perceived resistance of teachers to adopting new practices or tools (p. 49).’Yet this
paradigm is being challenged in thinking about policy change and it is now seen
that this language and positioning is unhelpful. There is a more collaborative
approach being taken (Fullan 2013 ). This includes adopting different perceptions of
the role of teachers and of the degree of involvement and autonomy they have in
change and reform. It is these very international comparisons that are driving some
of the shift in perceptions. In an analysis of what the United States of America can
learn from the world’s most‘successful’school systems Tucker ( 2011 ) writes about
the positioning of teachers in relation to improvement and autonomy.‘In the United
States, teachers are generally the objects of research rather than participants in the
research process itself’(p. 20) and he notes that systems such as the Japanese,
which are viewed as successful, are based on the view of the teacher as a competent
professional. In discussing professional development through enquiry-based
approaches, such as the use of research lesson study, he muses over what would
happen should teachers be viewed as‘highly competent professionals who are
expected to take the lead in defining what good practice is, advancing that practice
and keeping up to date on the latest advancements’(p. 21). This argument is exactly
that made by Stenhouse ( 1975 ) when he put forward a‘research model’of cur-
riculum development.
All well founded curriculum research and development, whether the work of an individual
teacher, of a school, of a group working in a teachers’centre or of a group working within
the coordination framework of a national project, is based on the study of classrooms. It
thus rests on the work of teachers. It is not enough that teachers’work should be studied:
they need to study it themselves. (Stenhouse 1975 : 143)Policy makers have also now theoretically accepted that teaching is best seen as a
profession of lifelong learning and that the learning of teachers is linked to the
development of practice. This is a shift in thinking, although maybe not yet in
practice, and has also been linked to the international comparison game or the
Global Educational Reform Movement, as Pasi Sahlberg has named it, brought
about the primacy of the Finnish position in league tables. Finland has a tradition of
focusing on high quality teacher preparation and professional development. The
idea, if not the practice, has been picked up internationally.
So I have argued that action research is well suited to educational reform for it is
the key to seeing the reform aims through to action and to discovering the pro-
fessional and personal challenges in action: the very things that can blow a reform
process of course if not attended to. However, the argument is not just for involving
action research as a curriculum development tool or problem-solving vehicle but
also for the authentic engagement of teachers in the direction and content of the
reform, for they are professionals and, as Stenhouse ( 1975 ) famously said, only
they can bring about real change.
39 Researching Practice as Education and Reform 585