso some things they had previously learned, I noticed
something changed because many of them wereparticipating in the last activity.
In the meeting with my colleague, he told me that henoticed that all the students were engaged with theactivity, they were sharing their ideas in their groups, theygave their opinions, adding extra information, and he sawthat all the students were really motivated, even the ones
who did not pay attention in the previous class.
The next class, I repeated the same procedure from thefirst observed class – I asked my students to write on apiece of paper (in Spanish) about what they rememberedfrom the previous class. Their answers were:■■■■

30 of them remembered the contents of the previous
class (and most of them remembered the activityof the map);
4 of them did not remember.

Most of them could remember the previous class, so if
I came back again to that content the learning could belinked to the previous class and learning could bemeaningful. I realised that if I make a change in my class,
I can change a complete situation and, the mostimportant of all, changes are not really difficult to do andhave an impact on my students.
What is Exploratory Action Research?

|23

I think I need to research more and reflect more, but what
I am really sure about is that wrapping-up activities arevery important. I need to sit and look for activities in which
students can reflect on their own learning – the teacher
here disappears and a helper appears at the same time.
I dare to say that wrapping-up activities must develop
metacognition in my students.
I have more questions in my mind – I will do some extra
changes, research again, and share my findings again!”Commentary
Here you can see how Andrea moved from exploration toaction by using the information she collected during her
exploration to inform her later actions. For example, since
her colleague told her that she always used the same
strategy (asking a question to students), she decided tovary the way she ended her lessons. From the information
she collected, she learnt that students need to be helped
to remember, and this is why she decided to use mind maps
to aid their memory. In conclusion, Andrea explored thesituation and later acted on it on the basis of theunderstanding she had gained. She also collected further
data to see whether the changes she made were working.

Task 3.4 @Look at the following sequences of events describing whata teacher did in a given situation. Decide whether theseteachers attempt to explore the situation or immediately
act on it. Check your answers in the answer key.

1. A teacher notices that
her students insist on using
their mobiles phones in class. In orderto address this situation, she plans
activities where students can use
their mobile phone for language
learning purposes.

3. A teacher wants to teachher students a song. She wonders
what song they might like, so she gives
a survey to her students to know.
Based on this, she decides to teachstudents a current pop song.

A. The teacher explores the situation first
B. The teacher immediately acts on the situation

2. A group of colleagues
are having some difficulties
managing a group of students.
They asked students, and they claimed
that they didn’t enjoy working
so passively at their desks.

A. The teacher(s)explores the situation first

B. The teacher
immediately acts on thesituation

A. The teacher explores the situation first
B. The teacher immediately acts on the situation

24|

What is Exploratory Action Research?

The ‘action’ part of Andrea’s research contains some of thesame elements (data collection, analysis and interpretation)
as the exploration part of her research, except that they
focus on evaluating the ‘action’ being carried out rather
than on exploring the situation more broadly. The stages in
the action part of her research, then, can be identified as:

3.4 So, what is Exploratory Action
Research?

1. Plan (to change)

Exploratory Action Research occurs when exploratory
research (as in part 1 of Andrea’s story (3.2 above)) is
followed by action research (as in part 2 of Andrea’s
story (3.3 above)). In other words, the whole process looks
like this:In this stage you decide what to change and plan how tocollect further data to see what happens.

A. Plan to explore [plan questions and how to getdata]

2. Act [implement the change]

B. Explore [gather data]

You apply the change (‘intervention’) you have planned.

C. Analyse and reflect [answer questions on thebasis of data]

3. Observe [see what happens – with data]
You collect data either while the intervention is taking
place or after it, and you analyse it.

1. Plan (to change)

4. Reflect [interpret what occurred]

2. Act [implement the change]

This is the stage where you interpret what has
happened, reflecting particularly on the effects of theintervention and considering any further actions thatseem necessary. Of course, you might decide thatfurther research is needed – so you can go back to(A.) to explore further or (1.) to engage in further action
research.

3. Observe [see what happens – with data]

4. Reflect [interpret what occurred]

We can also picture Exploratory Action Research like this …

?
4. Reflect
3. Observe
2. ActB. Explore

C. Analyseand reflect

1. Plan(to change)

A. Planto explore

exploration

actionSteps of Exploratory Action Research

What is Exploratory Action Research?

|

25

Task 3.5
As emphasised above, we believe that sufficient explorationis very important before you engage in action research.
Why? Note down one or two of your own reasons before
reading on. Hint: don’t forget the stories you’ve already
read, for example in Tasks 3.1 and 3.4!

As we saw in Chapter Two, and in Andrea’s story in thischapter, research begins with and grows out of questions.
we ask ourselves. So it may be useful at this point tohighlight the way Exploratory Action Research has two
separate basic research questions, which relate to the two
separate phases shown in the ‘Steps of Exploratory Action
Research’ diagram – Exploration and Action:
Exploration
The exploratory research question (EQ):
What is the current situation?

ActionThe action research question (AQ):
What are the effects of the change(s)that I attempt?

There are at least three good reasons for exploring asituation before planning action to change it:
1) Before we can decide what to do, we need to understandthe current situation. As teachers, we often think weunderstand what is happening in our classrooms, but thisis not always the case. The problem-solving examples in
Task 3.1 (and associated commentary) show that, without
exploration, we can easily take the wrong action and evenmake things worse.
2) In order to decide whether our action has beensuccessful, we need to compare what happens with thesituation as it was before we acted. By exploring thesituation and collecting data, we will have enoughinformation about the initial situation to do this. Another,related, advantage is that we can often use the same wayof collecting data after a new action, making it relatively
easy to compare the situations.
3) It may not be very difficult to combine exploration inyour classroom with your everyday teaching. It shouldn’t
increase your workload too much and should go welltogether with what you normally do. Exploration essentiallymeans looking at your situation in a different way, or inmore detail, and this, as we’ve seen, can be advantageous
for a number of reasons.

Only these two main questions are necessary for
Exploratory Action Research. We can make them more
specific and detailed, but everything we do should aim toanswer these two questions.
At this stage you may have questions about the questions!
You may be wondering how an interest or challenge thatyou’ve identified can be explored with these questions, oryou may want to see examples of more specific questions.
Don’t worry! These are coming soon. In the remainder ofthis book, we will look into each of the steps of Exploratory
Action Research in more detail, as follows:

Exploratory research
■■

■■

■■

What is Exploratory Action Research?

Analysing and interpreting the data to answer thequestions and understand your situation better[Chapter Six]

Action research■■|Collecting the data that you need to answer thequestions [Chapter Five]

Remember that these three steps may be enough - the newunderstanding you gain can help, in many ways, on its own.
Alternatively, you may want to take it further, into action
research:■■

26

Clarifying your problem, interest or puzzle, and deciding
on your specific questions [Chapter Four]

Planning to make a change, and then making the change[Chapter Seven]
Observing what happens, evaluating the change, andreflecting on what you want to do next [Chapter Eight]

Summary and follow-up

Follow-up

In this chapter we’ve looked at the value of exploring, andnoted that teachers’ perceptions of situations don’t always
match realities, especially when they’re immersed in the
day-to-day challenges of teaching students. With Andrea’s
story, we’ve noticed how the actions she took were only
possible after she’d explored and understood the situation
she was facing. We have identified seven steps in the
Exploratory Action Research process, three for explorationand four for action, and we’ve also looked forward to theremaining chapters of this book.

We would like to invite you to look back at Lorena’s story
from Chapter Two but in greater detail this time, via thefollowing link: http://bit.ly/LorenaMunoz
Here she describes her complete Exploratory Action
Research project. Complete the table below with notes
about what she does in each step. The first step has been
provided as an example.

Exploratory Action Research step

What did Lorena do?

A

Plan to explore

She noticed a problem with listening activities and decided onfour questions to work with.

B

ExploreC

Analyse and reflect

1

Plan (to change)

2

Act

3

Observe

4

Reflect

What is Exploratory Action Research?

|27

4. What shall I explore– and what are myquestions?
By now you should have a reasonably clear picture of what Exploratory Action
Research looks like – in theory, and in the practice of several teachers whosestories you’ve been introduced to. If you want to get an even better idea, you
could read more of the stories about teachers in the Chilean Champion Teachers
project, in the companion book we’ve been referring to a lot, and will continue
to refer to throughout this handbook, Champion Teachers: Stories of Exploratory
Research (http://bit.ly/champion-teachers). When you’re ready, read on to find out
how to get started with your own research!

4.1 Motivations for doing research
In the last chapter, you read how Andrea’s research topic
did not come from what she had read or from someone
else’s suggestions but started from a concern that she had
about her own teaching. In Chapter Two we also discussed
how teacher-research is primarily for teachers (and theirlearners) themselves, and so should be carried out in waysthat are manageable for them, not being an added burden.
It is only logical then that the main motivation for yourresearch will come from you, from your own experience,
purposes and needs, and not from the outside.
You are possibly thinking; “But, how do I start? There areso many things going on in my classes – so many issues toaddress, so many problems to solve, so many puzzles toresolve. First, it is important to keep in mind that yourresearch can originate from a) a success story, b) a puzzleor c) a challenging situation:
A. A success story: Something that worked and you would
like to explore further.
For example:
You noticed that using short stories to develop reading
comprehension improved your students reading skills.
You may now want to know what aspects of yourstudents’ skills improved or what kind of stories weremore successful. You may also want to explore whether
other narrative genres (such as comics) can have thesame desired effect.
B. A puzzle: Doubts or questions you have about yourstudents and their learning.
For example:
Your students have expressed to you on a number ofoccasions that they get bored in class. You observe themfor a while and you notice they are not engaged during
your lessons even when you plan more active activities.
You would like to know what they think about the class andhow lessons could become more engaging for them.

Most teachers have many issues they would like to address
and a useful way to start narrowing down your focus is bythinking of different areas or categories of classroom life.
We have adapted some categories originally suggested
by Michael Wallace1 in the following list:
A. classroom management: situations relating to students’behaviour, classroom organisation, etc.
B. appropriate materials: issues that you may have witha textbook, reading books or technological resourcesand equipment
C. particular areas of teaching: situations related to skills
teaching (e.g. writing), content (e.g. grammar or
pronunciation) or overall approaches (e.g. task-basedlearning)
D. students’ attitudes, achievement or motivation: issues
relating to students’ interest, progress etc. Here you
could also include issues relating to student–teacher
rapportE. otherC. A challenging situation: Something that didn’t work –you would like to know why.
For example:
You began to use role-play in class to help your students
become more confident speaking the language. However,they didn’t respond well to the activity and they tell you
they still feel embarrassed and anxious when speaking infront of people. You want to know why this happens.

1

Wallace, M, 1997. Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

29|

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?

Task 4.1
Using the categories suggested above, complete the following table with notes on particular issues you might wish
to explore further (in the case of a success you could build on), to clarify (in the case of a puzzle) or to solve / improve(in the case of a challenging situation).
CategoryYour own issue(s)A. classroom management

B. appropriate materials

C. particular areas of teaching

D. students’ attitudes, achievement or motivation

E. any otherTask 4.2 @Read again the stories shared by Andrea and Leyla (cf. Chapter Three). Identify the main motivations these teachers
had for their research (success story, puzzle or challenging situation?) and decide which category of classroom life
(from a. to e. in Task 4.1 above) their research was most related to.
1. Andrea’s story about ending lessons
Motivation and category:

2. Leyla’s story about writing
Motivation and category:

Whether you start with a problem, puzzle, doubt, worry or even success, you will need to decide on one of these to focus
on (since you cannot address all issues which are of interest to you at once), and then you need to come up with somequestions related to your focus. In the rest of this chapter we’ll first be helping you to find a focus. Then we’ll move on
to how to formulate ‘good’ questions, and then you’ll be almost ready to start your own research.
Narrowing down to a particular topic and deciding on questions can be hard – sometimes it’s the hardest part of theresearch process, as there are so many interesting things in classrooms that can be researched!

What shall I explore – and what are my questions? |30

4.2 Your own motivations – andnarrowing down your focus
The motivations we suggested above can lead you tounderstand your classroom, your students and yourteaching better and/or change them, via teacher-research.
To do research, though, you first need to choose aparticular topic, in other words narrow down to a major
focus from all the possible focuses you could have. The
following activities will help you do this:a more effective class, then you need to think whether you
can actually change the layouts in your classroom. If theanswer is ‘no’ in these cases, then it could be better toconsider an alternative topic area.

Urgent:a) Things that worked and you would like to explore further:

There are issues that you may need toaddress as soon as possible for a numberof reasons, for example when something isaffecting your or your students’ emotional
well-being and maybe also having an impact on theirlearning. If, for example, you have been teaching a group oflearners for some months and notice no improvements dueto their behaviour, then looking at this situation may be
more urgent than exploring other areas, particularly whentime is also a factor.

I am happy about

Significant:Task 4.3
Bearing in mind your answers to Task 4.1, try to write
sentences for each of the following situations:b) Doubts or questions you have about your students andtheir learning:
I am unsure aboutc) Things that didn’t work – you would like to know why:
I am unhappy about

You may have found that there are several topics that you
would like to explore and feel are worth pursuing further.
However, some topic areas are likely to be easier toapproach and/or are more relevant than others for you andyour learners. To narrow down your list, we suggest
considering what we call ‘MUSE’: the extent to which eachpossible topic for research is Manageable, Urgent,Significant and Engaging.

Manageable:
This is a criterion that is usually neglected
but which it is important to keep in mind.
It is very important that you choose a
research topic that you can actually explore
by yourself in the time that you have available. You may beinterested in finding out more about the use of the ELT
curriculum or the textbook in your locality but you need toconsider whether you can carry it out. If you would like toexplore the different classroom layouts that would allow for

31|

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?

The area you focus on also needs to besignificant, meaning it is something thatyou, your learners and maybe also yourschool can benefit from. For example, if
you notice that your learners can read and write
appropriately for their level but cannot communicate in
spoken form then you may want to address this issue. This
may not be a pressing need to be addressed quickly (unlike
if it is ‘urgent’) but it is significant since you know yourlearners need to develop oracy as well as literacy. Similarly,
if you have noticed that classroom management is a generalissue of concern in your school, then a topic in this category
could be considered significant.

Engaging:
It is important that the topic thatyou choose is interesting for you
and is something that you arewilling to focus on and spend timeon. If you focus on an area you
have simply read about or been told you ‘should’ focus on,
the research process may become a burden. Ideally,
Exploratory Action Research is an activity that both you andyour learners will enjoy.

Task 4.4
Look at the ideas you wrote about in task 4.3 as possible
motivations for doing research. Now evaluate themaccording to the MUSE criteria by placing ticks (or scoresout of 5) in the grid below. Hopefully, one of your topics willtick all the boxes!

MANAGEABLE

URGENTSIGNIFICANTENGAGING

1

2

3

If you are still not sure about a possible topic, keep a journal
for a week, using the following format to guide your thinking.
1. Something I liked about my class today ……
2. Something I am unsure about from my class today …..
3. Something that didn’t work well in my class today ….

After one week, go back to your journal and read your ideas.
You may find a potential topic there. If you don’t, do notdespair, it is better to take your time and continue writingin your journal until you feel good about the area you will
research. It is also advisable to talk to your colleagues aboutsituations that are puzzling or disturbing you. This can help
you choose a good area to focus on.

4.3 From topic to exploratory questions
In the previous chapter, we presented Exploratory Action
Research (EAR) to you as a way to explore, understand andpotentially change your practice.

Before we start peeling an onion, what we see is the outerlayer – what is evident to our eyes. After that, layer afterlayer is uncovered as we peel the onion.

A good way to start your EAR project is to take your topic /area of focus and to ‘unpack’ it. By this we mean, exploring
inside it further. To use another analogy, this process canbe compared to peeling an onion.

If we apply this process to our possible research topic, theresult will be a series of questions that can help us get toour main question or questions and then help us ‘see’ what
is not immediately evident. Sometimes, because we areso immersed in a situation, it is hard to think of ways to
uncover the issue. Here, the help of a critical friend ishighly useful and recommended. A critical friend can be acolleague you trust or a mentor (an experienced colleague
that you can go to for guidance). In the previous chapter
you read Andrea’s account of her research into ending
lessons. Andrea had a mentor who supported her during
her research.
Below, you will find an extract from the conversation
Andrea had with her mentor when she started. You will see
how, in this dialogue, the mentor helped Andrea ‘peel theonion’ and start to establish research questions:

What shall I explore – and what are my questions? |32

Dialogue between Andrea and her mentor
Andrea: My main concern is how I finish my lessons.
I just feel it is not effective.
Mentor: When you say how I ‘finish my lessons’,
what part of the class is it exactly and how
long does it take?
Andrea: It’s the very last bit, the last five minutesof my lesson.
Mentor: When you say, ‘it’s not effective’, what do you
mean exactly? What is it that you don’t like
about it?
Andrea: I don’t know, I just feel it’s not right. I can feelit’s not working out. When I finish my lessons
I don’t see what I would like to see. I don’t thinkit’s good.
Mentor: But what do you mean by ‘good’? What’s an‘effective’ ending of a lesson for you?
Andrea: Mmm... I think it should capture the main topicsof the lesson. I’ve also read that it shouldn’t
take too long.
Mentor: I see. Have you asked your colleagues about
this?
Andrea: Not really.
Mentor: Would it help to read about it? Maybe asking
your colleagues as well?
Andrea: Yes, that’s a good idea.
Mentor: Have you asked your learners what they think
about this part of your lessons?
Andrea: No. I hadn’t thought of asking them. I could dothat as well.
Mentor: What is it that you do in that part of lesson?

Mentor: How do you do that?
Andrea: I ask them what they learned that day, butmaybe that’s not working.
Mentor: Are you fully aware of what you do? Could you
make a list of what you do?
Andrea: Well, it happens really fast.
Mentor: Would it help to look in more detail at what
you do?
Andrea: Yes, of course. There are things that I may dothat I don’t notice.
Mentor: From this puzzle that you have about wrappingup, then, what are the things you need to get
more information about, then?
Andrea: I think I need to find out what an effective
ending of lessons would ideally look like. I alsoneed to know what actually happens when I
finish my lessons. And I think I should find out
more about what the students think about thispart of our lessons.

Andrea: I ask my students to summarise the main pointsof the lesson.

The dialogue that you have just read illustrates how Andrea became able to focus the exploration phase of her EAR with thehelp of her mentor. This is something that you can also try to do with the help of a critical friend and/or by yourself.

33|

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?

Task 4.5 @The conversation on the previous page between Andrea and her mentor illustrates how various questions can be asked
about a given situation. Based on this conversation, what do you think Andrea’s main exploratory questions could be?
1

2

3

Look in the answer key to discover the research questions she actually set out to answer.

4.4 Teresa’s exploratory questions
As you have seen, in order for you to understand a situation
better and gather data effectively, it is important to have aparticular question or questions in mind which you will later– with evidence – be able to answer.
Here is an example from a Chilean Champion Teacher,
Teresa Ríos, in her own words (you have read a third-person
account of her research already, if you did the follow-up
task for Chapter One). Teresa is a high school teacher, who
was concerned about her students not speaking English
in class. Read her description and pay attention to how,from her main topic area, she proposes exploratory
questions (EQs).
“I believe it is very important for my students to use thelanguage they are learning: they can read and write
simple texts but I noticed that my students did not speak
in class as was expected. I was afraid that they did nothave enough vocabulary to communicate what they ought
to, that they were not easily communicating orally theirthoughts or opinions or whatever they wanted to say.
I wanted to know why my students did not speak in class.
Why was it so hard to them to use the language orally?
I needed my students to speak in class, because thenational curriculum says that we need to emphasise
speaking.

In order to develop this project, my initial researchquestions were:■■

Why is it that my students do not speak in class?

■■

Do my students like to speak in English?

■■

What opportunities do they have to speak in class?

Having these questions in mind, I needed to reflect on myteaching so I asked two of my colleagues about the kindof activities they do to have their students practise orally.
Simple questions like ‘What strategies do you use in class
to make students speak more freely?’. Both answered“dialogues”, guided ones at first, then personalizing them.
Secondly, I prepared a survey to my students in order
to collect data about the activities they liked most andwhen (at the beginning or the end of the class) they liked
to speak or have oral activities. Three questions about
how they feel, and what activities are their favourite onesin class.
Then, I invited a fellow teacher to observe my class andcheck which activities I was doing to have my students
practice orally. I handed him a sheet of paper with somequestions to lead his “critical-friendly-visit”.
I also had informal conversations, after the surveys, withmy students about the activities they like most/least, andwhat they did like to do orally.

I wanted to make sure what the problem was for themin using the language they are acquiring or they havebeen acquiring since they started English at school,
using simple patterns. I know speaking is one of themost difficult skills to develop.

What shall I explore – and what are my questions? |34

After the strategies mentioned above, I found out someinteresting things about the activities they liked most: they
preferred small plays and dialogues, and one thing that
was appealing to them was tourism. One of my students
mentioned the need they have to speak when they meeta tourist in the city. We live in an area where tourists arecommon and my students mentioned they wanted tolearn how to talk to a tourist, and how to give them somedirections, instructions or orientations to get to placesin the city.

2.		 Exploring others’ perceptions is also an importantfocus, since you need to know what your learners(or sometimes parents, or your colleagues) think
and/or feel in a particular situation in order to fully
understand it. In 4.4 above, Teresa asked her students
about their preferences regarding speaking tasks,
since she felt students were not communicating
effectively in English in her class – in other words, she
asked students what they thought of activities in orderto understand this situation from their perspectives.

They said that they would like to speak more in class.

3.		 By exploring your students’ and also your own
behaviour, you will get a clear picture of what actually
happens in the classroom; what you do and what yourstudents do. Both Andrea and Teresa had this focus on
behaviour: Andrea looked at the way her students
behaved at the end of the lesson and Teresa explored
what she and her students did to practise speaking.
In this way, both Andrea and Teresa obtained
important and, in some ways, surprising data about
what they do, the way they teach and the way theirstudents react to their teaching.

My colleague mentioned that students only worked with
one partner and they did not have more opportunities
to talk. He suggested they exchange partners.
The information I collected told me that I was not giving
them enough time to practice: I was only giving one
speaking activity per class, or even only once a week.”
In the story above, you were able to see how Teresa
decided to start her research by exploring her problematic
situation further, asking herself questions which could help
her do this. Teresa’s main exploratory question was thefollowing:■■

Why is it that my students do not speak in class?

And she had a particular interest in two things:■■

Do my students like to speak in English?

■■

What opportunities do they have to speak in class?

Exploring my perceptions
E.g.
What do I mean by?

What do I think / feel about?

Why do I think

happens?

What do I want to see happening insteadof?

As you can see, these questions attempt to:
A. Clarify and understand the main issue

Exploring others’ perceptions

B. Give a sense of direction to the research process
C. Assist the teacher find answers in her own context
before leaping into action

4.5 Your own questions
In order to come up with your own exploratory questions,
you can think of questions which (1) explore your own
perceptions, (2) explore others’ perceptions (in particular,
students’) and (3) explore behaviour (your students’ andalso yours!).
1.		 Exploring your own perceptions is important for
identifying why a situation is important to you, what
you understand about it and what you expect,particularly if you are unhappy with it. In the case of
Andrea in Chapter Three, she needed to understandwhat a wrapping up was in order to establish why she
was dissatisfied with the way she developed this stage
in her lessons. Consequently, she needed to explore
her views of an effective wrapping up.

35|

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?

E.g.
What do my students think / feel about?

What do my colleagues think of?

Exploring behaviour
E.g.
When/How often does

happen?

What do I do / say whenoccurs?

What do my students do / say whenoccurs?

Task 4.6 @Let’s practise asking questions using the categories andquestion frames above, using one situation. Look at theexample and then pose a question for the topic provided.
Check the answers in the answer key.
Example:Topic: My students speak in English only to me but not toeach other.
Exploring my perceptions
In what parts of the class do I think students speak tome?
Why do I think it’s important for them to speak to one
another in English?

In Andrea’s example – which you read in the previous
chapter – and also in Teresa’s example in 4.4, you will havefound that there are two or three main EQs being asked,
under two or all of the three categories (own and others’
perceptions; and behaviour). This is not necessarily always
the case but it is good if you both try to keep yourquestions to a manageable number and attempt to lookat an issue from different perspectives.
Let’s try with your own topic now!

Task 4.7
Write down your main topic area (from Task 4.4) and thenpropose your own exploratory questions using theexamples you have read as guidance and also the question
frames provided in this section.
The area I will focus on is

Exploring others’ perceptions
What do my students think about this?

Exploring behaviour
In pair work, which students do and don’t speak in
English?
In pair work, when do they start speaking in English?
Now try to write some questions in the chart below for
another provided topic.
Topic: I often have too little time at the end of the class
to explain homework clearly.

1.

?

2.

?

3.

?

4.

?

Exploring my perceptions

Exploring others’ perceptions

Exploring behaviour

What shall I explore – and what are my questions? |36

4.6 SMART questions

3.

Accurate:
Specific, concrete and well-defined, not too generalor vague. Also, ‘down to earth’, so that you are able
to answer the question by, for example, looking at
your classroom or thinking about your practice or
asking your students. For example, not ‘How motivated
are my students?’ but instead ‘What activities do mystudents say they like/dislike in class?’

4.

Realistic
Feasible to answer, not too idealistic; some things may
be measurable but not by you, or even by you in ateam, within the time you have available or within yourindividual capabilities. Ask yourself: ‘Am I going to beable to answer this question myself?’. For example, not‘What were the intentions of the textbook writers inincluding these particular topics in the coursebook?’
but instead ‘What do different teachers say they dowhen they come to the topics about teenage drug use,
unwanted pregnancy and refugees?’

5.

Topic-focused
Related to your overall topic; there are lots ofquestions which are interesting to attempt to answer,
but you should try to keep focused on your central
topic, and leave other questions to another time.
For example, if your main topic is how to improve theinstructions you give for activities, not ‘What kind of
speaking activities help students to speak more?’ butinstead ‘How do I give instructions for different kindsof activities?’

It’s important to try to make your research questions as
good as they can be before you continue the research
process. But what do we mean by ‘good’? One way of
thinking about this, as with goals in general, is to see
if your exploratory research questions are ‘SMART’.1
Good exploratory research questions are:STUDY-ORIENTED
MEASURABLE
ACCURATEREALISTICTOPIC-FOCUSED
1.

2.

Study-oriented:
Oriented towards the study or examination of asituation rather than towards action upon it. Since,at this stage, the questions to ask are exploratory
questions, the focus should be on exploring a situationin order to understand it, rather than on taking action
to change it immediately. For example, not ‘How can
I improve my students’ writing?’ (even though thismight be your overall concern) but instead ‘What am
I doing now to support my students’ writing skills?’
Measurable:
Possible to answer; some things are interesting but noteasily observable or easy to record and are therefore
hard to measure. For example, not ‘What goes on in
students’ heads when I ask them a question?’ butinstead ‘How do students say they feel when I ask
them a question?’

Task 4.8 @Look at the following questions and decide whether they are ‘SMART’ or not. If not, which of the SMART criteria do they failto meet? You can check your answers in the answer key.

1

Exploratory question

SMART?

Criterion

1.

What affects my students’ learning English?

No

Not realistic or measurable

2.

When do my students use English to communicate witheach other?

3.

Why don’t my students learn?

4.

How many times do my students use their dictionaries
when doing their homework?

5.

How can films promote my students’ motivation?

6.

How often in my lesson do my students work in pairs?

Our definition of SMART is modified from the original.

37|

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?

Task 4.9
Have a go, with a partner, in a group, or on your own, at ‘SMARTing’ the exploratory research questions you wrote downat the end of section 4.5 (in Task 4.7) above. How can you make them more Study-focused, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic,
Topic-focused? Write down your revised questions here:
1.					2.					3.					4.					

Task 4.10 @Go back to task 4.8. Try to rewrite the questions you identified as not SMART, to make them SMART-er.
Exploratory question
1.

What affects my students’ learning English?

2.

When do my students use English to communicate witheach other?

3.

Why don’t my students learn?

4.

How many times do my students use their dictionaries
when doing their homework?

5.

How can films promote my students’ motivation?

6.

How often in my lesson do my students work in pairs?

Edited question(only those which need improvement)

Task 4.11
Leave your own questions in 4.9 above to ‘rest’ for 24 hours. Then, look at the questions and ‘SMART’ them again. Also, thistime, ask a critical friend or a mentor to look at them and SMART them as well. Write down your revised questions here:
1.					2.					3.					4.					

Summary and follow-up
This chapter took you, step by step, through a process from having various concerns in your mind to deciding on one ofthem to focus on (via MUSE); to devising research questions which explore your own perceptions, others’ perceptions and/or behaviour; and then to making your questions as ‘SMART’ as they can be. Deciding on research questions is one of themost difficult, and yet most important parts of the (teacher-)research process. Questions are never ‘perfect’, though, andit’s probably time to move on. We will move forward, in the next chapter, to deciding on what kinds of information, or ‘data’,
will help you answer the research questions you have come up with.

What shall I explore – and what are my questions? |38

Follow-up
In her story, Daniela came up with a set of exploratory questions in order to understand her situation better.
To prepare for the next chapter, we suggest that you read her story here: http://bit.ly/Daniela-Gajardo
Fill in the boxes with notes about the different things she did in her research. Alternatively, ask and answer
the questions with a colleague:
Daniela’s research
1.

What did she decide to explore?

2.

What questions did she ask?

3.

What did she do to gather information?

4.

What information did she get?

39|

What shall I explore – and what are my questions?

5. How can I explore?
By asking yourself questions (or by having someone else ask you questions),
as you did in the last chapter, you’ve already begun to explore the situation
you chose to focus on, in the sense that you’ve begun to think carefully
about it and have become more aware of what you do and what you don’t
know. In this chapter, we will suggest how you can continue to reflect in thisway and will also suggest some ways you can look for external sources of
information to answer your exploratory questions.

After briefly revisiting Andrea’s story, we will learn
about twelve different kinds of data source thatteachers have found it realistic to use in Exploratory
Action Research. We will then see how Mauro –another Champion Teacher – gathered data toanswer his research questions, and we will also see
how useful it can be to combine several different
sources of information. On this basis, we provide
some tasks to help you decide how to gather data
to find answers for your own research questions.

Box A. Andrea’s exploratory and action research questions:

5.1 Different sources of information

4. 		 What are the effects of the change(s) that I
			attempt?

1.		What is a wrapping up?

2. 		 What are the characteristics of my wrapping up?

3. 		 How do my students react in that part of the class?

Let’s recall Andrea’s story, which we first came acrossin Chapter Three. Her exploratory questions (EQs) were:
1. What is a wrapping up?
2. What are the characteristics of my wrapping up?

Box B. What did Andrea do to gather information?

3. How do my students react in that part of the class?

A. surfed the web for answers.

Once she had gathered enough information to answer
these questions, she decided to try various new ways ofwrapping up her class. As we saw at the end of Chapter
Three, the basic ‘action research question’ (AQ) is always:

B. asked a colleague to observe her class.
C. asked some colleagues about wrapping up.
D. asked students’ reactions

4. What are the effects of the change(s) that I attempt?
Andrea didn’t clearly state this question in her report,
but it’s clear that, after she explored the situation, shedecided to try out different activities at the end of her
lessons, and in each case, tried to see how effective these
activities were. In order to do this she compared what
happened with what she had previously discovered.

Task 5.1 @What, more precisely, did she do to try to answer her
research questions (1., 2., 3., and 4.) ? Write (a), (b), (c)and/or (d) next to each question in Box A below…
[Hint: (b) and (d) can be used more than once]

41|

How can I explore?

As you’ve seen, Andrea used different kinds of data toanswer different exploratory research questions. And when
it came to the action research part of her research, sheused similar data sources, so that she could clearly see theeffects of her new activities.
In this chapter we’ll be looking more closely at the different
possible sources of information you can use, how you canaccess them, and how you can match them effectively toyour research questions.

Remember, we are concerned with ways of researching which don’t place too much of an extra burden on you as a busy
teacher. Here, then, are some sources of information that secondary school teachers have actually managed to use
without much extra work in the projects we’ve been involved in:
1. Your own written reflections and/or notes

2. Other people’s written ideas on the topic

3. Notes from informal conversations with colleagues

4. Reflective writing by students

5. Notes or recordings of focus group discussions

6. Notes or recordings of interviews / chatswith individuals

7. Responses to a questionnaire

8. Lesson plans and materials

9. Lesson recordings

10. A critical friend’s notes about your lesson

11. Pictures of your class

12. Students’ performance on tasks (written orrecorded)Let’s see now what using each of these sources involves,
and let’s consider some basic advantages of each of them– in other words, what they can be used for (it’s importantto remember that you won’t be using all of them – justselecting from among them to suit your researchquestion(s)). As you go through, make a mental note ofwhether each kind of data seems best suited to answering
questions about: your own perceptions; others’ (e.g.
students’) perceptions; or actual behaviour or
performance.

What she did was to surf the web to look for information
about it and she found some good websites whichsuggested that a wrapping-up was effective when it
involved students and was focused on their learning.

1. Your own written reflections and/or notes.

Let’s practise looking for other people’s written ideas on
a topic. This time, and just for the sake of this task, pleasefind additional information about ‘wrapping up’ tocomplement what Andrea found. Surf the web and takesome notes about the ideas you find.

Reflective writing by you (e.g. immediately after a class,perhaps in note form, and/or in fuller sentences when
you’re at home) is a good way to explore your own
perceptions in relation to a particular topic or question– for example, self-questioning what you mean bysomething. Andrea used reflective writing to ask herself
what an ‘effective’ ending to a lesson meant to her, forexample.

Collecting this kind of information about a topic issomething you can do either by surfing the web, as
Andrea did, or by reading magazines, journals or books.

Task 5.2 @Note: We will also do the exercise; you can check what we
found in the answer key.

Unless you already keep a diary or reflective journal about
your teaching, it can be difficult at first to start to write
about your thoughts and feelings. If so, try writing in notes
at first, and don’t forget that the writing is just for you – you
don’t need to show it to anyone. Try to write as ‘freely’ as
you can, as thoughts come to you, without worrying aboutpunctuation, grammar etc.: so long as you can read it later,that’s fine. It can be hard to find time to write reflectively,
but even 20 minutes doing it is time well spent!
2. Other people’s written ideas on the topic
Besides keeping notes of your own perceptions of asituation, it is also useful to know what other people havewritten about the topic. By reading, you can compare otherpeople’s views with your own and also learn more about the
topic you will explore. Andrea did this when she decided tofind out more about the meaning and role of ‘wrapping up’.
How can I explore?

|423. Notes from informal conversations with colleagues
You can also explore your own perceptions in quite anatural way by having an informal conversation with acolleague. Sometimes we don’t realise what we really think
about a topic because we haven’t had a chance to reflect
on it in depth. Talking to a colleague about something gives
you the opportunity to express your views in the settingof a natural conversation.
Taking notes about some the ideas expressed during theconversation and what you think about them gives you theopportunity to gather interesting data about your own
perceptions.
As an example, read the following dialogue between two
teachers. Pay attention to the way in which Isabel starts
to reflect and share her views about her students’ lackof motivation:
Isabel:I’ve been thinking about my students’ lackof motivation.

Mario:

What exactly is troubling you?

Isabel:Well, they don’t seem to enjoy my classes.
They don’t get engaged in the activities. They
don’t seem to enjoy anything I do! Does that
happen to you?

Mario:

It happens to me with some classes, not all.
But yes, it does happen.

Isabel:This really bothers me and I need to think why
it bothers me so much.

Mario:

Well, it’s not nice to prepare activities thatstudents don’t enjoy.

Isabel:Exactly, that’s the main problem for me, too.
I prepare what I think is a fun class, and they
don’t show any interest.

Mario:

But do they tell you that they don’t like theactivities or do you just feel it?

Isabel:Well, they don’t seem very interested – but they
haven’t actually told me that. And if they arebored, I guess it could be for another reason,
so maybe I should find a way to find out! Anotherthing, though, is it takes me a long time to getthrough activities because I spend such a longtime trying to get the students to do them in thefirst place.

Mario:The same thing happens to me but I’ve noticed
that it always happens with the same groupof students.

Isabel:I get the feeling that, in my case, they’re all
unhappy or bored, or uninterested. They just
don’t seem to want to participate in anything
I plan.

43|

How can I explore?

In this dialogue, you can see how Isabel manages to go
deeper into the idea that her students lack motivation.
She discovers that their apparent lack of participation
is upsetting her mainly because:
■■

■■
■■

her students don’t participate in the activities she
prepares;they look bored and unhappy;
her activities take longer than expected because she
spends time trying to get students on task.

She also realises that she might need to consult thestudents to find out what they actually think.
Notes on a conversation like this would be useful to Isabel
because they enable her to uncover her own perceptions.
By then moving on to collect information about her
students’ perceptions and also their behaviour, she will beable to confirm whether her concerns are valid and, later,
how she can address the situation.
4. Reflective writing by students
Here we move into thinking about how to gather others’
perceptions about a situation, in this case students’
perceptions (opinions, thoughts, feelings).
Reflective writing by students is a good way to explore
their perceptions. You can ask students to write down – intheir own mother tongue or in English (the choice is yours!)– what they feel or think about a particular topic. They
could write freely, in note form, on a piece of paper that you
give them in the last 5–10 minutes of a class, for example(answering a question that you write on the board or
dictate to them) – or they could write for homework.
One advantage of this kind of evidence is that opinions /feelings can be expressed openly, especially if you don’t
require students to write their names. You can learn things
you didn’t know already. However, the opinions / feelings
you learn about may not be shared by many in the class.
You can check this by following up with a questionnaire(see 7 below).

5. Notes or recordings of focus group discussions
Something else you could do to discover students’ (or otherteachers’, or parents’) perceptions of a particular issue is toget a group of them together outside class time and ask thegroup for their opinions and thoughts. In this kind of groupconversation or ‘focus group discussion’, it’s important thatyou try to get members of the group talking with one
another as freely as possible, instead of you being at thecentre of attention all the time – so, after one person
replies to a question, you should look around the group andinvite others to respond or contribute additional opinions
or thoughts. After a while, it may not be necessary for you
to do this – in other words, the discussion among membersof the group themselves may start to flow more naturally.
If the conversation starts to go away from the focus of yourresearch, however, direct it gently back towards yourresearch topic.
One advantage of focus group discussions is that you
can get several people’s opinions in a relatively short time.
You can also sometimes find that people go deeper into
a topic than in an individual interview, because otherpeople’s opinions stimulate them to share more. On theother hand, it can be difficult to find a convenient time
for several people to get together.
6. Notes or recordings of interviews / chats withindividuals
In an individual interview, some people may share morewith you than they would in a group situation. However,
don’t forget that if you are interviewing a student of yours– or even a parent – they may wish to ‘please’ you with
their answers (in other words, they are unlikely to tell
you the ‘whole truth’ about what they think or feel).
Anonymous reflective writing – or completion of ananonymous questionnaire – can sometimes get you
more honest answers! In any case, try to relax theperson being interviewed via social talk before the‘proper interview’ begins.
One advantage of an individual interview – or even an
informal conversation – is that you can go deeply intoa particular issue; more deeply, perhaps, than with aquestionnaire. Prepare your questions in advance, but be
open to the idea of going in unpredicted directions withfurther questions if you feel you are uncovering new anduseful information. Finally, don’t forget to take notes during
interviews (focus group as well as individual interviews),
and turn these notes into a fuller account soon after theinterview – before you forget what was said. If you makea recording, you can, of course, make your account evenmore accurate, but it can take a long time to transcribe
an interview – and good notes, taken during and/or
immediately after an interview, can be equally useful.

7. Responses to a questionnaire
Gathering information about people’s attitudes, feelings,
ideas and opinions (‘perceptions’, in short) is very often
done via questionnaires in both classroom research andother forms of research (for example, political opinion ormarket research surveys). In fact, when many people thinkof ‘research’ they may tend to think automatically of‘questionnaires’. However, we’ve deliberately put
questionnaires at number 7 (i.e. not number 1) in order toshow you that there are other, equally good, if not better,ways of finding out about people’s perceptions (numbers
1 to 6 above).
Questionnaires have the major advantage that they makeit possible to gather perceptions of a relatively large
number of people quite easily. However, questionnaires
have disadvantages, too. For example, in an interview you
can go deeper and deeper into a particular topic according
to what someone replies, but a questionnaire doesn’t allow
you to do that. Also, it can be quite time-consuming to
make a questionnaire, and the questions need to be veryclear. It can sometimes be easier just to ask for students’quick reflective writing, (4. above) or to have conversations
or hold interviews (5. and 6.). Or you can do these things
first and use the responses to help you make aquestionnaire.
This is exactly how Javier Ávalos, another Champion
Teacher, made his own questionnaire. He was interested
in finding out his students’ feelings or attitudes towards
learning English. First he sat down and talked with his
students and noted down their individual replies. Because
he wanted to know if the whole class shared theseperceptions, he then put the individual replies he’dreceived into a grid, as you can see below. The original
survey was in Spanish (we have translated thequestionnaire items into English below), since Javier
wanted to make sure his students could understandthe questions.

How can I explore?

|

44

Statements

Agree

1.

Inglés es un idioma muy difícil.
[English is a very difficult language.]2.

Me pongo nervioso cada vez que tengo clases de Inglés.
[I feel nervous whenever I have English class.]

3.

Inglés me frustra porque no sé nada.
[English frustrates me because I don’t know anything.]

4.

Me siento imposibilitado de aprender inglés.
[I think it’s impossible for me to learn English.]5.

Siento que tardaré mucho tiempo en aprender inglés.
[I think English will take a long time to learn.]

6.

Yo puedo aprender inglés pero siento que es difícil.
[I can learn English but I think it’s difficult.]

7.

Me siento motivado debido a mis notas en inglés.
[I feel motivated because of my marks in English.]8.

No aprendo ingles por flojera.
[I don’t learn English because I’m lazy.]9.

Me siento avergonzado en inglés porque pienso que me puedo
equivocar.
[I feel ashamed in English because I think I can be wrong.]

Indifferent

Disagree

10. Me da vergüenza preguntar en inglés.
[I feel embarrassed to ask questions in English.]
Extract from Javier Ávalos’ questionnaire.

We will come back to Javier’s story in Chapter Seven. Fora different example of a questionnaire from the Champion
Teachers programme in Chile, you can also look at theexample in ‘Extra Material’ (no. 2) at the back of this book.
In both of these examples, the questionnaire contains only
‘closed’ questions – that is, the students responding to thequestionnaire are not given the opportunity to write freely,in their own words, about their perceptions. Instead, they
are forced to choose from a ‘closed’ set of options. This has
the advantage that you can compare different students’answers quite easily by counting and decide on what the
majority of students think about a particular issue.
However, you can sometimes learn a lot by also including
some open ‘Wh-’ questions in a questionnaire, or – if you
want to both give them support for writing and control thevariety of answers to some extent – by inviting them tocomplete sentences, the first part of which you provide.
For example, instead of the first item in Javier’squestionnaire above, he could have asked students tocomplete the following sentence:‘ English is a

45|

How can I explore?

language.’

A completely open equivalent ‘Wh-’ question would havebeen ‘What kind of a language do you think English is?’.
Do you need students to write their name on theirquestionnaire sheets before returning them? This is an
issue you will have to decide – if they do write their names
you will be able to follow up by asking certain students
what they mean by what they have written. If not, then they
may feel more free to write honestly about theirperceptions. Sometimes, a good compromise is to tellstudents to write their names only if they don’t mind talking
with you later about their answers.

Task 5.3 @Try converting some more of the closed questions in
Javier’s questionnaire into sentence completion questions.
Do this with items 2., 7. and 10. Now think of completely
open questions starting with ‘How ...?’ to correspond withthe same items.

8. Lesson plans and materials

10. A critical friend’s notes about your lesson

So far, we have been considering sources of information
about perceptions – your own and those of others(students’, parents’ or your colleagues’). Now we move intolooking at different kinds of behaviour. Lesson plans, andmaterials you prepare for your lessons, can be quite usefulfor this, if you write notes on them or about them during
or immediately after the class.

To explore your students’ or your own behaviour in asituation, you can do so by observing the situation yourself,
taking notes (as in 8. above) perhaps with the help of arecording (9. above), or you can ask someone else toobserve what happens and to share their observation
notes.

For example, let’s imagine that you’re interested in why you
always seem to run out of time and why you never finish
your lesson plan. On your lesson plan, you could make sureto write how long you intend to spend on each activity.
During the lesson you – or someone observing you – could
write down how long each activity actually took. Then you
can know which activities took longer than expected andyou can begin to think of reasons why. You can write otherkinds of notes on lesson plans or on lesson materials, too.
Of course, it can be easier to know what happened in alesson if you have a recording (9. below) or if someone else
watches your lesson (10. below).

Asking a friend to observe you is useful because, even if
you use a recording to observe your own classes, you canmiss some things because they appear just ‘normal’. Having
a critical friend take notes about your lesson is good forgiving you ‘another pair of eyes’, providing a newperspective on what happens.
There are limitations and difficulties, of course, including
the following:■■

9. Lesson recordings
Making either an audio- or a video-recording of your lesson
can help you to understand what’s going on in your classfrom a new and different perspective. You can simply play
the recording and use it to take notes about things you may
have missed when you were teaching, or, if you have time,
you can transcribe parts of the lesson to get a good,
objective record of what went on in the classroom talk(yours, the students’ or both). In fact, if your researchquestions relate to any aspect of classroom talk (forexample, if you’re concerned about the way you give
instructions or ask questions, or the way students respondto your attempts to correct their mistakes), then making
a recording and transcribing parts of it will be almost
essential – even though you can also get good insights
by asking a critical friend to observe your class (see 10.
below).
Before you attempt to make a recording, consider carefully– according to your research questions – what you areinterested in ‘capturing’. If you are just interested in some
aspect of classroom talk and not other kinds of behaviour,then an audio-recording might be sufficient, but a videorecording can help you pinpoint who is speaking, if that is
important. If, on the other hand, you are most interested inyour own classroom talk, then an audio-recorder can beplaced on your desk, near where you normally speak from,and you do not need to worry so much about capturingother voices. It can be quite hard to record students’ voices
in whole class interaction, and in this case a videorecording of the class will be more useful, perhaps
combined with notes that you or an observer takes about
who speaks when.

■■■■Your critical friend may tend to want to judge yourteaching as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s very important that yourcolleague understands that their role is not to judge but
to describe, and to support your exploration. Explain tothem clearly what it is that you are interested in so thatthey focus on that. In order to do this, you can give thema set of questions or a list of things to observe in orderto have a more focused observation.
Your students (and you, too!) may behave differently
because someone else is in the room and taking notes.
One way to overcome this is by explaining to yourstudents the reason for your colleague’s presence andby assuring them that the notes this person is taking will
not be used to evaluate either them or you.
You may have difficulties finding a colleague who isavailable or willing to observe you. This can be a difficult
problem to solve, but joining a local teachers’ group or
association or (in some countries) talking to a school
inspector or adviser, or even head teacher, could be
one option.

Despite all these limitations and difficulties, having acolleague take notes about your lesson is still a very usefulway to get information about your and your students’behaviour in the classroom. Just one good thing about itis that you can get feedback immediately (whereas it may
take you some time before you can listen to or watch arecording of your lesson, for example). Having a clear focus
for the observation, as we’ve seen, is very important, andyou can see a sample observation framework in ‘Extra
Material’ (no. 2) at the back of this book, which might help
you in designing your own.

How can I explore?

|

46

Task 5.4 @Let’s summarise! From what you’ve read, which of thekinds of data 1. to 12. would be suitable for:A. Exploring your own perceptions
B. Exploring others’ perceptions
11. Pictures of your class
In some cases, in relation to some research questions,taking photos of your class can be helpful. For example,
if your question relates to the way the desks are arranged,
or to the way that you use the chalkboard or a whiteboard,
photos will be useful. Mauro – one of the Champion
Teachers, whose story you will be reading later in thischapter – used photos to keep a record of the changes
he brought about in classroom arrangements. Together
with other sources, this helped him see the effects ofthese changes.
12. Students’ performance on tasks (written orrecorded).
You can look at and analyse students’ written work tounderstand issues in their performance. For example,
if you are interested in why students appear to be using
a particular grammatical structure incorrectly, it would be
logical to begin by looking at samples of their work anddescribing the way it is used there. For oral production,
you could record a group of students engaging in a
speaking task and then transcribe what you hear.
Transcription is quite time-consuming, so you could choose
to write down just those utterances where the particular
problem you’re interested in seems to be occurring.
You can also combine these techniques with chats orinterviews with students which help you understandreasons for particular aspects of their performance. If youcome to compare samples of their later work (for example,
following an action research intervention) with their initial
performance, it will still be valuable to get students’ own
reflections on reasons for change or on the difficulties
they’re still facing.

47|

How can I explore?

C. Exploring behaviour (including performance)
Write numbers from 1. to 12. next to A., B. and C. below.
Then check your answers in the answer key at the backof the book.
Focus
A. Exploring your own
perceptions
B. Exploring others’
perceptions
C. Exploring behaviour(including performance)

Kind of data5.2 Mauro’s story

have questions they look for a classmate to clarify their
doubts in the first instance; after that, if the doubt was notclarified, they reach out to the teacher for help – so I
started to suppose that students naturally prefer to workwith their peers rather than by themselves.

Below is a story of research by Mauro Sáez, a Chilean
teacher who was interested in exploring better ways toorganise his class. Read his story, paying special attention
to the ways he gathered evidence.

When it came to the students’ opinion, they do prefer towork with their classmates but they do not prefer working
in groups because they mainly feel that at least oneclassmate is not going to work properly. A few students
prefer to work on their own, while most of them point out
that working in pairs is the best class arrangement thatsuits them in terms of working in a more productive andcomfortable environment.

Mauro’s story“The topic of my research is how to arrange myclassroom. Why did I choose this topic? I attended aseminar “Summer Camp” where tons of interesting topics
were exposed and I was amazed and ready to put theminto practice. As the academic year started, there was
one idea that I noticed that wasn’t working for most of myclasses, and it involved rearranging my students’ seating.
Taking that into account I wanted to find out the way thatbest suits my students when it comes to the arrangementof the classroom and how they perceive it.

After finding out the results, I asked the school
authorities’ permission to change the classroom
arrangement in order to start implementing pair work.
The pairing was a bit difficult because I had to consider
the emotional and disciplinary aspects of the pairings.

So I stated my exploratory questions as the following:
−−

−−

−−

Luckily I know my students well, so I could pair them up
according to their needs and their compatibility. I thenimplemented activities and classes where my students
had to work in pairs.

How do my students act when they are sitting
individually?
How does the sitting arrangement affect individualwork?

I was impressed by the results obtained by the students
in the final test, where there were over 95% of students
with grades from 4.0 to 7.0, while there was only 4%
disapproval for the lessons themselves.

How do students feel about individual work?

For collecting my initial data, I asked a colleague to observe
my classes (one where they had to work individually,collaboratively and in groups) and to write down the
behaviour of the students during the class. Of course, inorder to provide a better observation, I also considered myexperience as an English teacher and the regular behaviourof my students. In addition to that I video-recorded a fullclass in order to obtain some information by myself. As forthe data collected from students I created three surveys,
one each for a class when students had to work individually,in pairs and in groups.
I gathered the information provided by the surveys andtook into account the most repeated ideas provided by
the students in order to organize the information. I also
consulted with my colleagues about the observations
done by my colleague and myself and they all agreed thatthe behaviour is repetitive through different subjects.
Students show a proper behaviour when working
individually but there is a repetitive pattern that mostof the students show in class, noticed by the observing
teacher as well as myself, which is that whenever they
Teacher

Mauro

As my planning did not originally include activities in pairs
I had to create a new set of activities for my class thatinvolved collaborative work. I think that this experience
helped me to take into account my students’ opinion in
relation to how I do my classes and created a comfortableenvironment.
I now think that I will include from the beginning of theyear activities where my students can work in pairs, andI will also encourage my colleagues to implement pairwork, as the experience is turning out to be very
productive, not solely in academic results but in thestudents’ attitude towards the class.”

Task 5.5 @Based on Mauro’s story, look at the table below andcomplete it by noting the kinds of data he collected toanswer his exploratory questions. Use the list of kindsof data shared with you in 5.1 above.

Research question1.

How do my students behave when they are
sitting individually?

2.

How does the seating arrangement affectindividual work?

3.

How do students feel about individual work?

Kind(s) of data

How can I explore?

|48

Task 5.6 @In the previous chapter, you read Teresa’s story about her students’ lack of communication in class, particularly
in speaking. Try to remember the kinds of data she gathered to answer her questions. You can quickly re-readher story if you don’t remember!
Teacher

Research question

Kind(s) of data

a.1. Why is it that my students do not speak
in class?
a.2. Do my students like to speak in English?
Teresaa.3. What opportunities do they have to speak
in class?

5.3 Combining information fromdifferent sourcesVideo
recording

You may have noticed from the Chilean Champion
Teachers’ stories we’ve considered in this chapter(Andrea’s, Mauro’s and Teresa’s), that they all collected
information from more than one source. For example,
Mauro recorded one of his lessons, got a colleague toobserve him and also gave a questionnaire to his students.
Combining different sources of information has a numberof advantages.
One advantage is that it builds up a more complete pictureof a situation than just collecting data from one source.
For example, you can use a questionnaire to find out themain difficulty your learners have with writing, but this may
not help you to understand why this is difficult for them.
Interviewing learners can help with this understanding,since you can ask them to expand on their answers, but
without the questionnaire, you wouldn’t have known how
many students have this difficulty in the first place!
Another advantage is that collecting different types of
information can help you to confirm what you see from one
source, making your research more reliable. For example,
Mauro’s colleague noticed that most of his learners did
activities best when working in pairs. When Mauro watchedthe video recording of his lesson, he also noticed that they
seemed to be interacting effectively and were helping
each other when they worked in pairs, while in theirquestionnaire answers, most of his students said that they
did prefer to work in pairs. If you get information fromonly one source, it can be useful to help you understanda situation but it may not be reliable, in other words you
may not be able to depend on it to make conclusions.
The process of obtaining data from different sources –in order to confirm understanding of a situation – is called‘triangulation’. To put it in simple terms, it involves looking
at a problem from two or more different points of view.

Questionnaire

Observationby colleague‘Pairs are best’
Task 5.7 @There are sometimes advantages to collecting different
types of data in a specific order. Let’s use an example to
make this clear:
You have noticed that about half your students either don’t
do their homework, or do it badly, and you want to find out
more to explore this situation. As this is not something that
happens in the classroom, collecting the data directly (e.g.
by observing them) is not possible, so you have decided tochoose the following three methods of data collection:1.

a focus group discussion with four or five students

2.

a short questionnaire for everyone in the class3.

five minutes of reflective writing for everyone in theclass, using the following question: What do you think
about homework?

What order would you do these in, and why?

Note: Check our answers in the answer key.

49|

How can I explore?

What data will you collect?
Now it’s your turn! Remind yourself of the exploratory research questions you ended up with at the end of Chapter Four.
What kinds of data are you going to try to get to answer each one? Below is our list (from 1. to 12.) of the different kindsof data you could consider accessing, matched against whether they are good for exploring your own perceptions,others’ perceptions or behaviour / performance:

Exploring yourown perceptions
ions
written reflect
1. Your own
and/or notes
ople’s written
2. Other’s pe
topic
ideas on theinformal
3. Notes fromwithconversations
colleagues

Exploring others’
perceptions
4. Reflective writing by
5. Notes or recording
group discussions

studentss of focus

6. Notes or recordings ofinterviews/chats withindividuals

7. Responses to a questionnaire

Exploring behaviour(including performance)
erialsplans and mat
8. Lessons
cordings
9. Lesson resfriend’s note
10. A criticalsson
about your leof your class
11. Pictures
ts’’ work / studen
12. Students
on tasks
performancecorded)(written or reTask 5.8
Write down your exploratory questions in the table below and the exploration focus of each question (own perceptions,others’ perceptions, or behaviour). Doing this can help you identify the kind(s) of data you’ll need to collect for eachquestion. Then, complete the last column of the table with a kind – or kinds – of data you could realistically access.
Exploratory questions

Focus

Kind of data

Example: What are the characteristics
of my wrapping up?

Behaviour

A critical friend’s notes about yourlesson.

1.

2.

3.

How can I explore?

|50

5.4 What should I keep in mind
when collecting data?
Let’s think further about your own researchand your exploratory questions. What kinds ofinformation could you realistically get that would
help you to answer them? By ‘realistically’, wemean information that you can collect yourself
or with the support of your colleagues in a
relatively short period of time, requiring minimum
preparation. As far as possible, gathering
information should not be a task that takes toomuch time away from your normal planning andteaching time.
Other things to consider are more specificto certain ways of collecting data. Since
questionnaires, interviews and classroom
observations are very common methods used,
we provide below a list of things you may wantto consider in relation to each of these methods
before starting the data collection process.

Research method

Things to consider

Questionnaires

■■
■■

■■

■■

Interviews■■■■

Classroom observations|

How can I explore?

in 5.1
Look at the twelve different kinds of data
ant
above. First, cross off any that are not relev
ple, if you
because of your research focus. For exam
, it
work
home
of
ct
want to research some aspe
lessons!
yourrdprobably won’t be useful to video -reco
Think about time and practicality. You’re
If youprobably busy, so don’t be too ambitious.
s gocollect a little data to start with, you can alway
e you
wher
on
nding
Depe
it.
back for more if you need
and
ers,
learn
work, the resources you have, yourns will betimetabling in your school, some of the optio
more feasible than others.

if
Keep your research questions in mind andseepossible written in a place where you can
your
for
ideas
some
have
them easily. As soon as you
rch
resea
your
data collection methods, go back towill help
questions and check whether these methods
answer the
you to collect the information you need todata and
some
cted
colle
e
question. Imagine that you’v
er youransw
toyou
you’re analysing it now: Is it helpingainresearch questions? You could even try fillingplay anquestionnaire with expected answers, roleinter view with a friend, etc.

Keep questions simple to avoid confusion and misinterpretations.
Use the type of questions that will give you the information you need. It might be useful
to vary between closed and open questions (see the example in Extra Material (no. 2)
at the back of the book, where spaces are provided for ‘other’ responses).
Keep the questionnaire to the point and brief. Sometimes questionnaires have too manyquestions which are not relevant. Good questionnaires are not good because they arelong but because they ask the right questions in the minimum time possible.
Ask a colleague to check the questionnaire and give you feedback and, if possible, ask
a student from a different class to answer it in order to make sure questions are clear.
Decide your questions before the interview.
Plan additional questions in case the responses you get are too short and provide too
little information■■

Try to ask ‘open’ questions and try to avoid ‘leading’ students to a particular answer■■

Plan a date and time for the interviews to take place ahead of time.

■■

■■

51

Here are som e tips:

Decide areas to focus on before the observation. For this you can design an observation
checklist (see the example in Extra Material (no. 2) at the back of the book).
If you are planning to ask a colleague to observe your classes, make sure you agree thefocus and procedure with your colleague ahead of time.

■■

If you are recording a lesson, advise your students they will be recorded.

■■

Prepare the recording device properly as to avoid any technical difficulties.

■■

Consider carefully where to place the recording device, in advance.

■■

Plan the date and time of the recoding ahead of time.

Task 5.8
If you have decided to use questionnaires, interviews or classroom observations as your main methods to collect data,then before you start collecting it, use the following checklist as a guide to keep track of the different things to consider.
If possible, ask someone – a colleague or critical friend – to help you while you’re planning. Otherwise, ask yourself thequestions, as self-critically as you can!
Research method

Things to consider

Questionnaires

1. Have I prepared the questions?

Check ✓

2. Are my questions easy to understand?
3. Have I used a variety of question formats?
4. Is my questionnaire brief enough?
5. Are my questions relevant to the main issue explored?
6. Have I asked a colleague to check my questionnaire?
7. Have I asked a student from a different class to answer the questionnaire(to ‘pilot’ it)?
Interviews

1. Have I prepared the questions?
2. Have I planned additional question?
3. Are my questions easy to understand?
4. Have I chosen a date and time for the interviews?
5. Have I chosen a place for the interviews?
6. If I will record, have I prepared a recording device?
7. If I will take notes, have I decided where and how I will take notes?

Classroom observations

1. Have I decided the areas to focus the observation?
2. Have I asked a colleague to observe my class?
3. Have I informed my colleague about the focus of the observation?
4. If I will record, have I informed my students they will be recorded?
5. Have I chosen a date and time for the observation?
6. If I will record, have I prepared a recording device and planned where toplace it?
7. If I will take notes, have I decided where and how I will take notes?
8. Have I chosen a date and time for the observation?

Once you have decided on a topic, identified your exploratory questions and decided on the kinds of data you need tocollect, we suggest that you organise a research schedule. A research schedule is a useful way to keep a note of different
actions you need to take in your research process and the time you will need for each one.
In order to help you with this, we have listed below some of the things you may need to do during the data-collecting
process. We have also suggested an estimated time you need to dedicate to the exploratory phase of research (from11 to 14 weeks), but please remember that the timings are only suggestions based on our experience – they may vary
due to a number of factors. Read more about the different steps overleaf.

How can I explore?

|52

Things to do

Time

1.

Informing and asking permission from school, students and/or other relevant people.

1 week2.

Talking to colleagues who may be involved.

1 week3.

Planning dates and times for the data collection

1 week4.

Designing ways of collecting data (questionnaires, interviews questions, observation checklist,
reflection notebook, etc.)

2–3 weeks5.

Collecting data

4–6 weeks

6.

Analysing and reflecting on the data you’ve collected.

2 weeks

There are many factors that you should be aware of which
may modify your research schedule. They can include;

We suggest that you try to keep your deadlines flexible
in order to allow for disruptions like the ones listed above.
If anything like that occurs, then you will need to use theextra time you have prepared.

−−

suspensions of lessons−−

holidays−−

sick leave−−school activities

Task 5.9−−change of school year calendar

−−

exams

−−

natural disasters−−

waiting for school authorisation to carry out yourresearch

Based on the list of actions and times provided above andalso considering your own research, your questions andthe kind of information that you need to collect, complete
the table below to design your own research schedule.

−−

teacher training−−

difficulties finding a critical friend to observe you−−teacher evaluations

Month 1 – Things to do

Month 3 – Things to do

Week 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 2

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Week 4Month 2 – Things to do

53

Month 4 – Things to do

Week 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 2

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Week 4|How can I explore?

Summary and follow-up
In this chapter we went from research questions tomethods for collecting data. There were practicalexplanations and examples of different kinds of data
(reflective writing, notes from interviews and observation,questionnaire responses, etc.) The different tasks showed
you how methods need to be well-matched to yourquestions. Finally, we provided you with some suggestionsof important things to consider with regard to the datacollection process.

Follow-up
In Chapter Three and at the beginning of this chapter,
you learned about Andrea’s story. We recommend thatyou read her full story here to refresh your memory:
http://bit.ly/Andrea-Robles
In her story, identify the different kinds of data shecollected. Did she use any form of ´triangulation´? In what
way was collecting different kinds of data useful for her?

How can I explore?

|

54

6. What do I find?
In the last chapter we looked at different forms of information, or data, thatyou can gather to answer your questions, and at the ways, or ‘methods’, thatyou can use to get data (e.g. observing or interviewing students, or asking
them to give written feedback or fill out a questionnaire).
In this chapter we need to look at how to analyse the data you gather; andwe consider how you can interpret what you find in order to answer yourresearch questions.

‘Analysis’: n. ‘Detailed examination of the elements
or structure of something.’1
Back in Chapter Two you came across some different
definitions of research. These definitions indicated thatthe ‘analysis’ of data is an important part of the research
process. Analysis involves the careful review of informationin order to help you to draw conclusions and makedecisions.
We will try to explain this process in a way that is easy
to understand – ‘data analysis’ can seem a very technicalactivity, and many people think it must involve complicatedstatistics, for example. We hope to show that it can actually
be relatively simple, and even fun!

6.1 Daniela’s story
Daniela Gajardo’s action research story is an inspirational
one in its own right. It’s also useful for helping us tounderstand an important distinction between two
fundamentally different kinds of data – ‘quantitative’ dataand ‘qualitative’ data. Both are useful, but they are usefulin different ways. Read about the first phase of Daniela’s
story, then do Task 6.1“So now, let me tell you something about this impressive
and exciting journey. It started as a project with the aimof encouraging speaking production among my students.
I began with an observation period, taking notes about
their behavior.

1

1. Do you like or enjoy speaking English in class?
Yes, I do: 20

More or less: 13

No, I don’t: 5

2. Is it important to you to speak English?
Yes, it is: 32

Not sure: 3

No, it isn’t: 5

3. Would you like to speak English in future?
Yes, I would: 30

Not sure: 3

No, I wouldn’t: 3

Task 6.1 @According to the answers provided by Daniela’s students,
complete the sentences which follow (you may need acalculator!). You can check your answers in the answer key.
A. ______% of students definitely enjoy speaking
English in class.
B. ______% of students think it’s important to speak
English.
C. ______% would like to speak English in future.
Now think about the following three questions (A–C):

The first thing I noticed, from that process, was that thestudents were used to answering and speaking in theirmother tongue instead of in English.

A. What does this data tell us about the students?

I asked them “Why don’t you try to answer me in English?”and they let me know that every time they give me ananswer in Spanish I assumed they did not understand thequestion or did not know how to express in English, and I
explained it to them in their mother tongue; consequently,
it was much easier and more comfortable for them to get
the idea coming from their native language. At thatmoment I learned my first lesson: “Never underestimate
your students. They have acquired tools to face thelanguage in an appropriate way, but if you do not allow
them to do it, they won’t try at all”, and from then on I
committed to speak them only in English, so in that way
I could encourage my students to try to do the same.

C. What question(s) might you now want to ask
Daniela’s students?

I also made a questionnaire which allowed me to gather
deeper information about my topic.”

Questions 1–3 above are typical ‘quantitative questions’.
As an English teacher you will probably have noticed thatthey are also yes/no questions, so they provide a limited
range of answers. Other common quantitative questions
start with ‘How much…?’, ‘How many…?’, ‘How long…?’,‘When…?’, etc. Of course, we can also collect quantitative
data without asking any questions. For example, you could
get a colleague to observe your lesson and to count how
many times you do different things. This would also provide
quantitative data.

Oxford English Dictionary

56

What did Daniela find? Here are some of the findings
from Daniela’s questionnaire. Read them and complete
the task below.

|

What do I find?

B. What doesn’t it tell us?

Commentary
If you look at the information that Daniela collected throughthe questionnaire, you will notice that it is mainly
represented in the form of numbers and percentages.
This is what we call quantitative data, i.e. information in theform of numbers, statistics or percentages, and it helps you
understand how common or uncommon a situation is. In
other words, it helps you answer questions like How many?
or How often?

As we see below, Daniela had some further usefulquestions on her questionnaire, of another kind;1.

How do you feel at the moment of speaking English?

2.

What kinds of activities do you like or would you liketo do in English classes?

These two questions are typical ‘qualitative questions’.
Such questions are often open questions, with a wide rangeof answers which (as in this case) can help us to understandwhat people are thinking or feeling. They give a voice to theparticipants in our research.
These two questions, then, gathered what is called
qualitative data, involving descriptions of feelings, opinions,impressions, qualities, etc. Notice how Daniela needed to
ask these questions in order to understand the causes ofthe problem she had observed. ‘How…?’ and ‘Why…?’ areperhaps the two most common qualitative questions.
Qualitative data, unlike quantitative data, visually presents
itself as responses, short or longer sentences or evenparagraphs.

5. What kinds of activities do you like or would you
like to do in English classes?
Most of the answers to this question were focused on
doing more practical, funnier and group activities inclasses. In order of preference: songs, games, karaoke,
movies, oral exercises, acting, puzzles and jigsaws,
pictionary, group contests, spelling, debates andrepeating and learning words’ pronunciation. Apart from
that, some students proposed more hours of English
classes and an English workshop after school.
D. What additional information did Daniela get by asking
the above two questions?
E. Why was this useful?

Task 6.2
Read about Daniela’s further findings below and thenanswer questions D and E that follow:
4. How do you feel at the moment of speaking
English?
Group A (15 students) feel comfortable, relaxed and finewhen they speak English in class. They feel that
performing oral activities in classes will help them todevelop accurate speaking skills.
Group B (23 students) feel nervous, insecure, and notconfident because they do not have a proper or
accurate command of the language. Most of them said
they get nervous, lack confidence and feel embarrassed
when speaking because they are afraid of making
mistakes, and hearing their classmates laugh at theirerrors. Among the answers, a few students said thatwhen they know the correct answers, they feel great, butwhen the answers are wrong they feel frustrated. Finally,
only one of them said he does not like oral quizzes or
tests because he is not sure about his pronunciation.

What do I find?

|57

6.2 Analysing and interpreting qualitative data
Analysing quantitative data basically involves counting (see 6.1 above and 6.3 below). Analysing qualitative data, on theother hand, tends to involve coding – that is, labelling ideas so that you can easily group similar ideas together.
For example, consider the following four students’ written responses to the question ‘How do you feel about group work?’
A. I like that we practise
B. I like being relaxed
C. I like speaking English
D. I like English conversation with no worry
Even though these responses are all different, using different words, there are some underlying similarities.
These similarities can become clearer if you give a label, also known as a ‘keyword’ or ‘code’, to each separate idea.
Response

Code/Label

A. I like that we practise[+ practice]

B. I like being relaxed[+ relaxed]

C. I like speaking English[+ speaking English]

D. I like English conversation with no worry[+ speaking English] [+ no worry]

Notice that you can give more than one code to a single statement, as in the case of (D) above. Also, your codes don’t need
to be single words – two or more words can be used, as in ‘speaking English’. If you want, you can use symbols like ‘+’ for‘like’ or ‘-’ for dislike. However, the actual codes and symbols you use are for you to invent, to correspond with what you
read in the data. There are no fixed codes or symbols that ‘must’ be used.
If you now look again at the Code/Label column above, you can probably identify some similarities. If you think about
students’ enjoyment of practising the language by speaking, then you can say that they like to ‘use’ the language. Also,being ‘relaxed’ and having ‘no worry’ seem to belong together – you can say that this is also a common idea. Here, then, is
where you can put ideas together under bigger labels, which are called ‘categories’ (see table below). These are basically‘bigger codes’ because they include codes that were similar to one another and therefore have been put together.
Response

Code/Label

Categories

A. I like that we practise[+ practise English][+ use English]

B. I like being relaxed[+ relaxed][+ relaxed]

C. I like speaking English[+ speaking English][+ use English]

D. I like English conversation with no worry[+ speaking English] [+ relaxed][+ use English] [+ relaxed]

We can summarise this analysis by saying that three of this small set of students like group work because it enables themto use, or practise, English, while two of the four students like the fact that group work helps them feel relaxed.
We have now seen how this small set of data can be analysed. The results, as just presented, constitute the teacher’s‘findings’:

DATA + ANALYSIS = FINDINGS
However, findings don’t just ‘speak for themselves’. Something more is necessary, and that is to interpret the findings.
‘Interpret’: v. transitive. ‘To decide that something has a particular meaning and to understand it in this way.’1

1

Oxford English Dictionary

58|

What do I find?

To interpret your findings, you need to ask yourself questions like:

So what?
How do these findings
relate to my findings
from other sources?

What do I know about
this now that I didn’tknow before?

The fundamental question is ‘So what?’. You need to decideon what your findings mean by reminding yourself of youroriginal research question(s) and your motivation for doing
your research. For example, in the case of the above data,
if the teacher’s research question was ‘Do students findgroup work beneficial?’, the answer seems to be clearly‘Yes’, at least for these students. If other students in thesame class give similar answers she may interpret this asa clear signal to carry on using group work.

Try to give a keyword or keywords to each statement. Then
see whether any similarities (categories) emerge. Finally,
write a few sentences summarizing what you think thefindings say about whether the teacher should use Spanish.
A. “When we’re stuck, I think use of Spanish can support”
B. “When our mother tongue is used, it’s better in termsof understanding”
C. “Using mother tongue reduces my interest in the lesson”
D. “If we don’t understand, speaking in Spanish is better”

Task 6.3 @Try to give codes to some more qualitative data, seeing
what similarities can be identified. This time, also try tointerpret the findings in relation to a particular researchquestion.
Here are eight different students’ answers during a classdiscussion about the teacher’s main concern and researchquestion, ‘Should I [the teacher] use the students’ mothertongue – Spanish – in the classroom?’ (The teacher
recorded this discussion and wrote down the individual
students’ answers while listening to the recording later).
Response

What do the findings
tell me about my researchquestion(s)?

Code/Label

E. “When Spanish is used, the pace of the lesson may
slow down”
F. “I feel relieved when I feel that I can understand”
G. “After some time, when the language we know is used,
we get bored easily”
H. “I think we can learn faster with the target language”
You can make a table like the one below to help youorganise the codes and make the categories from them.

Categories

A. “When we’re stuck, I think use of
Spanish can support”
B. “When our mother tongue is used, it’sbetter in terms of understanding”
C. “Using mother tongue reduces myinterest in the lesson”
D. “If we don’t understand, speaking inSpanish is better”
E. “When Spanish is used, the pace of thelesson may slow down”
F. “I feel relieved when I feel that I canunderstand”
G. “After some time, when the language weknow is used, we get bored easily”
H. “I think we can learn faster with thetarget language”
What do I find?

|59

Summary / Interpretation of findings:

Don’t worry if your own answer is different in some respects– different people will code and summarise the same datausing different words – so long as the main ideas are similar.
If you have doubts about how to code or label somequalitative data, you can ask a critical friend to help you toprovide a second opinion. It is always a good idea to try tocompare your own way of coding with someone else’s.

Task 6.4 @Look at the following extracts from a 5-minute reflective
writing task about the different interaction patterns usedby the teacher in a class. The question was: ‘What do you
think of pairwork and groupwork?’. Write as many keywords
or key phrases as you like next to each response. After
doing this, say what similarities and differences you see
by forming categories, and write a short paragraphsummarizing the data and reflecting on ‘So what?’ (inrelation to this teacher’s own puzzle - ‘Is pair work more
beneficial than group work?’).

“When we work in pairs,
Maria teaches me the meaningof certain words. She is likea dictionary for me.” – Carla

Commentary
In this section so far, you have seen one example ofqualitative data and how to code and form categories fromit; you have also completed one task where you were asked
to code, categorise and interpret some responses. You
have hopefully begun to gain a clear picture in your mind
about the steps to follow when analysing qualitative data.
Here is our summary of these steps:
1.

Working individually, write a keyword or key
phrase next to each idea.

2.

Looking at these keywords (‘codes’), identify
similarities and see whether you can put ideas
together to form categories.

3.

(If possible) compare your categories with acolleague who has done the same task.

4.

Write a summary which describes the maincategories.

5.

Think about ‘So what?’ How do your findings help
you to answer your research question(s)?

You have seen (and tried!) some of these steps with short
responses to questions. But qualitative data can also befound in the form of paragraphs like the ones you can get
when asking students to write reflective notes. The coding
process will be the same – try it out in the next task!

60|

What do I find?

“Agustin is my best friend, so wealways try to be in the same group,and make jokes. It’s lots of fun.
But for pairwork, I like studying withthe girls. They’re more serious.”– Vicente“Groups are noisy andI don’t like to work with Vicente.
He speaks English too fast.
I prefer to work alone.” – Agustin“Everybody copies my answers
in group work, and they ask me so manyquestions. I like to do the exerciseson my own, and then compare withanother student – I find thatvery useful.” –Sofia“I like pairwork and groupwork,
especially if I can choose who
I work with.” – Maria

You can use the following table for this task;
Comment

Keywords

1.

Carla: “When we work in pairs, Mariateaches me the meaning of certain words.
She is like a dictionary for me.”2.

Vicente: “Agustin is my best friend, so wealways try to be in the same group, andmake jokes. It’s lots of fun. But for pairwork,
I like studying with the girls. They’re more
serious.”3.

Agustin: “Groups are noisy and I don't liketo work with Vicente. He speaks English too
fast. I prefer to work alone.”

4.

Sofia: “Everybody copies my answers ingroupwork, and they ask me so manyquestions. I like to do the exercises on myown, and then compare with anotherstudent - I find that very useful.”

5.

Maria: “I like pairwork and groupwork,
especially if I can choose who I work with.”

Categories

Summary / Interpretation of findings:

6.3 Interpreting quantitative data
As with qualitative data (6.2 above), quantitative data needs to be interpreted – it doesn’t just ‘speak for itself’. Numbers andpercentages can give you some information about your question, but they will not fully explain the meaning of what you
found. For this you need to ask yourself ‘So what?’. In order to answer this question, it is sometimes useful to organise thedata in visual form, as this can help you understand it better.
Lorena, for example (her story was presented in Chapter Two), was concerned about her students’ lack of participationin listening tasks. One of the things she did was to get her students’ views and preferences through a questionnaire.
She organised her students answers in a table (presented below).
1. What do you think about
the audio topics?

2. Which activities do you
like best?

3. How clear are theteacher’s instructions?

very interesting

interesting

not interestingenoughnot interestingat all

26

28

14

8

songs

activities from the course book

films

48

1

27

very clear

clear

clear enoughnot clear at all

35

31

10

0

What do I find?

|61

By utilising a table like the one on the previous page, you can see where the highest responses are. This canbecome even clearer if you create a chart. Below, for example, we have created a chart for each of her questions.

What do you think about the audio topics?
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
very interesting

interesting

not interestingenoughnot interestingat allBar chart

How clear are the teacher’s instructions?
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
very clear

clear

clear enoughnot clear at all

Line chart

Which activities do you like best?

36%
63%

1%

songs

coursebook activities

Pie chart

62|

What do I find?

films

By looking at each chart, you are able to see more easily
the strongest preferences or ‘peaks’ (like mountains) andthese enable the ‘So what?’ question to be answered. In
Lorena’s case, she was able to notice that her students’views regarding listening tasks were positive. This was notwhat she had expected and she felt she still did not know
why students’ participation was low during listening tasks.
She therefore decided to analyse the findings from focus
group discussions to gain further understanding.

Task 6.5 @In the story of another Champion Teacher, Daniela (6.1 above), we saw some of her qualitative and quantitative data.
Like Lorena, she also used tables to organise some of the quantitative data to make it easier to interpret.
For example, in her questionnaire, Daniela asked the question; ‘In class, what is the percentage you understand?’.
She counted the numbers of students selecting different percentages, put this into a table and summarised the qualitative
responses she also got on the right. Try turning the quantitative data into a bar chart, then check in the answer key.
Percentage

Students

Summary

100%

3

90%

8

80%

6

Children who understand more than 50% of the class said that they could not always
understand each word from the class. However, they could understand the main andsecondary ideas in order to develop a high level of understanding, and that wasenough for them to comprehend the class.

70%

2

60%

3

50%

5

40%

7

30%

1

20%

1

10%

1

0%

1

Students who do not understand the whole class argue that the lack of disciplineof the class distracts them from paying attention and concentrating properly.

What do you notice? What are the peaks? Daniela’s researchquestion was ‘How much do students understand in class?’
How do you think she interprets the findings above, in thelight of this question?

Commentary
We can notice many things from this data. From theteacher’s perspective, it’s generally good news. The majorityof the students can understand most of what the teachersays, and may be learning well from trying to understandwhat they don’t know. However, there are two ‘peaks’ in thedata. As well as the biggest peak at 80–90%, there is also apeak at 40–50%. Notice how converting the data into a chart
made this clearer, and is likely to help Daniela think about theissue, what problems there may be in this class, and evenpotential solutions.
Now let’s see another example of this with anotherChampion Teacher, Javier Ávalos. Read about the problems
Javier found with learner motivation in his class.

“I did my research in a public school for adults andyoungsters (between 16 and 60) who had dropped out ofschools for different reasons. When I started teaching themI noticed their faces sometimes looked scared and/or quiet
when we talked about English. They seemed to be notfrightened of me, but of English itself. Then I noticed thatthey have a very low level in the language. ‘Can they learn
English if they are afraid of it?’, I wondered. I did some tests
and noticed they had weak grades. So, I began to ask mystudents randomly: ‘What were their feelings about
English?’ ‘Why did they think that they can’t learn English?’‘Were they comfortable or confident with learning thelanguage?’ I took some notes. While some students were
happy, others with more difficulties in English said things
like ‘I don’t understand English’, ‘I don’t care about English.
It’s useless’, ‘We are in Chile and we speak Spanish’, ‘I feelashamed in English because I think that I do it wrongly’.
I decided to create a survey to find out more.”

What do I find?

|63

Here are the questionnaire responses Javier obtained in this first part of his research:
Statements

Agree

Indifferent

Disagree1.

Inglés es un idioma muy difícil.
[English is a very difficult language.]

3

2

2

2.

Me pongo nervioso cada vez que tengo clases de Inglés.
[I feel nervous whenever I have English class.]

6

0

1

3.

Inglés me frustra porque no sé nada.
[English frustrates me because I don’t know anything.]

5

1

1

4.

Me siento imposibilitado de aprender Inglés.
[I think it’s impossible for me to learn English.]

2

2

3

5.

Siento que Inglés está muy lejos para aprender.
[I think English will take a long time to learn.]

3

0

4

6.

Yo puedo aprender Inglés pero siento que es difícil.
[I can learn English but I think it’s difficult.]

4

2

1

7.

Me siento motivado debido a mis notas en Inglés.
[I feel motivated because of my marks in English.]

4

2

1

8.

No aprendo ingles por flojera.
[I don’t learn English because I’m lazy.]

3

1

3

9.

Me siento avergonzado en inglés porque pienso que me puedo
equivocar. [I feel ashamed in English because I think I can be
wrong.]

3

2

2

10. Me da vergüenza preguntar en inglés.
[I’m embarrassed to ask about English.]

5

0

2

11. Creo que puedo aprender inglés pero no confío en mí.
[I think I can learn English but I lack confidence in myself.]

3

3

1

12. Creo que puedo aprender inglés. [I believe I can learn English.]

4

2

1

13. Entiendo las palabras pero no sé cómo pronunciarlas.
[I understand the words but I don’t know how to pronounce them.]

6

1

0

14. Me aterra inglés porque no sé cómo pronunciar.
[English terrifies me because I don’t know how to pronounce it.]

3

2

2

Task 6.6 @Look at the questionnaire responses Javier got. Circle the responses where a majority either agree or disagree.
What do these statements have in common?
Overall, how do you think Javier interpreted these results? In other words, how did he answer the questions he started out
with – ‘What are students’ feelings about English?’ and ‘Are they comfortable and confident with learning the language?’.
You can check your answer in the answer key.
We will come back to Javier in the next chapter, where we see how he moved from this exploratory research into action
research.

64|

What do I find?

Summary and follow-up
So, now we’ve gone through the whole exploratory research
process. We’ve seen how you can develop your researchplan by matching:■■your questions to …

■■

particular types of data to ….

■■

analysis, and interpretation.

In Chapters Four and Five, you read about how you can
explore areas of interest by collecting classroom data.
Chapter Six showed how you can make sense of the data,
so you can understand the situation better: why an activity
is successful, why a particular problem happens, or what
our learners think about something we do, for example.
In Chapters Seven and Eight we will see how, on the basisof the new understandings you have gained throughexploration, you can bring about change, in other words,
how exploratory research can turn into action research.

Follow-up
In Chapter Five, you read about Mauro, a teacher who wasinterested in looking into his students’ reaction to different
classroom layouts. As a result of his exploration, Mauro
discovered that his students prefer one classroom layout
over another; which one? How did he discover this?
After Mauro reached this understanding, he decided to try
some activities to evaluate their effects. What did he do?
Read his full story here: http://bit.ly/Mauro-Saez

What do I find?

|65

7. What shall I change?
Now we’ve been through the process of exploring, we come to the ‘action’part of ‘Exploratory Action Research’. It’s time to see if you want to change
anything. If you do, this chapter will help you both to plan for change andto implement the changes you plan. Chapter Eight will focus on observing
the effects and reflecting on what impact the action had.

?
4. Reflect
3. Observe
2. ActB. Explore

C. Analyseand reflect

1. Plan(to change)

A. Planto explore

exploration

7.1 Is ‘new action’ needed?
We’ve seen how exploration can lead you to a better
understanding of a particular puzzling, problematic,
or even successful situation. Based on your analysis andinterpretation of the findings, you need to decide whether
some kind of new ‘action’ is now needed. Let’s first lookat the possibility that no new action is necessary.

No need for new actiona) “Things are looking good”
When you interpret the data in relation to your exploratory
research questions, you may be quite satisfied, for example,
if you discover that something you thought was problematicin fact is not, from students’ perspectives.
b) “New things to explore”
On the other hand, there may be new puzzles or problems
to explore. In this case you can start a new exploratory
research process, with a new topic and research questions,following the procedures we’ve explained in Chapters Fourto Six.
c) “My teaching has changed already”
There are several ways in which change can happen. In fact,
you may have found that just by exploring you have caused
some changes. To start with, your understanding of thesituation will have changed – and you may already havestarted to teach in a different manner as a result.
d) “My classroom ‘feels’ much better”
By involving your students in exploring your questions(through asking them for their opinions about something,for example), you may have found that the classroom
atmosphere has already improved. Students may feel morevalued as contributors to the learning process, and this, initself, may have improved the ‘rapport’ you have with them,or the respect they give you as their teacher. If you shareand discuss the findings of your research with students, thiscan also help to improve relationships and learning.
67|

What shall I change?

actionHere’s what one teacher, Karla Ojeda, discovered:“Rapport is a crucial piece to the puzzle, because you are
not alone inside the classroom and you need to pay
attention to your students, not to assume things about them,but take the time to talk to them and to really listen to what
they are saying, so as to understand more. By doing this,rapport improves.” (final research report)
So, the very act of exploring the issue and/or opening
it up to students’ contributions and involvement can help
to bring about a positive change. You may feel that thisis enough, for example, if it has helped to improve theatmosphere, reduce a problem or increase your own
well-being as a teacher.
Desire for new action
It is also possible that, based on your new understandingof the situation, you will feel the need to change something,in other words implement a teaching idea that you think will
help. If you then collect data and analyse it to see whatchange actually occurs, you will be engaging in action
research (and not just ‘new action’).
Since you have already explored the existing situation
in some depth, it can both be satisfying and relatively
straightforward to analyse differences between thesituation ‘before’ and ‘after’ you try to bring about change.
In the next chapter (Chapter Eight), we will consider further
how to make this kind of before vs. after comparison (andhow to plan to gather data to help you with thecomparison). Here (in Chapter Seven), we’ll continue to try
to help you identify what to change.
So, we’ll assume both in the rest of this and in the next
chapter that your new understanding of a situation leads
you to want to change something about it. which will leadyou into ‘action research’.

sign. In that workshop they understood that the daily
context can help them to understand English. And I did
things like this the whole year. I got more students inclass, better participation and they felt much better withthe language. At the same time, their marks were
improving and, of course, the second term was better
than the first one for the same reasons. Then I did thesame survey again and the results were very positive.”

Remember, action research is like this:
1. Plan (to change)

2. Act [implement the change]

3. Observe [see what happens – with data]

Task 7.1
4. Reflect [interpret what occurred]

Do you, then, feel a need to change anything in yourpractice – a different way of teaching, organising yourclass, supporting your learners, etc? If so, what exactly
do you want to change?
Having carried out your exploratory research, do you think
you might need and/or want to move into action research?
If you do, read on!

7.2 Javier’s story
In 7.3 below we’ll consider different possible sources for
new actions, to help you define for yourself the desiredchange you’ll investigate in your own ‘action research’.
First, though, let’s see what one teacher did, following
on from his exploration of a problematic situation.
As we read in 6.3 in the last chapter, Javier Ávalos was
experiencing problems with demotivation in his classes of
disadvantaged learners. After analysing and interpreting
his questionnaire results, Javier realised that he could not
approach this class of learners in the same way he did withother classes. He knew that building their confidence andcreating a warm and positive classroom atmosphere was a
crucial first priority. He explains some of the things he did:
“I used more ice-breakers, told jokes about work, home,
couples, etc. Then, when they felt more comfortable, I
started each class by explaining what we were going to
do. Later in class, doing exercises, I started to monitor
carefully, guiding them on every single item. If they madea mistake I explained why it was a mistake, but always witha phrase like “Whoa! You are doing it quite well, you did it
wrong here, but it’s OK. Go on!!” and with those words,
they smiled and asked me “Really?”, “Yes, sure!” Theirconfidence in English went up and the frustration went
down immediately. Once, I created an activity in which thestudents had to create signs in English for different
places, like supermarkets, malls, the metro, etc. The mainidea was that they were already very familiar with manysigns, and even if they don’t understand all the words,
they could see the symbols well, and get the idea of the

Where do you think Javier’s ideas for changing the situation
might have come from?

Commentary
Javier faced a big challenge that many teachers face: lackof motivation. There is no easy solution to this issue, but
his story shows that there are things that can be done.
Javier explored the situation and then carried out small
actions like:■■using ice-breakers■■

telling jokes■■

explaining the overall plan of each class■■correcting encouragingly■■

using creative activities like sign-making

We don’t know exactly how the positive change in his classcame about or where his ideas came from, but the change
is likely to have resulted from a combination of:
A. Change without extra action. Students’ change inattitude from Javier’s requesting their opinions andideas. Just by talking to his students and giving thema questionnaire about their attitudes towards English,
Javier is likely to have helped them focus on the issue
and recognise their own fears and concerns.
B. Change due to new actions. Javier tried out a rangeof ideas, some of which perhaps came from his training
as a teacher (e.g. correcting encouragingly) or fromcolleagues, other teachers, or, for example, the internet.
It also sounds like he came up with his own ideas, suchas the sign creation activity.
Thus, Javier drew upon a range of sources of new actions
to help solve his problem. Interestingly, his action research
did not involve just a single big change but involved several
small changes, each of which contributed to the overall
result.

What shall I change?

|

687.3 Planning a change

Implementing students’ suggestions

Here is a reminder of the different sources of change weidentified in 7.1 above (of course there may be others!):

When offered responsibility, students can be very
perceptive about their needs and preferences, and about
challenges and problems in the classroom.

As we know, without the need for further action, classroomchange can occur through …
■■
■■

■■

a teacher’s change in understanding
students’ change in attitude due to you requesting
their opinions and ideas
students’ change in attitude due to you sharing
findings with them

The above can all come about through exploratory
research, without the need for new action. With new
action, classroom change can occur through:■■implementing students’ suggestions■■

implementing your own ideas■■

implementing others’ ideas

Change that occurs through such actions can beevaluated through Action Research. So, let’s consider
how you can plan new actions for bringing about change
in your own classroom.

Task 7.2
Where do your new ideas for teaching tend to come from?
Tick all those that apply to you:
Source of teaching ideas
A. your students’ suggestions
B. from inside yourself
C. from conversations withother teachers
D. training manuals
E. conferences
F. teacher group or association
discussions
G. academic research
H. other teachers’ research
I. other sources (where?)69|

What shall I change?

Tick (if it applies
to you)In Chapter Six we met Daniela, who investigated why
students didn’t seem to speak much in class. As well as
finding that this was partly a result of her behaviour asa teacher, she also got some useful suggestions from thelearners for relevant activities to improve their speaking
skills, such as games, debates, drama or role play, andusing songs and movies. Suggestions from students are
particularly useful, as they are more likely to succeed thanideas ‘from outside’, and they also provide the learners witha shared interest in making them successful. This wasparticularly true in the case of Mauro (Chapter Five), who
made changes to seating arrangements in his classes
based on suggestions from students. Because students
were aware that the suggestions had come from them,it’s likely that they wanted to make it succeed.
Karla Ojeda, another Champion Teacher, whose reflections
we first heard above, in this chapter, said this:“You end up finding out that what the students say to you
helps you to think of a variety of ways to plan your lessons
and to approach them. So, you find yourself having more
opportunities to gain inspiration, motivation andconfidence for your teaching practices.”
Roberto Delgado, another Champion Teacher, also stresses
the value of considering students’ opinions. This is what hesaid about this;“You have to interact with them. In the future if I see
some things that are not working. I don’t want to take any
measures without considering their point of view – I’ve
come to see it as a kind of dialogue, and that helped mea lot because from now on when I do classes I will startwith that.”
Considering Roberto’s words, have you ever asked yourstudents’ suggestions for class activities? If so, what did
you ask them about?

Task 7.3 @A number of stories that you have read in this bookdescribe how students were the source of suggestions
for classroom activities. Teresa (Chapter Four) was one
teacher who got some interesting ideas from students –what did they tell her?

Implementing your own ideas
One of the advantages of action research is that it provides
an opportunity for you to develop your own creativity
through the process of trying out new ideas, or adapting
established ones in your own classroom. By doing thiswithin an action research framework, you can observe theimpact of your creativity and collect useful data on how
effective the ideas are. We met a good example of this in
Chapter One, when we read about Paula’s secondary
school students who had difficulty remembering countries
and nationalities. Drawing on her experience, creativity andknowledge of her learners, she came up with an idea forcreating a domino game that turned out to be an effective
solution to the challenge she faced. Learners both enjoyed
the game and learnt the vocabulary. Thus, in this instance,
Paula’s creativity as a teacher turned out to be the primarysource of her intervention.

Daniela (see 6.1) is an example of a teacher who found out
what students wanted but implemented actions which she
devised herself. After analysing her quantitative andqualitative data, she
A. built a better atmosphere to help relax her learners,
including allowing them to change seats, having
interviews with students and parents, getting help fromthe school psychologist and having class discussions.
B. implemented some different classroom activities toencourage speaking, including pair and group work,
using nomination sticks,1 more formative assessment,
and asking questions to check understanding.

Task 7.4 @Go back to Tasks 6.1 and 6.2 in Chapter Six and re-read Daniela’s findings. Which findings mainly helped her decide
to do actions (a) and (b)? Check your answers in the answer key.
Actions

Findings

A. built a better atmosphere to help relax her learners,
including allowing them to change seats, having
interviews with students and parents, getting help fromthe school psychologist and having class discussions.
B. implemented some different classroom activities toencourage speaking, including pair and group work,
using nomination sticks,1 more formative assessment,
and asking questions to check understanding.

Implementing others’ ideas
As teachers, we are members of communities on different
levels. There’s the school community, where we cansometimes get ideas and materials from colleagues, andthere’s the wider community of teachers in our country
and worldwide. By making the most of opportunities tointeract in both these communities, you can get ideas foryour own interventions. A particularly good source might
be other teachers conducting action research in their own

classrooms. If they teach in a similar context to yours(e.g. primary, secondary, etc.), and especially if they arein the same country as you, ideas that they have may besuccessful in your classroom, too. So, if you’re using thisbook as part of an action research programme, it’s a goodidea to find out if other participants (either current or past)
have carried out similar projects, what ideas they had, andhow successful these were.

1
Coloured wooden sticks with students’ names written on them which she would randomly pick out to give each student at least one opportunity
to speak in English.

What shall I change?

|70By attending conferences, and reading journals andmagazines, you can also find out about what is working in
the classrooms of other teachers in our own country andaround the world. But the list doesn’t stop there – you can
get ideas from almost anywhere, including coursebooks,
materials and resources that you use, websites forteachers, Facebook groups and other online communities.
However, English teachers work in very different contexts
worldwide, and something that works in a different
classroom may not always be useful or appropriate inyours, so it’s wise to evaluate such ideas critically and to
make adaptations if necessary before using them.
In Chapter Three, we met Andrea, and learnt that she had
got some initial ideas for her area of research, wrapping up
lessons, from a website: www.busyteacher.com. It was only
by trying out a range of different ideas, getting further
feedback from her learners, and then adapting some of theideas that she eventually developed ideas that worked wellin her classroom. As such, Andrea’s interventions turned
out to be successful because they were a combination of
implementing students’ suggestions, her own ideas, andothers’ ideas.

Task 7.5
Imagine your colleagues had carried out their own
Exploratory Action Research and had decided that theyneed to implement new actions. As a result of analysing
and interpreting their findings they now realise that theyneed to1.

make their listening lessons more interesting forstudents;

2.

cater better for the needs of both high-achieving andlow-achieving learners when doing group work;3.

improve the way they correct spoken errors.

Complete the table for your Exploratory Action Research
project so far:
My topic(see Chapter Four)My exploratory questions(see Chapter Four)
1.
2.
3.
4.

My key findings
Write a brief summary sentence or two.

Changes so far?
Note down whether you have already seen any changes
as a result of your exploration.

Where would you advise them to look for ideas? Make notesor discuss with someone.
Possible ‘actions’?
Note down what (kind of) actions you may now want
to implement, to bring about (further) change.

Task 7.6
In Chapter Four you identified a topic to focus on foryour own Exploratory Action Research project and also
identified your exploratory questions. You may have also
begun the data collection process (Chapter Five) and theanalysis of that data (Chapter Six). If not, you may wantto come back to this task when you have done these.
Alternatively, for the purposes of this task, you canimagine you have collected the data and analysed it.

71|

What shall I change?

Now get a colleague or mentor to look at your table,
especially the possible actions, and provide somefeedback. Do they match the findings well? Does yourcolleague or mentor think they are good ideas? Can s/hethink of other possible actions? You may even want to shareyour ideas with your learners: What do they think of thepossible actions?

7.4 Implementing the change as planned
Once you have identified your possible actions, and got
feedback on them from colleagues / a mentor (and possibly
learners), you will be ready to begin implementing thechange. In this section we will share some advice that might
help you, and also consider some of the possible challenges
you may face.

Advice for implementing your change
1.

Consider the extra workload
It’s likely that implementing the change will increase
your workload temporarily. This may include planning
the action, implementing it and observing its effects.
If possible, then, try to do it at a time of your academic
year when your workload is not too high or make surethe actions don’t deviate too much from your everyday
teaching.

2.

Let those around you know what you’re doing
For obvious reasons, it’s a good idea to inform yourschool principal, and other teachers of the samelearners what you are doing and why. Most importantly,
think carefully about how you will introduce the change
to the learners. It will probably be a good idea toexplain to the learners about the change before you
begin implementing it.

3.

Plan ahead of timeIt’s important that you plan your action considering
the time this will take and also keeping some timeaside for contingencies. For example, make sure you
consider holidays and assessment periods sincethese may interrupt your implementation.

What happens if my action has a negative impact
or I come across an unanticipated problem?
Mistakes and challenges are all part of the learning process.
Often we learn just as much from them as from our
successes. So, first and foremost, don’t be afraid of these;
observing them can be part of the action research cycle.
If you find it necessary to stop your action before its
planned completion, reflect on what you observed thatcaused you to make this decision, and, if appropriate
collect further data (e.g. interview your learners) to help
you understand the problem in more detail, and whether
stopping was the right decision. The data you collect at thisstage could help you to modify your intended action andtry again.

Plan the remaining schedule
In Chapter Five (section 5.4), we encouraged you to plana research schedule to keep track of the different things
you need to do during the exploratory part of yourresearch. We have now added new things to do in the‘action’ part of the process, and you may be able to see,having gone through numbers 1. to 6., that we have arrived
at step 7. in the schedule below:

Things to do

Time

1.

Informing and asking permission from school, students and/or other relevant people.

1 week2.

Talking to colleagues who may be involved.

1 week3.

Planning dates and times for the data collection.

1 week4.

Designing ways of collecting data (questionnaires, interviews questions, observation checklist,
reflection notebook, etc.).

2–3 weeks5.

Collecting data.

4–6 weeks

6.

Analysing and reflecting on the data you’ve collected.

2 weeks

7.

Designing an action plan.

2 weeks

8.

Planning dates and times for application of the action plan and accompanying data collection.

1 week9.

Designing ways of collecting data (questionnaires, interviews questions, observation checklist,
reflection notebook, etc.).

2–3 weeks

10. Applying the action plan and collecting data.

4–6 weeks

11. Analysing and reflecting on the data you've collected.

2 weeks

What shall I change?

|

72

Task 7.7
Based on the list of actions and times provided above and also considering your own research, your action plan and thekind of information that you need to collect, complete the table below to design your own research schedule for the action
part of your research (7. onwards in the above schedule).

Month 1 – Things to do

Month 3 – Things to do

Week 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 2

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Week 4Month 2 – Things to do

Month 4 – Things to do

Week 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 2

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Week 4

Summary and follow-up

Follow-up

In this chapter we have learnt about how to move fromthe exploration to the action phase of Exploratory Action
Research. We have thought about whether it is necessary
to plan a specific intervention, or whether the exploration
itself has been sufficient. We have looked at different ways
in which change can happen, and looked at examples fromreal teachers, noticing that for several of them the changes
involved a combination of different approaches and evenadaptation to their original idea. You have also had an
opportunity to think about what kind of change you may
want to make after conducting the exploration phase, andconsidered some useful tips and advice in case things
don’t go quite as planned!

Esteban López conducted an Exploratory Action Research
project consisting of several cycles of exploration andaction. The first action that he implemented involved using
a new approach called ‘input-based instruction’, something
he’d never tried before. When he began implementing it,
he faced some challenges. For example, he found that:In the next chapter you will read about how we can observe
and analyse the effects of the change, and reflect on what
occurred and its meaning.

73|

What shall I change?

■■

■■

■■

with this approach students were less involved thanwhen they discovered rules for themselves
an input-based strategy sometimes seemed
overwhelming to these learners who had so little
language
students still did not produce as much spontaneous
speech as he had expected.

Imagine you are Esteban. Whatwould you do in this situation? Make
notes or discuss with a colleague if
possible. Then read Esteban’s story
and see what he in fact did next:
http://bit.ly/Esteban-Lopez

8. What happens?
This chapter focuses on observing and analysing the effects of the ‘new action’introduced in the action research part of your project. We will review different
ways of collecting data and will consider again how data can be analysed.
We will also look at ways to reflect on what you find and consider its implications.
In a few words, this chapter focuses on helping you answer the question:

What are the effects of the change(s) that I attempt?
So, whereas findings for exploratory research are connected with the basic
question ‘What is the current situation?’, your findings for action research willtell you what happens as a result of the change you implement.

8.1 Lorena’s story – revisited

The focus group participants mentioned that they now felt
motivated and more successful because they were able
to do the tasks, and do them well. This was confirmed byanother peer observation, where the student-teacher told
me that students were able to focus on the activities andthey did not get distracted by anything else.”

Let’s begin by revisiting Lorena Muñoz’ Exploratory Action
Research project, which you first read about in Chapter Two.
Read this summary and extract and then do the task that
follows.
Lorena noticed that her grade 9–11 students weren’t
engaging with listening lessons. Her exploratory researchphase involved surveying the students, conducting a focus
group interview and getting a student-teacher to observe
several of her lessons. These revealed that her students
found the audio topics interesting (something that surprised
Lorena), but they found many recordings too long and could
not complete activities. This led to them getting frustrated
and doing other things, like chatting. She also found thatthey liked songs most of all, simply because they wereshorter and they were able to complete the task. So she
started adapting audio tasks to make them more like songs.
She divided the audios into sections and created activities
such as ordering the information, filling in gaps, underlining
the correct word and crossing the odd one out.
Let’s reread what happened after she implemented heraction plan:“By the end of two weeks I observed several changes.
The first one was that they actually did the activities,
handouts were completed with the correct answers and I
could observe many hands up to participate in the lesson.
I conducted another survey in which students answeredthat working with the listening materials as if they weresongs allowed them to work better. They also said thatthey were able to identify information from the text andthat the activities they liked the most were underlining thecorrect word, filling in the gaps and crossing out the odd
one out. They still found it difficult to order the
information because sometimes the material was too fast.

75|

What happens?

Task 8.1 @Underline or highlight the words or phrases above thattell us about the evidence Lorena gathered to answer
the question ‘What are the effects of the change(s) that
I attempt?’
Then answer the following questions, either by making
notes or discussing with a colleague:
1.

How long did it take her to begin noticing the effectof the changes?

2.

Which kinds of evidence were ‘quantitative’ and whichwere ‘qualitative’?

3.

What told her that the changes were effective?

Commentary
Lorena collected data before and after implementing achange, using the same methods. She then analysed thedata from the different sources to evaluate whether theeffects of her actions had been effective.
As we know from Chapter Five, the process of trying to findevidence from different points of view, with different typesof information, is called triangulation . While it is notnecessary to engage in this for all Exploratory Action
Research projects (sometimes one kind of evidence will beenough), Lorena’s case demonstrates that teacher-research
can be quite reliable if we attempt to see things fromseveral points of view.

8.2 A reminder of research methods
It’s clear that in the action research phase you are going to plan different new actions (or one overall new action) related
to your teaching. You will also need to plan what kind of data you require in order to answer, as objectively as possible,
the question ‘What are the effects of the change(s) that I attempt?‘, in other words ‘What happens?’
At this point, it is worth revisiting the kinds of data we came across in Chapter Five.

Task 8.2
Read through the following different types of data and try to remember examples of each one from the teacher-researchstories you have already read in this book.
1. Your own written reflections and/or notes

2. Other people’s written ideas on the topic

3. Notes from informal conversations with colleagues

4. Reflective writing by students

5. Notes or recordings of focus group discussions

6. Notes or recordings of interviews / chatswith individuals

7. Responses to a questionnaire

8. Lesson plans and materials

9. Lesson recordings

10. A critical friend’s notes about your lesson

11. Pictures of your class

12. Students’ performance on tasks (writtenor recorded)

Task 8.3

But you may also want to allow some time for students to
get used to the change before doing surveys, interviews
or reflective writing. Two weeks, as in Lorena’s case, may
be long enough for the changes to stabilise, but not toolong for learners and you to forget and become unable
to compare the situations before and after the action
or change.

Think about your own Exploratory Action Research project.
You may also want to look back at the table you completed
for task 7.6. Answer the following questions, either bymaking notes, or discussing with a colleague:
1.

Will you collect the same kind(s) of data as for the
exploration phase, or will you make some changes
and/or additions?

2.

How long after you begin to implement the new
action will you collect this data?

3.

Will you be able to use the same research methods?
If so, what adaptations – if any – will you needto make?

CommentaryIt’s usually a good idea to use at least one method thatis the same as in your exploratory phase. This will allow
you to make a direct comparison between before andafter the action.

Remember that if your change involves introducing a newactivity or way of working into your classroom, you’ll
probably need to make some alterations to the datacollection method that you used. These alterations could
involve adding questions or other items to surveys, sets ofinterview questions or an observation framework, in order
to ask learners or observers what they think of or noticeabout the new action(s) you’ve introduced. Note that Lorena
did this in her action research phase – she asked thestudent-teacher observer to focus more specifically on
student participation and engagement; and, in the second
focus group discussion, she asked for reasons why students
liked the new type of listening activities.

With many changes you will find that data collection
naturally begins immediately as you observe your learners’
behaviour, as Lorena did when she noticed the change innumbers of students with their hands up.

What happens?

|768.3 Comparing exploratory and action
research findings
In Chapter Four you identified your own topic andexploratory questions (EQs). Then in Chapter Five we looked
at a range of different ways to collect information to help
you answer these questions, and thereby help you gain
more understanding of your learners and teaching situation.
The initial, exploratory information you gained will be very
useful (necessary, in fact) as we attempt to answer the key
question for the present chapter – the action question (AQ):

What are the effects of the change(s) that
I attempt?
You can most effectively answer the basic action researchquestion by comparing the data you collected earlier,during the exploratory phase, and the data you collect
after the change, like Lorena did.
This is why the exploration part of the Exploratory Action
Research cycle is essential. Without the earlier observationand description to help you understand the situation as fully
as possible, it is difficult to analyse the impact of what you
have done. While it is not necessary to collect exactly thesame type of data each time, the more similar it is, theeasier it is for you to evaluate the impact.
So, you can often use the same ways of gathering
information, for example the same questionnaire, or thesame observation framework to give to colleagues with
only some minor amendments.

Task 8.4 @Look back at Esteban’s story, which you read at the endof Chapter Seven. Notice how he collected data before
and after the intervention. Did he use the same methods
to gather evidence before and after? Did he alter the
methods in any way? Check your answer in the answer key.
If you are gathering the same kind of data after or during
as well as before your new action(s), then noticing change
is usually quite straightforward, especially if the data
involves numbers – you can just compare the data andspot any differences. Let’s practise this by looking again
at Javier’s Exploratory Action Research study (we havebeen following this in 6.3 and 7.2 already).

77|

What happens?

The data from Javier’s questionnaire changed a bit from the first to the second application since there were more
students in his class the second time, but still you will be able to notice some differences which can tell you the effectof his new actions:

Statements

First application

Second application

Agree

Indifferent

Disagree

Agree

Indifferent

Disagree1.

Inglés es un idioma muy difícil.
[English is a very difficult language.]

3

2

2

9

3

11

2.

Me pongo nervioso cada vez que tengoclases de Inglés. [I feel nervous wheneverI have English class.]

6

0

1

5

4

14

3.

Inglés me frustra porque no sé nada. [English
frustrates me because I don’t know anything.]

5

1

1

6

4

13

4.

Me siento imposibilitado de aprender Inglés.
[I think it’s impossible for me to learn English.]

2

2

3

4

4

15

5.

Siento que Inglés está muy lejos para
aprender. [I think English will take a longtime to learn.]

3

0

4

3

6

14

Yo puedo aprender Inglés pero siento
que es difícil. [I can learn English but
I think it’s difficult.]

4

2

1

17

2

4

Me siento motivado debido a mis notas
en Inglés. [I feel motivated because of
my marks in English.]

4

2

1

13

5

5

8.

No aprendo ingles por flojera.
[I don’t learn English because I’m lazy.]

3

1

3

6

2

15

9.

Me siento avergonzado en inglés porquepienso que me puedo equivocar. [I feelashamed in English because I think I can be
wrong.]

3

2

2

8

4

11

10. Me da vergüenza preguntar en inglés. [I’m embarrassed to ask questions in English.]

5

0

2

6

4

13

11. Creo que puedo aprender inglés pero noconfío en mí. [I think I can learn English
but I lack confidence in myself.]

3

3

1

11

1

11

12. Creo que puedo aprender inglés.
[I believe I can learn English.]

4

2

1

19

1

3

13. Entiendo las palabras pero no sé cómopronunciarlas. [I understand the words but I
don’t know how to pronounce them.]

6

1

0

12

7

4

14. Me aterra inglés porque no sé cómopronunciar. [English terrifies me because I
don’t know how to pronounce it.]

3

2

2

7

5

11

6.

7.

Task 8.5 @Look at Javier’s data above. What do you notice? Javier’s aim for doing this Exploratory Action Research with his students
was ‘building their confidence and creating a warm and positive classroom atmosphere’. Do you think he succeeded inachieving this aim?

What happens?

|788.4 Interpreting self-critically
It is important to recognise that other things may influence
your findings, not just the action(s) you implemented. A very
simple, but useful tip is to try to look at your data criticallyand ask yourself the question:

What else could have caused the changethat I’m noticing?
Task 8.6
You will probably remember Andrea’s story from Chapter
Three. Her Exploratory Action Research project involved
investigating the way she wrapped up lessons, and thenmaking a change to help learners to remember more about
the lesson content. Although she collected several different
types of evidence, one very simple idea she had was to get
students to write down what they could remember from theprevious class:
Before the change“I gave students a piece of paper and I told them to write
what happened the previous class, I did that in Spanish
so all of them had the same chances to express theirideas. These were my findings: 23 did not remember;
3 did not answer; 8 answered correctly.”
After the change“I repeated the same procedure from the first observed
class, I asked my students to write on a piece of paper(in Spanish) what they remembered from the previous
class. Their answers were: 30 of them remembered theprevious class (most of them remembered the activityof the map); 4 of them did not remember.”
Using this information alone, ask yourself the criticalquestion we have suggested – in other words, what else
(other than Andrea’s new ideas for wrapping up lessons)could have influenced the change that we’re noticing
in the data?

Commentary
If Andrea relied on this data alone, the difference could
be explained by any of the following:
1.

Coincidence – there are always variations between
lessons in how much students remember;

2.

They may have found the second lesson topic moreinteresting, or it may have been easier;3.

Andrea may have been better prepared for thesecond lesson;4.

Andrea may have been trying harder for the whole
lesson, and not just changing the way she ended it;

79|

What happens?

5.

The students may have tried harder, especially if theyknew that Andrea was hoping for success;6.

It may be because the wrapping up activity was newthat the students remembered much more. If she does
the same activity every lesson, the novelty may wear
off and they will remember less.

Luckily, Andrea collected much more data than this. After
introducing a range of wrapping-up activities, she also
asked students to choose their favourite ones, and she got
a colleague to observe her lessons before and after
implementing the change. Thus, we can again see theimportance here of triangulating. After she carefully andcritically interpreted all of these different sources of
information, and considering other things that could haveinfluenced the findings, Andrea was confident that her new
strategies for wrapping up lessons were helping learners toremember more.
Where does the data lead you?
Noticing change and trying to work out what led to it is only
the first step in evaluating change. In order to understandthe data and its implications for our practice, we need tointerpret further, just as you did during the exploration
phase of your research.
As we saw in Chapter Six, ‘interpret’ means to decide whatsomething ‘means’ by answering the question ‘So what?’.
Knowing the meaning or ‘value’ of something in the case ofteacher-research primarily involves knowing what it meansfor your practice and in relation to the questions you asked.
So, you may be happy with what has happened, and perhaps
seek to reproduce your success in later lessons. Or it may
not have worked, and you may either (1) not mind because
you’ve gained understanding in other ways or (2) want tofind out more about why it didn’t work or try out new things
for the same purpose. In all these cases, you are answeringthe ‘So what?’ question by thinking about the implications
the new action has had for your teaching and/or continuingresearch.
Often we may only get a partial answer to a question.
This, on its own, may be useful enough, or may prompt us
to make changes and collect more data at a later stage.
It’s also very common that our findings will throw up newquestions, as they did in the case of Esteban, whose story
you read at the end of the last chapter:■■

A key characteristic of action research – and of
Exploratory Action Research – is that we can continue
to adapt and improve the changes that we introduce
for as long as we keep teaching, while continuing toresearch and reflect on the impact of these changes –there is no end to the process of discovery!

8.5 Reflecting on your own development– the major finding?
‘Reflect’: v. ‘To think carefully and deeply aboutsomething’1
Nobody would disagree that teachers should ‘think carefullyand deeply’ about their work. Unfortunately, we aresometimes too busy to do this, and we replace reflectingwith ‘assuming’. If we go back to the story of Teresa Perčić,
whom we met in Chapter One, you will remember that she
assumed that playing classical music had no effect on how
well students concentrated during tasks, so she stopped
doing it, despite the recommendation of her boss. It was
only through the process of teacher-research that shelearnt that her students did find it beneficial:
So what was her final thought?:

Task 8.8 @The other teachers that we’ve met in this book have alllearnt valuable things through the process of Exploratory
Action Research, and the insights they provided give you
a useful opportunity to practise your own data analysis
and interpretation skills. Analyse the reflections below for
any common themes, recurring expressions or importantwords, and then write a short paragraph summarising what
Exploratory Action Research can do for us as teachers, on
the basis of these reflections. You can compare your answer
with our paragraph in the answer key.
“We need to stop focusing on our concerns and pay more
attention to our students’ concerns. As a result of thisproject, I feel that I am more empathetic.”
Camila Villalobos“I heard my students. I saw myself.” Leyla Nuñez“If you are an experienced teacher and you think that you
have nothing to learn from your colleagues and from yourstudents, you are wrong.” Andrea Robles“With this exploratory process I discovered that I was
expecting something from my students but I was not
giving them something they needed first.” Teresa Ríos

Task 8.7
Look carefully again at these final reflections. Think about
the following two questions and either make notes ordiscuss with a colleague:
1.

What did Teresa learn from her research thatis likely to help her in the future?

2.

What do you think she will do next time she’s told
to do something by her boss because it has been
proven by research?

Commentary
Teresa’s final reflections seem to indicate that she learnt
several important things:
■■

■■

■■

1

We can all be wrong, but we shouldn’t be scared of this.
It is an opportunity for learning;
We should avoid making assumptions based solely on‘signs’ of student behaviour (remember, in Chapter One
we made this distinction between ‘signs’ and ‘evidence’);It’s OK to be critical of recommendations we receivefrom others, and testing them out in our own classrooms
is the perfect way to find out whether we should accept
them or not.

“Action research is important because education needs
teachers who innovate, who have good ideas, who areaware of their students’ needs and are willing to change
their approach.” Mauro Sáez
“From now on the way I teach listening will be different
and according to what the group requires.” Lorena Muñoz“I can say that this project has benefited me in so many
ways. It has helped me to improve my teaching skills, butalso to develop a better relationship with my students,
and colleagues.” Javier Avalos“Research is a wonderful tool and opportunity to begin
that change we so desperately need.” Daniela Gajardo
Finally, we’d like to share the following update from Leyla(whom we met at the end of Chapter One). This is what she
told us about her learning experience almost four years
after her project ended:“Thanks to engaging in my exploratory action research
project, I now see my students and myself as active
agents in/of the changes in the classroom. I have stopped
blaming the system, my students or even myself for those
things that don’t work as expected in the classroom; also,
I have learnt to value those things that do work, which
also deserve to be explored and systematized in time.
Above all, I have learnt not to assume the reasons why
things happen. Whatever happens in the classroom has areason which I need to unveil. The best way is by asking
the other actors, my students -- they will always haveimportant information to share. They are the source of
motivation to continue improving my teaching practices.”

Oxford English Dictionary

What happens?

|

80Summary and follow-up
In this chapter we have learnt more about how we canobserve, analyse and reflect upon the changes that we may
make in our teaching as a result of doing Exploratory Action
Research. We have learnt when and how we can observe
the effects of these changes, and the difference between
noticing and interpreting them during the evaluation
process. We have also practised looking critically at
indicators of change and have reminded ourselves why
triangulation is an important part of showing us that change
has really happened. Finally, we have seen how, whenteachers reflect on Exploratory Action Research, they often
notice more fundamental changes – changes in ‘mindset’– in how they view learners, their colleagues, themselves,
and the teacher development process.
The change that can happen inside you, as a teacher (evenwhen you were not expecting or planning this), can be oneof the most important findings of Exploratory Action
Research – and one that it is good to highlight when you
come to share your findings, as we shall consider in the final
chapter.

Follow-up
Camila, whose challenging situation you first came acrossin Chapter One, did an Exploratory Action Research study
to help some of her students. She was particularlyinterested in supporting those students who were part of an
inclusion programme. Please read Camila’s story here andanswer the questions below: http://bit.ly/Camila-Villalobos
1.

What changes did Camila introduce in her class?

2.

How did she evaluate its effects?

3.

What did Camila learn from this experience?

81|

What happens?

9. Where do I go
from here?
In the previous chapters of this book we have invited you to take a journey of
exploration and action. In that journey we have asked you to reflect about yourpractice, identify an area to explore, plan an exploration, explore by collecting
data, analyse and interpret data, suggest an action plan, implement the action
plan and evaluate its effects. We have supported you in this journey by looking
in detail at each of the key steps in the Exploratory Action Research process.
Now we’ve reached the top step. So, where do you go from here?

9.1 Sharing your research with others
Task 9.1

First let’s look at how you can present your research tocolleagues, and audio- or video-record and share yourpresentation further.

Before reading on, take a moment to consider the above
question.

Task 9.2 @■■Is this the end of your journey? Or just the beginning?

■■

How do you feel about what you have learnt?

■■

Do you want to share it, or build on it?

There is of course no one simple answer to any of thesequestions. Your decisions at this stage will depend verymuch on you, your research and the other obligations inyour life. One thing you can do is share what you have learnt
in your research, and we will consider how you can do thatorally or through a written report while respecting
participants’ rights. You may wish to join a wider communityof teacher-researchers and/or you may want to start theprocess again and embark on another Exploratory Action
Research experience.
So, rather than it coming to an end, your first Exploratory
Action Research project is likely to be the beginning of alonger process of development and interaction with otherteacher-researchers.
As Daniela, one of the Champion Teachers, noted (and wehope you will agree!):“Research is a wonderful tool and opportunity to begin
that change we so desperately need.”

83|

Where do I go from here?

Write a list of potential advantages of sharing your researchwith others. Think of how it can benefit you, yourself, notonly other teachers. You can find some of our ideas in theanswer key.
The first step to take to share the findings of your
Exploratory Action Research could be to make a briefpresentation to other teachers. This may happen in ateacher development session in your own school, duringa regional workshop, a local teachers’ meeting, or evenat a conference. If, like most people, you are nervous about
giving a presentation, perhaps the best place to start could
be in front of your own colleagues. The more often you givethe same presentation, in different places, the better it will
become! A presentation doesn’t have to be very long.
You may want just to talk about it for three to five minutes
in front of a poster, as in our next example, or you may
prefer to show a few PowerPoint slides of photos, quotes
or results charts. Don’t forget to allow time for questions
and discussion at the end – this can be the most usefulpart of the presentation, both for yourself and colleagues.

Task 9.3 @One of the simplest ways of presenting is to do so via a poster presentation. You can prepare a poster in advance, use it
more than once, and you don’t need to rely on technology! Here are four posters from teachers we have met in this book.
1.

Can you work out who created which one?

2.

Which one do you like most, and why?

Poster A.

Poster B.

Poster C.

Poster D.

Commentary
We will probably all have different answers to thesecond question, and the variety provides a useful
insight into how different teachers understand theresearch process. For example, Poster C refers to
the way action research is often represented as acircle (see also 9.5 below) whereas in Poster B the
research process is represented as a journey.

Where do I go from here?

|

84

Task 9.4
Choose one of the posters above (A to D). If needed, readthrough the corresponding story again to refresh yourmemory with the details, and then answer the following
questions, either by making notes, or discussing witha colleague:
1.

What information did this teacher choose to present
in their poster?

2.

Where did they decide to use images? Why?

3.

What questions would you ask them after thepresentation?

4.

What would you have done differently in the poster?

As you gain confidence in your presenting skills, and also
in the value of your research for others, you may want to doa talk or a workshop at a Teacher Association conference.
Lorena, a Champion Teacher whose report you read in
Chapter Two, did that. She presented her research at aconference organised by RICELT (Red de Investigador@s
Chilen@s en ELT: the Network of Chilean ELT Researchers)
along with other teacher-researchers. You can watch her
presentation here: championteachers.weebly.com/lorena
An alternative or additional way to begin sharing yourresearch with others is to use social media. One simple
way to do this is to record yourself presenting yourresearch findings on a digital camera or mobile phone,and then upload this recording to YouTube, Facebook
or other platform. If you’re giving a talk at a conferenceor workshop, or even in front of a small group of otherteachers, why not ask a colleague to record yourpresentation and then upload the recording together
with photographs of your poster?
You can see some examples of online presentations
on the following website:
http://classroombasedresearch.weebly.com/outcomes.html
There are more examples in this Facebook group, and you
can join it to share your own video:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/teachersresearch/

There are many ways that you can write about yourresearch, ranging from informal brief accounts that may
only take a few hours to write, to academic articles that
can take much longer. Let’s look at some of the options:

From oral presentation to written report
What we are suggesting here is that you take the recordingfrom your oral presentation, transcribe it, edit it and share
it as a written report. In other words, writing can come after
a spoken presentation that has been recorded. For this, youneed the file of the recording, a laptop and headphones.

Instead of worrying about issues such as style and format,
just listen to the recording and type what you hear, then edit
to add detail or to delete things you don’t want to share in
writing, and to improve grammar and vocabulary choices.
You can then add photographs to support comprehension
and you’re done! We do advise that you show this written
report to a colleague to give you feedback. Sometimes
things are clear for us (because we have done it!) but notclear for others. So asking a colleagues to read it and give
you feedback is always useful.
You could share the final written report via social media,
or as part of an account of the workshop where you
presented. You could even turn it into a short blog post.

Task 9.5
Let’s look at an example from a teacher you know – Andrea,
whose poster is Poster A in task 9.3. She recorded her talk,listened to the recording and transcribed almost exactly
what she heard. The result was uploaded to the Champion
Teachers website. Visit the page, listen to her recording
here http://championteachers.weebly.com/andrea-robles.
html and answer the following two questions:A. How closely does the report match the recording?

9.2 Sharing your research by writing

B. What did she change? add? delete?

Back in Chapter One we saw some of the images teachers
have about research and tried to show how they can berevised. One of these concerned writing:

Notice how, in her spoken presentation, Andrea just chatsnaturally about her project. This makes it relatively easy
to understand and enables her audience to participate.
Then, when she wrote it up, she used the same structure
and just made small changes to the sentences to makethem clearer.

A major worry teachers have about research is that it will
involve them in a lot of academic writing, for which they
do not have time. We’d like to show how writing can bebuilt up to – from the kind of oral presentation describedin the last section, to wider sharing via writing.

85|

Where do I go from here?

Sharing your written report

9.3 Consider participants’ rights

If you want to share your research experience with a bigger
audience, you can place your writing in a blog, a newsletteror even in a Facebook group or on your own web page.
If you want to create your own blog or website, it only takes
a few minutes to set one up through websites such as
WordPress.com or Weebly.com.

When we report on research we need to respectparticipants’ rights to confidentiality and security at all
times. This relates to ‘ethical issues’ in research.

If you don’t want to start your own blog, there are teacherresearch communities and teacher associations that havetheir own blogs (for example, the International Festival of
Teacher-Research in ELT: https://trfestival.wordpress.com/).
They may be interested in you contributing as a guest
blogger.

In you want to share your writing through a newsletter or amagazine, first think about the newsletters you have accessto and which would be interested in publishing your story.
You can also think about a newsletter for teachers ofdifferent subjects (not only English language teachers),
since this experience may also be interesting for them.

Task 9.6
Many successful blog posts are just one to two pages long,
written for busy teachers like you! If you already have yourtranscribed report, think about the following task applied
to your own report. Otherwise, try drafting a short reportbased on Lorena’s presentation here: championteachers.
weebly.com/lorena. After you have transcribed, think about
the following:
1.

What title would you give the post? Remember thatit has to attract attention.

2.

What three images would you use? Remember thatthe first image in a post will appear as a preview onsocial media sites.

3.

What headings would you use? Three to five should
be enough.

As soon as you begin to share your research findings inpublic, even within your own school, you need to actively
imagine the consequences this may have for participantsin your research. So here is some important advice:1.

Anonymise data. Change participants’ names unlessthey wish you to use their real name;2.

Don’t post photos or video of children for the public
without full consent of their parents. Asking thechildren themselves if it’s OK is not sufficient; Theirparents need to provide consent, ideally in written
form.

3.

Remember that some of the most enthusiastic readersof your research may be the participants themselves.
They may enjoy seeing themselves in your research,
but because of how much they know about each other,
they may also be able to spot classmates orcolleagues, so, if you quote them, make sure that otherresearch participants won’t be able to identify themfrom what they say.

Task 9.7
Ethical issues in your own research
If you have started your own Exploratory Action Research
project, note down some answers to the following
questions and then share with a colleague. If you haven’t
started yet, you could consider them from the perspectiveof one of the teachers-researchers featured in this book:1.

Have you made any video- or audio-recordings
or taken any photos of children for your research?
How will you keep these secure? Do you really need
to use them when sharing your research?

2.

What personal information have you collected fromparticipants (e.g. names, jobs, hometown, etc.)?
Do you need to include this in your research findings?
If so, can you anonymise this data?

3.

How will you describe the context for your research?
Will others be able to identify the school/organisation
involved? If so, how can you alter this description toensure that it is useful but anonymous?

Where do I go from here?

|869.4 Joining wider communities

Teachers Research! Facebook group

Here are some further advantages of sharing yourresearch. These involve the fact that, when you publicise
your research, you are joining a wider community as apresenter or writer:

There are a number of communities active online that are
involved in teacher-research for English language teachers.
A relevant community for you would be the Teachers
Research! group, which is dedicated to all types of teacher
research, including Exploratory Action Research, but also
‘Exploratory Practice’ and more formal classroom-based
research: https://www.facebook.com/groups/
teachersresearch/

■■

■■

■■

You can meet other individuals interested in similar
questions. You can discuss and share your challenges
and also learn from others about how to research more
effectively.
You may gain opportunities to become a mentor forother teacher-researchers, developing your capabilities
as a leader and ‘teacher educator’.
You can make useful contacts, for example withrepresentatives of universities, agencies or networks
which will provide you with further opportunities, due
to sharing your research.

In this chapter we have already provided the names ofseveral networks and communities where you can bothshare your research and learn from others. Below we list
some further, mainly international, communities andgroups. However, the most useful and rewarding groups
to participate in are often local or national associations
or groups, where you can interact with teachers whoshare similar challenges to you.

IATEFL
Originally started in the UK in 1967, IATEFL (theInternational Association of Teachers of English as a
Foreign Language) has grown to be an internationalorganisation. It organises webinars and a web-conferenceeach year, and a main conference which takes place in the
UK. It also has a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs),
including the IATEFL Research SIG and Teacher
Development SIG, which you are likely to find of great use.

You can also join communities or networks which support
the sharing and promotion of teacher-research in your own
country. Many of the Champion Teachers in Chile did this byjoining RICELT (the Network of Chilean ELT Researchers) andparticipating in their conference as presenters.

IATEFL website: https://www.iatefl.org/
IATEFL Research SIG website: http://resig.weebly.com/
IATEFL Teacher Development SIG website: https://tdsig.org/
IATEFL also has national affiliates in many countries.

TESOL

Champion Teachers at the first RICELT conference

Started in the USA in 1966, TESOL (Teachers of English to
Speakers of Other Languages) International Association,
like IATEFL, has become global, with regular regionalseminars and a main conference in North America eachyear. While many of its ‘Interest Sections’ are similar to
IATEFL SIGs, it does not have an interest section specifically
devoted to teacher-research.
Website: http://www.tesol.org/

87|

Where do I go from here?

Finally,
Electronic Village Online (EVO) on classroom-based
research for professional development
EVO is a voluntary community, active in January–February
each year – that has provided online teacher education
programmes for free to teachers from around the world.
In recent years, the EVO on classroom-based research forprofessional development has been supporting teachers
through Exploratory Action Research:
http://classroombasedresearch.weebly.com/

9.5 Continuing your research
In this book, we have used a staircase to illustrate the key steps of Exploratory Action Research. But action research
can also be visualised in other ways.

Task 9.8 @Type the words ‘action research’ into an Internet search engine, and then look at the image results provided.
1.

What is the most common diagram type shown?

2.

How many stages are usually involved?

3.

Why do you think that they show a circle or spiral instead of a straight line?

We have represented Exploratory Action Research as a staircase which includes the stages from the action research
cycle that you probably found in the internet, but those stages (1. to 4.) are preceded by exploration steps (A. to C.)
in the staircase diagram:?
4. Reflect
3. Observe
2. ActB. Explore

C. Analyseand reflect

1. Plan(to change)

A. Planto explore

exploration

actionWe decided to use a staircase representation in this book in order to highlight the need (in our view) for an exploratory
stage before entering action research but also to show how the whole process promotes learning and professional growththrough an ‘upward’ series of steps. Nonetheless, the process can certainly be viewed as cyclical – or as a spiral – because
it may begin again.
Observations and reflections may throw up new questions to answer and therefore another cycle of exploration and action
may start again – the more we learn, the more curious we may become!

Where do I go from here?

|88

Many teachers who have completed an (exploratory) action research project seem to go on to do more research, either
informally in their own classrooms, or more formally as part of a qualification. You can do this research alone or withcolleagues. If you do go on, our EAR staircase may get taller and taller! For example:

B. Explore
4. Reflect

B. Explore

A. Planto explore

3.
Observe

2. ActC. Analyseand reflect

C. Analyseand reflect

1. Plan(to change)

A. Planto explore

exploration

actionLet’s look at a few ways that this might happen:

exploration

Remember that, just as with the first project we haveguided you through in this book, you can decide whether
you just want to explore a situation, in order to understandit more, or whether you want to try a new intervention inorder to change it. You can also decide on when you want
to do this; perhaps you want to take a break first! As always,
it’s up to you.

1.

Your initial Exploratory Action Research (EAR) only
partially answers your question, but it tells you where
you need to look to find a more complete answer.

2.

Analysing the data from your initial EAR reveals
something you didn’t expect, or can’t explain.

3.

The answers you get are general, and you wantmore specific answers, so you develop moredetailed research questions.

Task 9.9

4.

The feedback you receive after sharing your findings
provides you with new ideas that you want to try out.

Reflect on your own Exploratory Action Researchso far:5.

Sharing your findings leads to an opportunity tocollaborate with someone else on a new research
project.

1.		 Has it thrown up new questions that you want toanswer, or puzzles that you want to understand?
What are they?

For example, Leyla, whom we met at the end of Chapter
One, writes to us now (four years after her original project)that she has since used Exploratory Action Research inseveral new ways:“I headed an EAR project on gender education in theframe of a British Council ARAS award. Also, I was
involved in an international project, in which thirteen
teachers from different corners conducted action
research. Nowadays, I am starting my own EAR on
developing strategies to scaffold special needs
students who had been exempted for years and now
they have to form part of the class because of the
new law of inclusion in education.”

89|

Where do I go from here?

2.		 Has the process of doing the research brought you
into contact with potential collaborators? If so, whatkind of project might interest both of you?
3.		 Is there anything from your original researchquestions that you still don’t understand?
Would you like to find out more?
Finally, the more experience you gain of doing Exploratory
Action Research, the better you will become at it.
Formulating research questions, selecting your methods,
planning and doing your research, analysing data andreflecting on it will all become much easier with time, andthis will increase the opportunities for you to share yourresearch, publish more widely, and share the benefits ofyour experience with others.

Some teacher-researchers even go on to become mentors,
supporting other teachers embarking on research projects.
This could be with other teachers in your school, withinyour local teachers’ association, or through workshops orconferences. The experience can be rewarding, and canprovide new inspiration for your own classroom research.
Lorena, for example, whose story you came come acrossin Chapters Two and Eight, and whose presentation you
may have watched while reading section 9.1, has done all
the following since then:“I have worked as a mentor for action research, twocohorts in Chile (13 teachers) and now a third one withteachers from Perú (10 teachers). I am also mentoring
my colleagues on teacher evaluation this year. One of theelements of the portfolio should be a collaborative action
done by teachers, so I have suggested to do it as action
research since the idea of this product is how to solve a
problem in the classroom collaboratively. The Physical
Education department accepted the idea and they are
doing it related to volleyball.”
Leyla, too, reports that she is ‘always speaking andshowing what I do to “improve” my teaching practices
in conferences, professional development events andtalking to teachers who are struggling with issues intheir classrooms.’
As you can see, the journey you have been through withthis handbook may be just the first of many!

9.6 Your personal journey withthis handbook
At the end of the introduction to this book we invited you
to use a diagnostic tool to assess your own competencies
in the key skills needed for Exploratory Action Research.
Now that we’ve come to the end, as one way of seeing
what you’ve got out of it, you may like to repeat the sameself-assessment you carried out then. You can thencompare the two to see how much change has occurred.
Fill out the Competencies table on the next page by circling
numbers from 0 to 4 in the ‘Level’ column, using thefollowing level descriptors:

Level 0I do not currently have this competency.

Level 1

I am beginning to apply this competency.

Level 2I am applying this competency but haveareas which require improvement.

Level 3I am applying this competency withconfidence.

Level 4I am applying this competency withstrength.

Where do I go from here?

|90Competencies

Level

A. I can reflect on and analyse my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

B. I know how to improve my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

C. I can identify what is good about my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

D. I can see what problems are occurring in my classroom

0

1

2

3

4

E. I can identify a focus for research into my classroom

0

1

2

3

4

F. I can consider how to turn successes, problems and other issues into research questions

0

1

2

3

4

G. I can identify appropriate sources of evidence for research questions

0

1

2

3

4

H. I can decide how to gather information to answer my questions

0

1

2

3

4

I. I can collect evidence to answer research questions

0

1

2

3

4

J. I can analyse evidence collected

0

1

2

3

4

K. I can incorporate my students’ suggestions and/or opinions into my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

L. I can design an action plan based on exploration of my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

M. I can put an action plan into practice based on exploration of my teaching

0

1

2

3

4

N. I can evaluate the results of an action plan

0

1

2

3

4

O. I know how to communicate/present research findings orally and in writing

0

1

2

3

4

Task 9.10
Hopefully, you will be able to see some improvement inyour scores. But if you’ve been honest with yourself, there
will surely also be space for further development. Highlightthe competencies where you have scored yourself thelowest. Then, working with a colleague, or a mentor if
possible, discuss how you can work on these competencies
further. This could include:
■■
■■

91

reading sections of this book again;
going back to your own Exploratory Action Research,and carrying out one of the stages again;|

Where do I go from here?

■■

■■

■■

further reading (see, for example, the list of resources
here: https://trfestival.wordpress.com/resources/);starting a related, or completely new Exploratory Action
Research project;participating in more formal educational programs,
such as an online course, a teacher training qualification,or even a research degree.

Complete this table, based on the outcome of your reflections/discussion:
Area I would like to improve

How I plan to improve

When I plan to do thisHappy further exploring!

Image by: Rick Carey/Shutterstock.

Where do I go from here?

|9210. Extra material

1. Sample questionnaire
Questionnaire about listening activities in English
Designed by Carolina Cid and Gemma Maldonado
Mark with an X the answer that best represents your opinion.
1. How do you feel when listening to English?

Mark
‘X’

A. Motivated

4. How understandable are instructions inEnglish for you, either given by the teacher
or in CDs?

Mark
‘X’

A. Very understandable
B. Relaxed
B. More or less understandable
C. Confused
C. I understand very little
D. Frustrated
D. I do not understand anything
E. Other:

2. How do you feel when the teacher speaks
in English?

Mark
‘X’

What topics do you prefer listening to in the
English class?

A. Motivated

A. Sports

B. Relaxed

B. Music

C. Confused

C. Science

D. Frustrated

D. Culture

E. Other:E. Other:

3. How do you feel when your classmates
speak in English in class?
A. Motivated
B. Relaxed
C. Confused
D. Frustrated
E. Other:94|

Extra material

Mark
‘X’

6. What English listening activities do you
like?
A. Listen and complete (dialogues, songs, box
with information)
B. Listen and mark correct pictures or options
C. Listen and sequence actions
D. Listen and answer development questions
E. Other: (please specify activity)

Mark
‘X’

Mark
‘X’

2. Sample observation checklist
Peer Observation Guidelines
Designed by Jeannie Fernandez

Purpose: The purpose of this peer observation guideline is to obtain in a written way what is being done during the lesson.
This observation will be done by an English teacher colleague. Finally, the peer observation will be used to reflect on what
is being done about the students’ participation inside the classroom in an English lesson.
Research Questions: To reflect about the students’ participation, there are two questions to be answered during theprocess of the research with the help and observation from a peer teacher. The questions are the following:
1.

What do I expect from my students in my English class?

2.

Who are the students that participate in my English class?

While you observe the lesson, please answer thoughtfully the following questions related to the teacher and the students
from 11th Grade.
1. What do the students do during the introduction stage of the lesson?
(During the introduction stage the teacher greets the students and introduces the objectives and activities that thestudents will do during the lesson).

2. What do the students do during the development of the lesson?
(During the development stage, students do the main activities of the lesson, for example reading a text and answeringsome questions; or listening to an audio and completing a task related to it; working in pairs to discuss about a specifictopic, etc.).

3. What do the students do during the closing stage of the lesson?
(During the closing stage, students answer a question orally or written related to the topic of the class, or complete an
activity to sum up the content of the lesson).

Extra material|95

4. What does the teacher do to get the students to participate during the lesson?
To answer this question read the definition used to understand the concept of participation.
‘Participation is the fact of taking part, as in some action or attempt, for example, answering questions by raising theirhands, completing the tasks on their notebooks or handouts, going to the board to give their answers, and working inpairs/groups when asked’.

5. What does the teacher do to get the students’ attention during the class?

6. What are the teacher’s words, instructions or signs that students respond best to, to participate during thelesson?

7. In what way(s) does the teacher ask the students to participate during the lesson?

8. How many times does the teacher ask the students to participate in the lesson?

96|

Extra material

9. Who are the students that participate in the class? Please cross out those students’ desks here:

10. Write any other relevant comment about what you observed of the students’ participation.

Extra material|97Answer Key
Chapter 1
Task 1.3

Task 1.4 @1.

We KNOW the different strategies she used tomotivate her students.

Box A. Signs

2.

We KNOW the background of the students Camila
is concerned about.

3.

1.

Students are very involved in what is going on
D, E

We DON’T KNOW what all of her students think about
the strategies she used.

2.

Students are very active
D, E

4.

We DON’T KNOW what makes Camila conclude
students are not motivated.

3.

Students are using the vocabulary words of thelesson A, B, E

5.

We DON’T KNOW how students actually react
in class to certain activities.

4.

Students and teacher enjoy the classC

5.

Students were pronouncing words correctly
A, E

6.

Students’ enjoy classes based on games
C

Task 1.5
What did the teacher do?

Kind of information“I took notes of everything that happened while my students worked: their attitudes,
their behaviour, etc.”b“I later collected their different pieces of work and started to notice certain differencesin their work according to the music I played.”c, b“I also gave them a survey, a simple kind of questionnaire for them to give me their opinions.”“I decided to interview them, so after each activity we did with background music, I asked them
about how they felt, if they had trouble concentrating, if they felt the music helped them complete
the task and so on.”

Chapter 2
Task 2.1
In example 1, Luis started his search with a clear question
is mind: where to find the fastest and cheapest flight from
Bogotá to London. In order to answer this, he did a searchand then compared the results to make the right decision.
This situation describes steps which are common in the
research process; the need to answer a question or solvea problem, the collection of information, and analysis of
the information to provide the answer.

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If you compare this example with situation 3, you will seethat Claudia did not search for any information to makeher purchase and in fact her initial intention to find a laptop
was not addressed, since she finally bought a computer
just because it was on sale. This is an example of not using
research to find answers to a question but simply acting
impulsively.
In example 2, Francis at first tried to solve his problem
by applying an immediate action without really thinking(pressing several buttons) but later he did look for
information systematically (according to the questionin his mind) in order to solve the situation.

Answer Key
Chapter 2
Task 2.2
The three situations show different ways in which teachers
can approach a problematic or puzzling situation in theclassroom. The maths teacher (1) decided to stop doing
something because she was unhappy with the results. Even
though what she did may be valid, this is not an example
of research since no evidence was collected to identify thereasons for the problem. Similarly, although the scienceteacher (3) changed his teaching to try to improve his
students’ participation, he did not gather any informationor analyse the situation either before or after making thechange. On the contrary, the English teacher (2) did collectinformation by asking her students and a colleague, andshe compared this information when analyzing it. She thenplanned a strategy not only to improve her students’ lack ofparticipation during video-based lessons but also to gather
more information, this time about the change she wanted
to make. She went beyond signs and looked for data. Only
example (2), then, can be seen as an example of research.

Task 2.3
1. What were Lorena’s initial concerns?

She noticed her students were not working properly in listening activities
so she wanted to know why they were not completing their listening tasks.

2. What were Lorena’s initial questions?

1.

In which listening activities do my students listen better?

2.

How is listening presented during the lesson?

3.

What kind of information are my students able to identify from thelistening material?

4.

How does the length of the listening material affect students’performance?

Chapter 3
Task 3.1

Task 3.3

Letter B

1. A

In these situations, there seems to be a focus on solving
the situation by ‘acting’ on it. This is a common thing
teachers do and it is understandable since they need tosolve a number of problems in their classroom and in
relatively little time. You probably feel a need to act now!

2. B

Task 3.2(1) closed(2) questions(3) questionnaire(4) observe

3. B
4. C
5. A
6. B

Task 3.4
1. B
2. A
3. A

(5) data(6) reflected(7) understand

Extra material|99Answer Key
Chapter 4
Task 4.2
1. Andrea’s story about ending lessons
Motivation and category:A puzzle / e. Other (wrapping up)

2. Leyla’s story about writing
Motivation and category:
A challenging situation / c. particular areas of teaching

Task 4.5
Here are Andrea’s actual exploratory research questions:
1.

What is an ‘effective’ wrapping up?

2.

What are the characteristics of my wrapping up?

3.

How do my students react in that part of the class?

Task 4.6
Topic: I often have too little time at the end of the class to explain homework clearly.
Some possible questions for this issue are suggested in the table.
Exploring my perceptions

Exploring behaviour

What do I mean by?

When/How often does

happen?

What do I think / feel about?

What do I do / say whenoccurs?

Why do I think

happens?

What do my students do / say whenoccurs?

What do I want to see happening instead of?

E.g. How do I actually give instructions?

E.g. What do I mean by ‘explain clearly’?

Exploring others’ perceptions
What do my students think / feel about?

What do my colleagues think of?

E.g. What do my students think about my instructions?

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Answer Key
Chapter 4
Task 4.8
Exploratory question

SMART?

Criterion

1.

What affects my students’ learning English?

No

Not realistic

2.

When do my students use English to communicate witheach other?

Yes

3.

Why don’t my students learn?

No

Not accurate

4.

How many times do my students use their dictionaries
when doing their homework?

No

Not measurable

5.

How can films promote my students’ motivation?

No

Not study-oriented

6.

How often in my lesson do my students work in pairs?

Yes

Task 4.10
Exploratory question

Edited question(only those which need improvement)

1.

What affects my students’ learning English?

e.g. What do my students say motivates them to learn
English? What do they say they find demotivating?

2.

When do my students use English to communicate witheach other?

3.

Why don’t my students learn?

e.g. What do my students find difficult about English?
What typical mistakes do they make? What do they
say are some reasons for these difficulties andmistakes?

4.

How many times do my students use their dictionaries
when doing their homework?

e.g. How many times do my students use a dictionary
when doing a writing task in class? What do they say
about how often they use a dictionary when doing
their homework?

5.

How can films promote my students’ motivation?

Do my students use any resources for learning
English outside class? What do they say could help
them learn more English from these sources?

6.

How often in my lesson do my students work in pairs?

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Chapter 5
Task 5.1

Task 5.3

Box A. Andrea’s exploratory and action research questions:2.		 I feel nervous whenever I have English class. ->1.		What is a wrapping up?
			(a), (c)		 [sentence completion] I feel_____________________ whenever I have
English class ->2. 		 What are the characteristics of my wrapping up?
			(b)

		 [open Wh- question] How do you feel when you have
English class?
7.		 I feel motivated because of my marks in English. ->3. 		 How do my students react in that part of the class?
			(b), (d)		 [sentence completion] I feel____________________ because of my marks
in English ->4. 		 What are the effects of the change(s) that I
			attempt?
			(b), (d)		 [open Wh-] How do your marks in English make you
feel?

Task 5.2
Information about wrapping up a lesson.
The closure is the time when you wrap up a lesson planand help students organize the information in ameaningful context in their minds.
A brief summary or overview is often appropriate.
Another helpful activity is to engage students in a quick
discussion about what exactly they learned and what itmeans to them now.
Reinforce the most important points so that the learning
is solidified for future lessons.
The closure step is a chance to do an assessment.
You want to determine whether the students needadditional practice, or you need to go over the lesson
again. It allows you to know that the time is right tomove on to the next lesson.

10. I feel embarrassed to ask questions in English. ->		 [sentence completion] I feel____________________ to ask questions
in English ->		 [open Wh-] How does asking questions in English
make you feel?

Task 5.4
Focus

Kind of data

A. Exploring yourown perceptions

1. Your own written reflections
and/or notes
2. Other’s people’s written ideason the topic
3. Notes from informal
conversations with colleagues

B. Exploringothers’ perceptions

You can use a closure activity to see what conclusions
the students drew from the lesson.
They could describe how they can use what they learnedin the lesson. You can ask they to demonstrate how theywould use the information in solving a problem.
The closure can preview what they students will learn
in the next lesson and provide a smooth transition to
the next lesson.
Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/lesson-plan-step-5closure-2081851

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4. Reflective writing by students
5. Notes or recordings of focus
group discussions
6. Notes or recordingsof interviews/chats withindividuals
7. Responses to a questionnaire

C. Exploring
behaviour(including
performance)

8. Lessons plans and materials
9. Lesson recordings
10. A critical friend’s notes about
your lesson
11. Pictures of your class
12. Students’ performance ontasks (written or recorded)Answer Key
Chapter 5
Task 5.5
Teacher

Research question

Kind(s) of data

1.

■■

Recording of a lesson■■

A critical friend’s notes about lesson■■

Recording of a lesson■■

A critical friend’s notes about lesson■■

Responses to questionnaire

2.

Mauro

3.

How do my students behave when they are
sitting individually?
How does the seating arrangement affectindividual work?
How do students feel about individual work?

Task 5.6
Teacher

Research question

Kind(s) of data

a.1. Why is that my students do not speak in class?

■■■■a.2. Do my students like to speak in English?

Teresaa.3. What opportunities do they have to speak inclass?

A critical friend’s notes about lesson
Notes or recordings of interviews/chats withstudents■■

Responses to questionnaire■■

A critical friend’s notes about lesson

Task 5.7
One way of doing this would be to start with the reflective
writing, followed by the questionnaire, and then the focus
group discussion.
The reflective writing will provide you with some of theissues that the students who don’t like homework havewith it (e.g. ‘It’s boring’ ‘I don’t have time.’ ‘I find it too
difficult to do on my own’, etc.). This will help you to put
together a questionnaire that you can then use to workout how common these issues are (See the example below).

Note that the statements in the left hand column in thequestionnaire can come directly from what students havewritten in their reflective writing – you don’t need to spend
a lot of time thinking up ‘good’ statements. Once you haveidentified the most common issues from students’questionnaire responses, you can use the focus group
discussion to find out why these issues are present, andwhether the students have any suggestions that will help
you to get them to do their homework better in the future.

Example questionnaire items:
1 = strongly agree; 2 = agree;
3 = neither agree nor disagree; 4 = disagree;
5 = strongly disagree
1.

I find homework boring.

2.

I don’t have time to do homework.

3.

I find it too difficult to do homework on my own.

1

2

3

4

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Answer Key
Chapter 6
Task 6.1
A. 53 % of students definitely enjoy speaking English in class.
B. 79 % of students think it’s important to speak English.
C. 84 % would like to speak English in future.

Task 6.3
Response

Code/Label

Categories

A. “When we’re stuck, I think use of
Spanish can support”[+Spanish as support][+Spanish as support]

B. “When our mother tongue is used, it’sbetter in terms of understanding”[+Spanish as understanding][+Spanish as support]

C. “Using mother tongue reduces myinterest in the lesson”[–reduces interest][–reduces interest]

D. “If we don’t understand, speaking inSpanish is better”[+Spanish as understanding][+Spanish as support]

E. “When Spanish is used, the pace of thelesson may slow down”[–slow lesson][–slow lesson]

F. “I feel relieved when I feel that I canunderstand”[+Spanish as understanding][+Spanish as support]

G. “After some time, when the language weknow is used, we get bored easily”[–boring][–reduces interest]

H. “I think we can learn faster with thetarget language”[–better learning][–better learning]

Summary / Interpretation of findings:
For the research question ‘Should I [the teacher] use the students’ mother tongue – Spanish – in the classroom?, theanswer seems to be ‘Yes’ since it provides support for understanding. However, there is a caveat since students also
perceive that the lesson becomes less challenging when Spanish is spoken. When it comes to interpreting this data,
the teacher can also consider how Spanish is used in order to avoid making the class less interesting and also thinking
about better ways to aid understanding.

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Answer Key
Chapter 6
Task 6.4
Comment

Keywords

Categories

1.

Carla: “When we work in pairs, Mariateaches me the meaning of certain words.
She is like a dictionary for me.”+ pairwork - learning from a
specific other student+ pairwork

Vicente: “Agustin is my best friend, so wealways try to be in the same group, andmake jokes. It’s lots of fun. But for pairwork,
I like studying with the girls. They’re more
serious.”+ groupwork - jokes / fun / workwith friends+ groupwork

Agustin: “Groups are noisy and I don't liketo work with Vicente. He speaks English too
fast. I prefer to work alone.”– groupwork - noise– groupwork– groupwork - problem witha specific student+ student choice2.

3.

+ pairwork - serious study+ student choice+ pairwork+ student choice+ individual work

+ individual work
4.

Sofia: “Everybody copies my answers ingroupwork, and they ask me so manyquestions. I like to do the exercises on myown, and then compare with anotherstudent - I find that very useful.”– groupwork - others copying– groupwork– groupwork - too manyquestions from others+ individual work
+ pairwork+ individual work – exercises+ individual work followedby pair work

5.

Maria: “I like pairwork and groupwork,
especially if I can choose who I work with.”+ pairwork - especially if own
choice of partner+ groupwork - especially if own
choice of partner

Perhaps the most obvious overall category to spot among
these keywords is ‘preferences for different interaction
patterns’ (including pairwork, groupwork and individualwork), but this is hardly surprisingly, as this is what theteacher asked the students to write about! You may havespotted another important umbrella category emerging
from this very small set of data: all five students talk aboutother students in some way (who they like, and don’t liketo work with, whether they work effectively with certain
people, etc.). This is an interesting emerging theme, onethat isn’t so obvious when you first look at the data.

+ pairwork+ groupwork+ student choice

Here’s one possible two-sentence summary. Notice how
the first sentence introduces the theme, and the second
describes the finding:An important part of pairwork and groupwork for theselearners is who they work with. Their evaluations ofwhich interaction pattern they preferred were often
linked to how much they did or didn’t enjoy working withothers, either in pairwork or groupwork, with severalof them mentioning preferring pairwork slightly more.
If you are writing this up as a finding from your research,
you could then add a few quotes to illustrate the point you
are making.

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Answer Key
Chapter 6
Task 6.6

Task 6.5
In class, what is the percentage
you understand from it?
98
7
6

Mostly, statements where most students agree or disagree
are those which relate to feelings of fear, shame andfrustration. These answers indicate that students feel afraid
to use the language, mispronounce and therefore lackconfidence. However, students also say that they want tolearn and do better.
Regarding the questions ‘What are students’ feelings about
English?’ and ‘Are they comfortable and confident withlearning the language?’, Javier concluded that;

5
4
3
2

“The results confirmed my suspicions - many of thestudents felt that they couldn’t learn English, or pronounceit, but I also realized that they wanted to do their best.”

10100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

In the bar chart above, there are two noticeable peaks; onethat shows 8 students who understand 90% of the class andthen 7 students who understand 40%. If you look at thepeaks again, you will be able to see that the highest peaks
show students understand over 40% of the class or more.
What this graph shows is that Daniela has a mixed-levelclass at least in terms of language comprehension. Even
though most of her students understand most of thelanguage used in class, there is still a big number ofstudents who struggle and therefore she needs to workon making her language more accessible and supporting
understanding.

Chapter 7
Task 7.3
Teresa’s students indicated they enjoyed ‘dialogues’ and ‘role-plays’, and they also mentioned ‘songs’ as something theywould like to do in class.

Task 7.4
Actions
A. built a better atmosphere to help relax her learners,
including allowing them to change seats, having
interviews with students and parents, getting help fromthe school psychologist and having class discussions.

B. implemented some different classroom activities toencourage speaking, including pair and group work,
using nomination sticks,1 more formative assessment,
and asking questions to check understanding.

Findings
■■

■■

■■

■■

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Students feel nervous, insecure, and feel embarrassed
when speaking because they are afraid of making
mistakes in front of their classmates.
They also get frustrated easily when their answers
are wrong.
They feel that performing oral activities in classes will
help them to develop accurate speaking skills. They
also would like more practical, funnier and group
activities in classes.
One student indicated he did not like oral assessments.

Answer Key
Chapter 8
Task 8.1“By the end of two weeks I observed several changes.
The first one was that they actually did the activities,
handouts were completed with the correct answers andI could observe many hands up to participate in thelesson. I conducted another survey in which students
answered that working with the listening materials as if
they were songs allowed them to work better. They also
said that they were able to identify information from thetext and that the activities they liked the most were
underlining the correct word, filling in the gaps andcrossing out the odd one out. They still found it difficult
to order the information because sometimes the material
was too fast. The focus group participants mentioned thatthey now felt motivated and more successful because
they were able to do the tasks, and do them well. Thiswas confirmed by another peer observation, where thestudent-teacher told me that students were able to focus
on the activities and they did not get distracted byanything else.”
1.

Lorena’s account indicates that it took her about two
weeks to begin to notice the effect of the changes
she had made.

2.

There were four types of evidence: she first observed
a change in the behaviour of her learners during
lessons (making a mental or written note of this), andfollowed this up by collecting both quantitative data
(through a second survey) and qualitative data
(through her second focus group interview). Hercomment: ‘From the peer observation’ indicates that
she also asked the student-teacher to observe her
lesson again and provide more feedback. This could
have been quantitative (e.g. number of times students
volunteered answers) or qualitative (e.g. general notes
on aspects of students’ participation).

3.

Lorena collected data in similar ways before (during
the exploration phase), and after her new actions.
This enabled her to compare the data and analyse
what change had happened. The four types ofevidence all pointed towards the students being moreengaged and having more success in listening lessons.
According to the four different sources of information,
Lorena was able to see clearly that her attemptedchange had been successful.

Task 8.4
Esteban did a diagnostic test during his exploration phase,and then a similar test after beginning to use the newteaching method. At both stages he also reported his
observations of learner behaviour. But, because he chose tomodify his research questions, for the action phase he alsochose to draw on information from a more formal progresstest. And, as he continued to make further modifications to
his teaching method, he continued to collect more informal
evidence for the impact of the change, including aboutlevels of learner participation and interaction in the lesson.

Task 8.5
If you look at Javier’s questionnaire data, you will notice thatafter the change, there is a trend towards agreement withstatements beginning with “I think I can learn English ...”,“I feel motivated ...”, etc.. Also, there is a trend away fromagreement with statements beginning with “I think it willtake me a long time ...”, ‘I think it’s impossible ...’, ‘I feelashamed ...’, etc. This data can be interpreted as showing
students became more confident and the classroom
atmosphere improved. Javier could then conclude that his
main aim had been achieved.

Task 8.8
Here is one possible summary paragraph. Yours may be alittle different. This doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s wrong!
Above all, the process of exploratory action research helps
us to focus on the learners, their needs and theirperceptions (Camila, Teresa, Lorena). By doing this, wedevelop our rapport with learners, and with colleagues(Javier). Exploratory action research shows us that todevelop as teachers we don’t necessarily have to visit
workshops or undergo training, we can learn in our schools
and in our own classrooms through the insights and support
that both learners and colleagues can provide us with(Andrea, Daniela, Javier). This includes developing our own
creativity (Mauro), and learning more about who we are as
people (Leyla) and community members (Javier).

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Answer Key
Chapter 9
Task 9.2

Task 9.3

There are many possible advantages to sharing yourresearch. Let’s start with, perhaps, the most beneficial
to you personally, and maybe the least obvious:

A. Andrea;

1.

Presenting your research to others can be a way
to enter new professional groups, communities
and networks, and this can be beneficial in many
unpredictable ways. We will return to this pointin 9.3.

2.

The act of sharing your research findings canbe motivating, due to the impact you can see it
having on colleagues and the professional pride
you can gain.

3.

As you prepare for a presentation, this will help you
to reflect and evaluate what you have done carefully.
This can lead to new insights before you shareanything!

4.

You get feedback on your research and what you
found. This can include both praise and questions
or constructive criticism that can help you to
re-evaluate your research and understand more
about it. This may help you to understand yourexperience better, and of course it can help you
to become a better teacher-researcher, too.

5.

Finally, other teachers can learn directly from yourexperience, challenges, successes and findings.

B. Daniela;
C. Teresa;
D. Lorena.

Task 9.8
1.		 Action research diagrams tend to show a spiralor a round cycle like the diagram shown here:

PLAN

REFLECTACTOBSERVE

2.		 Most diagrams will show four key stages; Plan,
Act, Observe, Reflect.
3.		 The spiral shows how the process may continue
after the final stage to a previous stage or backto the beginning.

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This practical, user-friendly guide takes teachers through the steps of Exploratory Action Research, an approachto teacher-research for professional development created originally in the context of the British Council Champion
Teachers programme for secondary school teachers in Chile and, since then, adopted also in teacher-research
schemes in India, Nepal and Peru.
Based on examples from actual experience, including cases from the companion publication Champion Teachers:
Stories of Exploratory Action Research (British Council, 2016), the book is unique in the literature on teacherresearch in ELT in being particularly targeted at school teachers working in relatively difficult circumstances.

Richard Smith (Reader in ELT & Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK) has expertise in the fields oflanguage teaching history; learner and teacher autonomy; teacher-research; ELT research capacity-building; andteaching in difficult circumstances. He has published widely and given invited talks, seminars and workshops inmany countries, working as an educator and mentor with teachers and researchers from around the world, both
face to face and as leader of networks like the Teaching English in Large Classes network (TELCnet), IATEFL
Research SIG. and the International Festival of Teacher-research. He is currently the editor of the ‘Key Concepts’
section of ELT Journal, chair of the Editorial Board of English Language Teacher Education and Development Journal,
and an academic adviser to teacher-research schemes in both Latin America and South Asia.

Paula Rebolledo has taught at primary, secondary, undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in INSETT
programmes. She is the former coordinator for teacher education of the English Open Doors Programme (EODP)
at the Ministry of Education in Chile and is now a freelance teacher educator and researcher. Her areas of interest
include teaching young learners, teacher education, professional development and teacher-research. She has
given talks and workshops in Latin America, Europe and Asia. She has worked as a mentor in a number of teacherresearch programmes such as the Champion Teachers programme in Chile and Peru and the APTIS Action ResearchAward Scheme, both funded by the British Council. Recently, she led the Laureate Action Research Scheme fundedby Laureate Languages. She is the co-founder of RICELT, the first network of Chilean researchers in ELT.

www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications
ISBN 978-0-86355-885-6
All images published with the kind permission of the teachers involved.
© British Council 2018
The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.