Our Inquiry, Our Practice: Undertaking, Supporting, and Learning from Early Childhood Teacher Research(ers) - Tapa blanda

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Rebecca Isbell is an early childhood consultant and professor emerita of early childhood education at East Tennessee State University. She has authored numerous books and articles and presents on topics related to young children, creative thinking, storytelling, and the creative arts.

Sonia Akiko Yoshizawa is a PhD fellow in early childhood education at East Tennessee State University. A coauthor of STEM Learning with Young Children: Inquiry Teaching with Ramps and Pathways, she conducts inquiry-based STEM trainings and presentations for teachers.

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One of the defining characteristics of teacher research is that it is undertaken in context—it is on-the-ground inquiry generating valuable information. Teacher researchers decide what elements of their practice they want to study, what questions they want to answer, and how they will collect and analyze data to find answers that make sense in their immediate surroundings. Part of being professional educators means reflectively assessing all parts of our work; this ongoing reflective practice is greatly enhanced when teacher research identifies places where improvement is needed and assesses the effectiveness of changes made. All of the processes of teacher research take place in a particular context. Therefore, the outcomes of the inquiry are directly suited to the questions teachers have about their practice. This approach is the opposite of taking findings from large-scale studies and implementing them in prescribed ways that ignore the fact that every teacher, group of children, educational setting, and community is unique. Teacher research is grounded in the contexts that frame what really happens in early childhood classrooms. Instead of assuming that teachers are incapable of shaping their own professional development, teacher research is based on the premise that teachers can figure out what they need.