ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the practitioners, the teachers, lecturers, instructors, assistants, mentors and so on who make education work. The problems action researchers face are varied as they are identified by the practitioners themselves; this is bottom up research by practitioners for improving practice, not top down research carried out on practitioners. Reflective practice seems core to professional development of teachers and other professionals and indeed a great many have taken part in action research and other practitioner research projects. Once the action researcher has identified possible interventions to address their problem, they will weigh up the predicted opportunities and constraints within each and then design an intervention. The next phase of an action research project is that of implementation. Outright criticism of action research generally focuses on the excessive demands being made on practitioners particularly in tackling areas such as educational evaluation in which they may have little past experience to draw upon.
