ABSTRACT
The paper briefly summarises criticism frequently made of educational research both in the USA and in Britain, especially by politicians who claim that it does not provide answers to the questions they are asking. The consequence is a shift to the more quantitative research, exemplified by medical research and in particular randomised and stratified control tests. But it is argued that, although these provide evidence which needs to be taken seriously, they cannot answer the questions which teachers ask in order to teach well. That kind of research needs to take account of the complexity of the educational context. It requires an understanding of ‘an educational practice’. Therefore, the teachers themselves need to be the ‘active researchers’ within their own schools and classrooms. The paper begins to spell out what ‘teachers as researchers’ means in practice: finding ways of sharing practice with other teachers, formulating hypotheses on what works, collecting evidence to support such hypotheses, being open to criticism in the light of evidence, and so on. It explains how the initiative for so thinking emerged from Stenhouse’s Humanities Curriculum Project and the account thereby given by John Elliott in Action Research for Educational Change.
