Putting Research in the Collaborative Hands of Teachers and Researchers: An Alternative to Traditional Staff Development

ABSTRACT The research to practice gap continues to be a prominent concern among professionals in the field of education. Traditional staff development in which teachers attend presentations and workshops for a few days each year has been one method for attempting to bring empirically validated instructional practices into the classroom. Unfortunately, traditional staff development has had little effect on classroom practice. This paper will present an alternative strategy for bridging the research to practice gap-bringing university researchers and classroom teachers together to collaboratively plan and execute classroom research. Because a great many universities are located in or near rural areas, rural school districts can provide rich opportunities for collaborative partnerships. This paper will provide guidelines for uniting researchers and practitioners in the endeavor of collaboratively designing and implementing classroom research. Researchers in the field of education seek to identify solutions to current problems that will ultimately benefit teachers, students, and society (Carnine, 1997). Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, applied research has had little impact on instructional practice in America's classrooms (Cuban, 1993; Gersten, Morvant, & Brengelman, 1995; Woodward, 1993). One reason that educational research rarely finds its way into classroom practice is that researchers often target problems and plan interventions that may be of little relevance, accessibility, and usability to teachers (Abbot, Walton, Tapia, & Greenwood, 1999; Gersten, Vaughn, Deshler, & Schiller, 1997). Research knowledge, which typically aims to be generally applicable to a wide range of teaching situations, has been described as abstract and out-of-context with the real world (Malouf & Schiller, 1995). Teachers, who traditionally are not consumers of research (Kaestle, 1993; Viadero, 1994), may view research as erroneous, inconsistent, and inapplicable to their own individual teaching situations (Malouf & Schiller, 1995). When empirically sound research findings are not used in the classroom, researchers tend to blame teachers' resistance to change, skepticism, and lack of skill in application of research findings (Cuban, 1988; Richardson, 1990). On the other hand, teachers may believe that researchers are responsible for the research to practice gap because tiiey do not involve teachers in planning and implementing research (Carnine, 1997). Regardless of who is responsible for the research to practice gap, bringing empirically sound instructional practices into classrooms remains a worthwhile goal. School administrators attempt to achieve this goal through staff development. This paper will present some concerns regarding traditional staff development, the benefits of collaborative partnerships between researchers and practitioners, and an alternative to traditional staff development that involves researchers and practitioners collaboratively planning and implementing classroom research. Traditional Staff Development Student populations and the arrangement of instructional environments are continuously changing. Consequently, teachers are presented with die challenge of providing an effective education for a wide range of student needs and ability levels. After PL 101-476 required states to develop personnel preparation programs that would facilitate teacher implementation of current best practices, schools were held responsible for providing effective staff development. Staff development is an activity directed by school administrators that aims to increase teacher effectiveness and thereby to increase student achievement (Seyfarth, 1996). Traditional staff development typically takes the form of brief lectures or workshops, with little or no support or follow-up, that may or may not address die individual needs of the teachers. Further, information is often presented in packaged programs that may not accurately reflect the original research (Billups, 1997). …