Research Into Practice:
False Hope, Best Evidence, and the Practitioner
To the Editor:
As classroom teachers and researchers, we feel compelled to respond
to the Commentary "From Research to Practice" (March 12,
2003). While we agree that the authors are asking important questions-How
desirable is evidence-based practice in education? Why do educators
and policy leaders frequently fail to utilize education research?- we
feel that their proposed solutions miss the mark in at least two areas.
First, the "education-knowledge industry" described
by the authors leaves out a very valuable, and untapped, source of education
knowledge: practitioner- researchers. Second, the authors state that "Educators
... will have to learn, accept, and apply what 'best evidence' demonstrates to
be effective." Our question is, whose "best evidence"? And why
is the burden placed on educators to learn, accept, and apply?
Educational research is not like other sciences. Teaching
and learning are incredibly complex. What may have been shown to be an effective
method in one part of the country, or with one group of students, may not transfer
to another. There are too many variables involved to "scientifically control
for" them all and make any definitive claims about what works and doesn't
work in every single classroom setting.
We think researchers should make their data and results accessible,
as advocated in your Page 1 article a week later, "Scholars Aim to Connect
Studies to Schools' Needs" (March 19, 2003).
This article emphasizes that "one of the big problems
in educational research is that people haven't understood the need to take research
one step further and translate it to usable knowledge." It also explains
the position of those who advocate "ongoing collaboration between researchers
and practitioners, so that researchers address the questions frontline educators
are asking."
These ideas make a great deal of sense to us, as we have engaged
in "action" research in our respective classrooms for the past five
years. Our research results have informed our own practice and that of numerous
colleagues both at the local and national levels, through our work with the Teachers
Network Policy Institute, conference presentations, committee memberships, and
publishing. Educators can read our results and weigh our information against
their own contexts, because we address relevant questions and produce data that
are both accessible and usable, as well as understandable.
We wonder why our work, and that of our practitioner colleagues,
continues to be overlooked as a source of understandable and usable knowledge
about teaching and learning. So we were delighted to see the eloquent
description of TNPI and the important forum it provides for the teacher's voice
in policy research and decisionmaking in her recent letter to the editor (Whither
Teachers? Trying to Be Heard, Letters, March 26, 2003).
We encourage practitioner researchers to seek out opportunities
to make their voices heard. After all, classroom teachers are the true educational
experts.
Jane Ching Fung
National Board-Certified Teacher
Milken Educator, 2002
Los Angeles, Calif.
Gail V. Ritchie
National Board-Certified Teacher
Fairfax County Teacher of the Year, 2000
Fairfax, Va. |