ABSTRACT
Six years ago Michael Armstrong put forward a research proposal which was accepted by Leicestershire LEA to conduct fieldwork in order to gain some understanding of the quality of children’s intellectual activity as it is evidenced in the classroom. His plan was to work as both a teacher and a researcher alongside another teacher and thereby gain access to the details of the children’s work as it progressed. After considering various schools, he decided to spend most of the year working with me in my class of eight to nine year olds in Sherard Primary School, Melton Mowbray. Although we taught and ‘researched’ together, he took the major responsibility for the research, while I undertook the day to day running of the classroom. The results of this year’s work were then written up in the book Closely Observed Children. 1 In this article I want to describe some of the developments that have taken place since then, the ideas behind this type of inquiry and the problems and possibilities it raises.
