1. As a result of the PEEL project, teacher-research projects have been encouragedand developed through PAVOT
1.1. Researching Teaching for Understanding
1.1.1. Most frequently, their studies centre on classroom concerns which represent persistent tensions,dilemmas and difficulties
1.2. Teachers focus on their classroom issues and are conscious that this limitsgeneralizability to other situations
1.3. The complexity and perceived uniqueness of teacher concerns makescommunication to others difficult and teachers tend to feel isolated withtheir concerns
1.4. Teachers feel they need to act immediately on new possibilitiesand adjust their teaching.
1.4.1. The research focus therefore alters, as adjustmentsare made, and new insights and possibilities emerge
1.5. Teachers have shown little interest in merely studying a problem to clarifyit, or prove its existence.
1.5.1. This means that research can be a high-risk activity forteachers and significantly affect their primary role as a teacher.
2. The Genesis of Effective ScientificExplanations for the Classroom
2.1. Horwood(1988) illustrates with examples that, in junior high school at least, students oftenconsider the two terms to be synonymous (see also Wong, 1995)
2.1.1. Factors that may influence teachers’ explanations
2.1.1.1. Content factors
2.1.1.2. context factors
2.1.1.3. Student factors
2.1.1.4. Teacher factors
2.2. According toHorwood (1988), ‘[f]or teachers, “explain” and “describe” are used loosely,sometimes interchangeably and sometimes jointly (“explain and describe”) apparentlyfor emphasis’
2.3. Explanations are systematic arguments that address theissues of ‘how’, ‘why’ and usually include cause-and-effect statements
2.4. Descriptions,on the other hand, are statements that concentrate on superficial details like number,size, time and place.
2.5. ¿Is an explanation the process, that is, theact of explaining, or is it just the syntactic product?
2.5.1. Explaining scientific phenomena to school students involves both process andproduct because an explanation’s viability is determined by its context
3. MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Loughran, J.John. Researching Teaching : Methodologies and Practices for Understanding Pedagogy. Routledge, 1999. APA (American Psychological Assoc.) Loughran, J. J. (1999). Researching Teaching : Methodologies and Practices for Understanding Pedagogy. Routledge.
4. Researching Teaching Through Pedagogy
4.1. we need to be attuned to the ways that students experience things,including our teaching practices
4.2. What is needed is the development of a disciplinethat can be attentive to the manner that students experience their lives in classrooms
4.3. ‘pedagogy’ has become a term of discourses that have little to do with educationalconcerns of what is good for children.
4.4. We need to rescue the language of pedagogyand develop its practice in the service of our children, for the sake of our children,the students we teach
5. Bridging the Gulf Between Research andPractice
5.1. Teaching has elements of a craft, a science and an art, each ofthese has different implications for attempts to improve classroom practice
5.2. The traditional teacher culture frames teaching primarily as a craft, with newteachers needing craft knowledge about what to do and how to do it in a range ofcommon classroom situations.
5.3. PAVOT stands for The Perspectives and Voice of the Teacher
5.3.1. PAVOT was funded by an Australian Research Council grant.
5.3.2. It aimed to get the voices of the teachers into the research literature and to explore ways of effectively communicating teachers' research findings to other teachers.
5.3.3. PAVOT was set up to assist teachers to research aspects of their practice
5.4. The Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL)
5.4.1. was founded in 1985 by a group of teachers and academics who shared concerns about the prevalence of passive, unreflective, dependent student learning, even in apparently successful lessons.
5.4.2. They set out to research classroom approaches that would stimulate and support student learning that was more informed, purposeful, intellectually active, independent and metacognitive