Voices of Practitioners
Teacher Research in Early Childhood Education
Barbara Henderson, Daniel Meier, and Gail Perry
Teacher research in early childhood education involves a systematic and sustained study of some aspect of teaching and learning with young children and their families. These teacher research studies are grounded in the daily lives of children and based on the insights of the teachers or caregivers who work with them.
Voices of Practitioners: Teacher Research in Early Childhood Education includes articles and useful resources readers can download and print to read, share with colleagues and families, and use for staff development and college courses. New articles will be added periodically.
What is teacher research?
A preschool or primary grade teacher, an infant/toddler caregiver, a family child care provider, or a home visitor begins an inquiry by asking a genuine question about the work in which she or he is engaged with children and families. The teacher examines a problem from many perspectives, collects and interprets data, and reflects on the findings. Thus teacher research in early childhood education provides unique insider perspectives on real issues in early care and education settings.
Children are at the forefront of teacher research. Children's voices are heard through their own words and gestures, photos, and drawings, or any other ways by which they are best portrayed. Unlike traditional university-based educational research, children and families are not just the subjects of this research; they are participants and often coresearchers. In this way teacher research is participatory, inclusive of differences, and democratic in nature.
Designing teacher research
Teacher research projects are designed to help teachers become more responsive to children. Teachers gain new ways of seeing children and develop deeper understandings of children's feelings and growth.
Research questions can begin simply enough: "Should we allow pretend gunplay in any circumstances?" "How can I use storytelling to build literacy among bilingual preschoolers?" "What is it about me or my caregiving that lets me build securely attached relationships with toddlers?" As teachers begin to observe closely, they see children's development played out in highly contextual situations, always influenced by the potentially overlapping cultures of their home and school lives.
Teacher research can appear in a variety of formats. Following are five brief examples. A longer sample of a teacher research project summary can be found by clicking the back button on your browser and clicking on the Sample Article link. These examples illustrate the range of formats, teacher questions, and methodologies that might be used.
Example 1.
Friendships: A case study of two children
A teacher of toddlers presents a photo chronology of two children's social relationships as they use the classroom environment to promote their friendship. Six photos taken over two months show critical incidents in the children's budding friendship.
The teacher adds anecdotes to accompany the photos. She includes as well her analysis of how this research has increased her understanding of the relationship between the toddlers' friendship and nonverbal communication in the environment.
Example 2.
Improving environments-With voices and images of families
A Spanish/English bilingual teacher at a state-subsidized center serving a Latino population finds ways to make her center more homelike and comfortable for the children and their families. She writes vignettes of her mother's history as a teacher in rural Mexico and of her own personal growth as a preschool teacher.
These family memoirs help her understand and explore the kinds of changes she wants to make in the classroom environment and why. She documents the impact of the changes through conversations with families about how they feel about the redesign and in photos of the children and their families as they interact in the new environment.
Example 3.
Understanding teaching through memories
A Filapina American teacher reflects on her English-language learning as a first-grader and what it was like to attend parent conferences with her Tagalog-speaking parents. In both English and Tagalog, she expresses the child's mixture of shame and pride as her mother and teacher talked together.
She uses her writing to consider how she supports English learners and their families in her own classroom.
Example 4.
Seeing links through a home-based program
A home-based visitor from Early Head Start records and transcribes dialogues between a few parents and children with whom she works to evaluate an emergent literacy curriculum she has created. These transcripts allow her to document the effects of her intervention.
She sees results in parenting skills built through positive, low-stress opportunities for parent and child to interact over books and writing. Using these experiences, she argues that home-based programs offer families a powerful way for bridging home and school, as literacy practices become part of normal home life and parents see themselves as their child's first teacher.
Example 5.
Children's behavior prompts a valuable metaphor
A veteran preschool teacher working in an inclusive classroom for transitional kindergartners finds a group of boys having persistent trouble concentrating during circle time. She begins taking field notes on the children's behavior and writes vignettes, which she shares with her colleagues. From these comes a metaphor of the Rolodex card file (as in "OK, how do I respond to this infraction? Let's see…" [flip, flip, flip]).
Using this metaphor allows her to shift her relationship with one capable child as she sees her own unintended rigidity. Instead of acting on how she thinks he should behave ("He can do this!"), she attends to his actual needs, which shifts his behavior and lets him build needed self-regulation.
What are the benefits of teacher research?
Through teacher research teachers have an opportunity to shape their professional development and to validate, affirm, and improve their practice. In every teacher research project, the voice or perspective of the teacher is as important as that of the children. Giving voice to an idea is taking ownership. Teacher research provides teachers a place to reflect and explain how their projects change them, their teaching, and their child care settings.
Teacher research benefits the field of early childhood education and teachers and other professionals by providing a diversity of perspectives. When teachers undertake research, they deepen and improve their teaching relationships both with children and with one another as professionals. The process offers an innovative approach in strengthening the professional development of early childhood professionals.
The purpose of the Teacher Research online feature
One goal of this new feature is to give teachers more opportunities to exchange teacher research and to give more visibility to their studies. Such studies provide a window onto classroom environments, curriculum, and ways of interacting through other teachers' systematic studies and reflections. Early childhood professionals learn how others negotiate the dance between home and school, child and curriculum, and of children with each other. As teachers improve practice through such dialogue, so teacher research improves young children's learning and development.
By providing links to teacher research groups and teacher research Web sites, this Beyond the Journal feature will serve as a clearinghouse for teacher researchers in early childhood education. In particular, the hope is to provide a means, such as an online discussion forum, for those doing similar teacher research projects in early childhood education to contact each other directly.
Submitting manuscripts on projects
The submission process, briefly outlined here, includes the following components.
Explain your teacher research focus. That is, what are you trying to understand about your work with children?
Provide background information about the children and your child care setting.
Describe your process for collecting and understanding the data.
Reflect on what you found and what you learned.
Make recommendations for other teacher researchers. Discuss what it was like to do your project and how others in the field can apply your findings.
Once research is completed and a manuscript prepared, potential articles for the Teacher Research feature go through a review process by Young Children's Teacher Research Committee, a diverse group of teacher researchers and early childhood educators. Before submitting a teacher research manuscript, review the full submission details in the Teacher Research Guidelines posted on this Web site. Click the back button on your browser, or click this Guidelines link.
Barbara Henderson, PhD, is an associate professor of education at San Francisco State University. She co-coordinates the MA in Education, Early Childhood Education Concentration program, and teaches graduate and credential classes. Barbara's interests are teacher research and children's development in cultural contexts.
Daniel Meier, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Elementary Education at San Francisco State University. He teaches courses on children's language and literacy development, families, and teacher research, and is a part-time literacy teacher for the Berkeley Unified School District.
Gail Perry, PhD, has a 40-year career teaching early childhood education graduates and undergraduates, consulting, and researching a range of topics, including classroom discourse and the Reggio Emilia approach. She is New Books editor for Young Children and program development associate for the Early Childhood Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C.
Voices of Practitioners: Teacher Research in Early Childhood Education is coedited by Barbara Henderson and Daniel Meier. Gail Perry is the Young Children's Teacher Research coordinator.
