This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licenseabout classroom events. Another feature is that the research required conscious reflection over an extended time:
their journals and conversations contained not only descriptions of events, but also interpretations of the events. A
third feature is that the study involved collaboration: it was not just one teacher studying the major questions, but
two. Th fourth feature is that the teachers not only developed their results and conclusions for themselves, but also
shared them with others. These four qualities make the study by Clifford and Friesen a clear example of teacher
research. Note, though, that sometimes studies conducted by teachers may not show all of these features so clearly;
instead they may show some of the key features, but not all of them, as in the next two examples.
Example #2: Focusing on development
Since 1981, Vivian Paley has published a series of short books documenting and interpreting her observations
of young children in classrooms (1981, 1986, 1991, 1998, 2000, 2005). Paley was interested in how young
children develop or change over the long term, and in particular how the development looks from the point of
view of a classroom teacher. In one of these books, for example, she observed one child in particular, Mollie,
from the time she entered nursery school just after her third birthday until after the child turned four years
old (Paley, 1986). Her interest was not focused on curriculum, as Clifford and Friesen's had done, but on
Mollie as a growing human being; "the subject which I most wished to learn," she wrote, "is children" (p. xiv).
Paley therefore wrote extended narrative (or story-like) observations about the whole range of activities of
this one child, and wove in periodic brief reflections on the observations. Because the observations took
story-like form, her books read a bit like novels: themes are sometimes simply suggested by the story line,
rather than stated explicitly. Using this approach, Paley demonstrated (but occasionally also stated) several
important developmental changes. In Mollie at Three (1988), for example, she describes examples of Mollie's
language development. At three years, the language was often disconnected from Mollie’s actions—she would
talk about one thing, but do another. By four, she was much more likely to tie language to her current
activities, and in this sense she more often "said what she meant". A result of the change was that Mollie also
began understanding and following classroom rules as the year went on, because the language of rules
became more connected in her mind to the actions to which they referred.
Vivian Paley's book had some of the characteristics of action research—but with differences from Clifford and
Friesen’s. Like their research, Paley's “data” was based on her own teaching, while her teaching was influenced in
turn by her systematic observations. Like Clifford and Friesen’s, Paley’s research involved numerous reflections on
teaching, and it led to a public sharing of the reflections—in this case in the form of several small books. Unlike
Clifford and Friesen, though, Paley worked independently, without collaboration. Unlike Clifford and Friesen, she
deliberately integrated observation and interpretation as they might be integrated in a piece of fiction, so that the
resulting "story" often implied or showed its message without stating it in so may words. In this regard her work
had qualities of what some educators call arts-based research, which are studies that take advantage of an artistic
medium (in this case, narrative or story-like writing) to heighten readers' understanding and response to research
findings (Barone and Eisner, 2006). If you are studying the use of space in the classroom, for example, then
aesthetically organized visual depictions (photos, drawings) of the room may be more helpful and create more
understanding than verbal descriptions. If you are studying children's musical knowledge, on the other hand,
recordings of performances by the children may be more helpful and informative than discussions of performances.
Educational Psychology 369 A Global Text