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.
With this article Young Children introduces an online feature, Teacher Research in Early Childhood Education. It will appear periodically in Beyond the Journal, Young Children on the Web, which 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.
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. The following five brief examples and one longer summary of a teacher research project by Isauro Michael Escamilla (after this introduction) 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 online feature Teacher Research
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 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, all those interested should first review the full submission details in the Teacher Research Guidelines posted on Beyond the Journal at www.naeyc.org/resources/journal/beyond_tran.asp. Manuscripts should be sent to NAEYC, Attn: Editorial/Teacher Research.
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.
The online Beyond the Journal Teacher Research feature is coedited by Barbara Henderson and Daniel Meier. Gail Perry is the Young Children Teacher Research coordinator.
A Dialogue with the Shadows
Isauro Michael Escamilla
My teacher research was conducted with kindergarten-age children at an after-school and holiday care child development center and was sponsored by a California school district. The center primarily serves Chinese families and other recent immigrants.
Although I have also taught school-age children, I currently work with preschoolers. I use ideas from project approach theory and Reggio Emilia as the inspirational forces for my teaching. The ideas from these approaches not only strengthen my daily teaching, but also help me understand how and why children learn and I myself learn as a teacher.
We know that learning is based on a system of relationships and connections. Looking at my teaching and at children's learning helps me see those hidden connections and understand what goes on under the surface of our everyday interactions and projects.
Working on projects and documenting our learning is a form of research into understanding what the children and I are learning. In this article I discuss one project on shadows that kindergarten-age children carried out with me and my assistant teacher.
Teacher research focus
I used this project, in one way, as an assessment of my own teaching skills. I asked myself, How do I listen to children, and what do I learn about what is in their minds, how they think, and what skills they have? It was important to find the children's voices, because we were trying to create an atmosphere in which children's ideas are supported and heard without any judgment on my part.
Doing project work and understanding it really is about learning how ideas grow and develop and what they mean for children's learning and our own development as teachers. For instance, there are many ways for children (and for us) to express ideas. Many times children are not able to express their ideas with fluency, but this does not mean that they do not understand what is going on around them. Some children are very verbal and contribute to a discussion; some can't speak yet-maybe because they are shy or don't know the language-but they do understand and do have ideas.
In project work we observe and we listen. If not, we have no ideas. Beginning a project and researching our teaching might start in a subtle, quiet way for children and us. For example, if children are quietly playing with blocks and trying to make a car go from one place to another, we have only to look-there is an idea right there.
We ask children and look for ourselves to see if they have any problems. Maybe a bridge is too short or not strong enough. When that revelation happens, it is the moment we are looking for. And when there is a problem, there is an even bigger idea. If the bridge falls down or one car comes one way and the other comes the opposite way, we ask, "What would happen if...?" The answer to that question becomes a hypothesis to research and understand. So my own understanding and teacher research are really embedded in my children's research and learning. Our data collection included transcriptions of adult-child conversations, group discussions, observations, and documentation panels with children's drawings, photos, and quotes.
The shadows project emerges
When the children in our kindergarten class found a snail in the garden, we thought this small creature could be the springboard for our new class project (we adults had been paying close attention to children's conversations, and they seemed genuinely interested in this slow mover). We carried the snail inside the classroom and put it on a white sheet of paper on a table next to the windows. The children looked at the snail very carefully with magnifying glasses and made a few remarks about its slow, dragging motion. Seizing the opportunity, we teachers supplied the children with paper and pencils so they could draw a likeness of our visitor. Some of the children's representations follow.
As the children set about drawing the snail, sunlight came through the window and created the snail's shadow on the white paper. This led the children to try drawing the snail and its shadow. These are some of those drawings.
Later the same day, Annie presented a carefully drawn self-portrait of her new haircut. When she presented it to the class, the children couldn't decide if the dark-colored image they saw on the reverse side of the paper was a shadow of her head. What Annie had created was a back view of her head to fully show her new haircut.
This moment of debate provided a good opportunity to record the children's ideas to present them back to the children on another occasion. From then on, we tried to follow up on the children's interests in shadows. The project on snails that we thought might begin and the project on self-portraits begun several weeks before were shifting and merging.
This commingling marked the beginning of our project on shadows. In doing project-based work, I find this is often how projects develop. Projects are not linear processes. Sometimes we don't even know a project has started, but in this instance I could see that the shadows project had begun.
Discussing our shadows project
In having a discussion with a group of 18 children, 10 felt confident enough to express their ideas to the group. In conversations like this, teachers are not making judgments; our role is to facilitate the dialogue with open-ended questions. All responses are accepted and written down on the board.
At the initial level of project work, it is not important whether children's answers are right or wrong. What is important is that they are expressing their thoughts and formulating theories. Children support their theories with explanations based on their own experiences.
Through children's explanations, as teachers we are able to see how the children perceive the world around them. When children try to make sense of their world, they are making connections. This is why it is important to ask meaningful open-ended questions and to take seriously the children's answers.
I began the conversation by asking, "Why do we have shadows?"
Francisco: I think because the sun is shining.
Javier: Because the sun makes shadows.
Ernesto: I know. Because the sun is bright. And the sun comes out and the shadows come out. And then, when the moon comes out, the shadows go away.
Francisco: When the sun follows you and the...
Javier (interrupting Francisco): The sun doesn't follow you. The shadows follow you. When it is very hot, the shadows follow you every place you go.
Bryan (apparently still thinking about Ernesto's statement about the moon): At nighttime we don't see the shadows.
Michelle: But if you come home and then you turn the lights on, then you have your shadow.
Maria: When it is nighttime, you can see a little bit of shadows.
Michelle: When you turn off the lights, then you don't see the shadows.
The conversation extended through three more questions, "When you don't see your shadow, where do the shadows go?" "Why do you like your shadow?" and "How many shadows do we have?" Maybe this last one was not a good question because nobody answered. But then after a few moments, Tony, who had been silent until then, spoke: "We have only one shadow because there is only one sun."
Teachers reflect
As teachers we also need support-to develop a stronger sense of professionalism in the classroom. Besides the technical support (camera, tape recorder, film, and film development), we also need the collaborative support of not only our co-workers but also the administrators and children's families. I was able to do this project at my center because I knew that I could count on everyone's open-mindedness and flexibility. For example, there were times when I didn't take a break because something important was happening with the children, and I just couldn't leave. I coordinated with my co-workers to take my break at another time. I asked this of my staff as well so they could keep working on a particular activity. Our site manager made staffing arrangements for them to leave early another day.
At the end of each project, families made an effort to participate in a celebration of the project. They were invited to a slide presentation and review of the documentation of the children's work. Parents brought healthy snacks for the kids, and this turned into a family evening.
Role of the teacher
We are working to find the role of the teacher. Some teachers are not comfortable writing or taking pictures, but we need to be empowered and to empower each other. Our site supervisor Lynne pushed a little as well. She was someone with a vision for what children can do, and we all have had open dialogues with her.
In all, this project worked because a whole system of relationships grew into place and provided support. My assistant teacher and I became a team, and we had great respect for one another. We blended the boundaries of the traditional hierarchy of assistant teacher and teacher, and that is how these projects took place. We listened to the tapes together and talked about what we heard.
We shared a close relationship. And for this to happen, we needed to talk about the children. The more we talked, the more we documented, and the more we came to realize that what we were doing was just a start. I thought, for example, that after we had been doing documentation for about a year, we had gotten it. But gotten what? There is just the experience. The more you experience, the richer you become as a teacher, a person, a professional. What we did was small in comparison to what is being done in the Reggio Emilia schools-which are our inspiration to actively listen to the children and to make their learning experiences visible through the art of documentation.
Conclusion
This is how our projects go; layered into them are the words, drawings, gestures, and other ways of expression that the children have within them and that we try hard to document and reflect back to them. Children have a tendency to use the narrative to experience and to dream-everything becomes a story. As I record and document the children's drawings, conversations, and ideas, I then engage in my own research process of understanding the power of the children's learning and of my teaching.
For further reading
Ballenger, C. 1999. Teaching other people's children: Literacy and learning in a bilingual classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Ballenger, C. 2003. Regarding children's words: Teacher research on language and literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
Bisplinghoff, B.S., & J. Allen, eds. 1998. Engaging teachers: Creating teaching and researching relationships. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Burnaford, G., J. Fischer, & D. Hobson, eds. 2001. Teachers doing research: The power of action through inquiry. 2d ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cochran-Smith, M., & S. Lytle. 1999. The teacher research movement: A decade later. Educational Researcher 28 (7): 5-25.
Genishi, C. 1982. Observational methods for early childhood education. In Handbook for research in early childhood education, ed. B. Spodek, 1-52. New York: Free Press.
Goswami, D., & P.R. Stillman. 1987. Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Hankins, K. 1998. From cacophony to symphony: Memoir in teacher research. In Engaging teachers: Creating teaching and researching relationships, eds. B.S. Bisplinghoff & J. Allen, 13-25. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Hubbard, R.S., & B.M. Power. 1999. Living the question: A guide for teacher researchers. York, ME: Stenhouse.
Meier, D.R. 1998. Teaching in small moments. New York: Teachers College Press.
Paley, V.G. 1998. The girl with the brown crayon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Project Zero & Reggio Children. 2003. Making learning visible: Children as individual and group learners. Reggio Emilia, Italy: Reggio Children. Available from NAEYC.
Ulichny, P., & W. Schoener. 1996. Teacher-researcher collaboration from two perspectives. Harvard Educational Review 58: 496-524.
Zeichner, K., & S.E. Noffke. 1998. Practitioner research. In Handbook of Research on Teaching, 4th ed., ed. V. Richardson. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Isauro Michael Escamilla, a teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District for the last 10 years, is currently a preschool lead teacher at Las Americas Child Development Center in the heart of San Francisco's Latin neighborhood. He has an AA and is working toward a BA in education.
Five Elements of Teacher Research in Michael's Project
The teacher research focus
Michael assesses his own teaching. He asks himself how well he listens to children to find out what they know and what they need.
Background information about the children and the child care setting
This project is on kindergarten-age children in a public, district-level after-school program. Most children are multilingual English-language learners.
Process for collecting and understanding the data
Michael's data includes transcripts of conversations, collections of children's work, photos, and the documentation panels created as the project evolved in the classroom. To analyze and understand the data, he refined his original question, Do I listen carefully enough to all of my students so that they see themselves as capable theory makers? Using criteria and in collaboration with colleagues he reviewed the data to find specific evidence that he had heard and honored both talkative and more silent children's theories about shadows.
Reflection on the findings and learning
Strong projects arise in nonlinear ways when we are able to listen closely to children and follow up on their interests and excitement.
Children have complex theories about how things work and fit together.
Children who don't speak up often know a great deal; our openness and attentiveness is key.
Recommendations for other teacher researchers
Deepen your teaching and your own learning as a professional by making the children's voices visible through documentation. Experiment by working with your colleagues. See each teacher research project as improving and learning about yourself as a teacher researcher and as an early childhood professional.
Copyright © 2004 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at www.naeyc.org/resources/journal.
Voices of Practitioners
Guidelines for Manuscript Submissions
Young Children is pleased to introduce Voices of Practitioners, a new feature focusing on teacher research in early childhood education. It will appear regularly in Beyond the Journal, Young Children's online publication. Barbara Henderson and Daniel Meier (both of San Francisco State University) are the coeditors.
Teacher research is grounded in the daily lives of children, with insights from the teachers who work with them. The purpose of Voices of Practitioners is to provide both a vehicle for publishing the work of early childhood teachers, who are often underrepresented as authors in the educational research arena, and a forum for dialogue.
Teacher research benefits the field of early childhood education by making a unique contribution to the knowledge base of how young children develop and learn and the teacher's role. Teachers provide the critical insider perspective through systematic study and reflection on the ongoing reality in classrooms for young children. This feature will also serve as a clearinghouse for teacher researchers in early childhood education by providing various links to other teacher research, teacher researchers, and teacher research Web sites that enable people to contact each other directly.
Who should submit manuscripts to Voices of Practitioners?
All teachers in early childhood settings serving children from birth through third grade are invited to submit their research. The study can focus on children, families, staff, the settings themselves, or other factors that influence teaching. The editors of Voices of Practitioners welcome all teacher research manuscripts and look forward to learning from early childhood communities that are seldom represented in the research literature (such as infant and toddler programs, family child care, or teachers and children from a range of ethnic backgrounds).
Content
Manuscripts submitted to Voices of Practitioners should include the following sections:
Introduction-research question, problem, framework for the piece, links to other research
Methods-setting, participants, data sources, how data was collected, selected and analyzed, as well as limitations of the study
Findings-illustrated with relevant examples from the data
Discussion-reflection and description of what the teacher researcher found and learned
Conclusions-implications of the study for others in the field, ideas for continuing teacher research as part of daily teaching practices, and further questions raised by the study
Articles should also include personal reflections on the teacher research journey.
Format
Cover page
- Article title and name(s) of author(s)
- Author information: full name, affiliation, title, address, phone, fax, and e-mail for each
- Designation of one author as the primary contact.
- Brief abstract of the research project. Describe the question or problem, the subjects, the findings, and the implications of the study (approximately ˝ page).
Length
Style of text
Double-space lines, and leave wide margins
Number the pages
Include the title and date in the footer
Use a clear informal style of writing. Avoid excessive educational and research jargon.
Write in active voice…"The children contributed ideas…" rather than "Ideas were contributed by the children…"
Include subheads and visuals (children's work samples, photographs, charts, graphs).
Photos or other graphics should illustrate and clarify the data and not just serve as decorative elements.
Do not include the name(s) of author(s) anywhere except on the cover page as all manuscripts are subject to a blind review.
References, citations, and excerpts
Permissions
Authors are responsible for seeking written permission from parents or legal guardians to include children's art and work samples.
Authors are encouraged to submit photos with their teacher research articles. Authors or photographers must have model releases for all recognizable people in each photo (signed by all the adults who appear in the photo and by the parents or legal guardians of all the children photographed). These model releases should be maintained by the photographer. NAEYC may ask for copies of the model releases if necessary.
Authors must seek and submit written permission from the copyright holder for quoted material longer than 50 words.
Submitting a manuscript
E-mail a cover letter and the teacher research manuscript to Gail Perry, Young Children's Teacher Research Coordinator (gperry@naeyc.org).
If you do not have e-mail access, mail a cover letter and one copy of the teacher research manuscript to:
Gail Perry, Teacher Research Coordinator
Editorial Department
NAEYC
1509 16th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036-1426
The manuscript will be logged in and the author will receive acknowledgement of receipt of the manuscript.
Review process
The review process generally takes two to four months from receipt of manuscript. It includes the following steps:
The journal editor, the teacher research coordinator, and the teacher research coeditors jointly determine whether the article meets the basic guidelines. If not, the author is advised why the manuscript is not appropriate for consideration. If they choose to authors can revise their manuscript accordingly and resubmit.
Manuscripts that meet the basic guidelines will be subject to peer review by members of the Teacher Research Committee, a group of early childhood teacher research experts, including teacher researchers, who represent geographic, cultural, linguistic, and subject matter diversity. The reviewers will provide comments and recommendations.
Using all the reviews as a guide, one of the following decisions will be made (notification will be sent to the author by letter):
The manuscript will be accepted for publication in Voices of Practitioners, Beyond the Journal on the NAEYC Web site.
The author will be asked to revise and resubmit the manuscript for further review or possible acceptance. Reviewers' suggestions for enhancing the manuscript will be sent to author. Authors will have up to four months to complete revisions and resubmit the manuscript.
The author will be advised the manuscript is not accepted for publication.
From acceptance to online publication
It is not possible to determine in advance the exact publication dates of accepted manuscripts. Most manuscripts will require some revisions during the editing and production process.
Editing involves the teacher research coeditors, the journal editor, and a copy editor. Authors may be asked to update, clarify, or expand article content or references. A copy editor will return the edited article to the author via e-mail for final approval before the manuscript enters production.
When an article is scheduled for publication, authors are asked to complete biographies and copyright transfer forms. Both forms are provided electronically. The copyright transfer provides permission for publication online in Beyond the Journal.
If you have questions about the submission and review process for Voices of Practitioners contact Gail Perry, Young Children's Teacher Research Coordinator at gperry@naeyc.org or submit your queries in a letter or call 202-232-8777, Ext. 12126.
