Living the Questions

"Asking questions of our classrooms is as natural as breathing. Teachers who conduct classroom-based research turn those wonderings into research questions they can systematically pursue," (p. 30). -JoAnn Portalupi in Living the Questions

This year has been a big year for me. I am in the last year of my doctoral program, finishing up my last classes and working on my dissertation (which I hope to defend in the summer or early fall). Another big shift was that I took a one-year-leave of absence from my 6th-8th grade dual immersion classroom where I taught reading and writing workshop. I have been thinking a lot about what I still want to do as an educator and what my dreams are after completing my doctoral program. Recently I decided that I will return to my classroom in the fall. This year I have discovered that I would have been happy in higher ed as well, but Kassia Wedekind summed it up well in her recent post reflecting on her own career related decision, "But the classroom is where I belong. For now."

It is often hard to pinpoint change over time, but I know for sure that one aspect that will be different is that I now view myself as a teacher-researcher and am excited to have a more intentional and focused research process throughout the year, in addition to observing and reflecting about various aspects as I have in other years. However, in my doctoral coursework, it seems that I hear more often about outside researchers. So much so that I almost sought a route to focus my dissertation on someone else's classroom. Thankfully, my committee guided me back to focusing on my teaching journey and my students, realizing that passions related to my topic were grounded in my experiences.

Knowing that I will be back in my classroom next year, it would only make sense that my research would center on self-study and practitioner research. As such, I was so excited to read Ruth Shagoury and Brenda Miller Power's Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers, second edition. I recognized Brenda Power's name from the Choice Literacy e-newsletter, so it was nice to learn more about teacher research from a voice I recognized, along with another colleague.

The book is organized into eight chapters, beginning with a rationale for teacher research, and then walking through various stages of the research process, including how to sustain research. I loved that the epilogue was titled "Why Not Teacher Research?", an invitation to get started. Each chapter had a balance of narrative from the authors mixed with features from other teacher-researchers, providing glimpses into many different ways to go about research within our classrooms. The appendix also had another set of sample research plans. I loved that I could connect to different plans in different ways, and thought of colleagues for others. It seems that the authors intentionally tried to have a nice balance of topics and methods.

Living the Questions will be a good resource to have and revisit throughout the research process. Tomorrow I will be posting about some of my thoughts on research for next year.