"This informative book helped me to understand research in general and to bring focus and clarity to my current research project. The text answers questions and provides guidance and support in a manner that is user-friendly and easy to comprehend.... After reading this book, I feel empowered as a teacher-researcher and would unhesitatingly recommend it to other teacher-researchers, graduate students and educators."Francesca Crowther - teacher and doctoral student, Nova Scotia, Canada.

This book provides a comprehensive and detailed approach to teacher research as systematic, methodical and informed practice. It identifies five requirements for all kinds of research, and provides clear and accessible guidelines for teachers to use in conducting their own classroom-based studies.

Features:

• A clear definition of teacher research which insists on more than 'stories' and anecdotal 'retrospectives'
• Innovative organisational structure based on the collection and analysis of spoken, written and observed data, with strong emphasis on the design of research projects
• Easy-to-use and widely applicable tools and techniques for collecting and analysing data in qualitative research

Informed by the authors' own wide-ranging experiences, A Handbook of Teacher Research provides everything the teacher researcher needs in order to conduct good quality practitioner research. It is ideal for upper level undergraduate Education programmes and for postgraduate research, as well as for teacher researchers who conceive and drive their own independent studies.

Colin Lankshear is Professor of Literacy and New Technologies at James Cook University, Australia, Visiting Scholar at McGill University, Canada, and an Adjunct Teacher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Part 1: A general background to teacher research as practice

1.An introduction to teacher research
2.Teacher research as systematic inquiry
3.Formulating our research purposes: Problems, questions, aims and objectives
4.General approaches to teacher research
5.Informing the study: some key aspects of reviewing literature
6.Ethics and teacher research

Part 2: Introduction to teacher research as document-based and quantitative investigation

7.An introduction to teacher research as document-based investigation
8.An introduction to teacher research as quantitative investigation

Part 3: Teacher research as qualitative investigation

9.A background to data collection in qualitative teacher research
10.Collecting spoken data in qualitative teacher research
11.Collecting observed data in qualitative teacher research
12.Collecting written data in qualitative teacher research
13.Analyzing spoken data in qualitative teacher research
14.Analyzing observed data in qualitative teacher research
15.Analyzing written data in qualitative teacher research

Part 4: Research quality and reporting
16.Quality and reporting in teacher research

Bibliography