Action Research and Principal Teachers

"Teacher." That is the answer to every final examination in every course I have taught my aspiring principals for the last seven years. It's a "pass-fail" proposition. You get it or you don't. Oh, yes. The question: "In school, 'principal' is an adjective that modifies what noun?"

Somewhere in the ebb and flow of history, education practitioners and policymakers dropped the original term conferred upon individuals who would lead a school. Archival evidence shows that, rather than the legally-appointed middle manager manifest in the contemporary principal, the leader of our earliest schools was a kind of step-ahead teacher.

Mostly he (and believe it or not, time was that only men were permitted to teach) was the most accomplished, well-respected teacher in the school. People understood then that as the dance company has its principal dancer and the orchestra its principal violinist, the school has its principal teacher.

This line of thought is important for present purposes only to the extent that aspiring principals would do well to promote what, in my mind at least, is the most important role a teacher can play. That role is action researcher. The proposition is really not as radical as it may at first appear.

Action research is traced to John Dewey and the progressive movement arising in the first quarter of the 20th century. By definition, "Action research is any systematic inquiry conducted by teacher researchers, principal, school counselors, or other stakeholders in the teaching/learning environment to gather information about how their particular school operate, how they teach, and how well their students learn" (Mills, 2011, p. 177).

A careful reading of the definition comports very nicely with what we are learning about effective teachers, particularly if one extends to teaching, specifically, peer review as a necessary component of scientific research generally. As in the peer review process required for professional publication, collaboration among teachers, such as that advanced in professional learning community, results in a better mousetrap.

If some strategy worked in my classroom, maybe it will work in yours too, so goes the thinking. But how can teachers say with certainty what worked in the absence of systemic inquiry around a particular area of focus, collection of data, analysis and interpretation of those data, and subsequent action based on findings? The answer is, of course, they cannot.

Bottom line: Effective principals are principal teachers who themselves engage in action research even as they expect it of their teachers. I will repeat now and with even more certainty what I wrote for Phi Delta Kappan nearly six years ago reporting on the SERVE Teachers As Researchers Academy:

"As well-meaning reformers work to create community, expertise, and a professional knowledge base for teachers, we submit that TR [Teacher Research] is an avenue whereby such conditions may be more authentically and powerfully created by teachers themselves" (Bingham, Parker, Finney, Riley, and Rakes, 2006, p. 688).