Publications>
Research Bulletin

Phi Delta Kappa Center for Evaluation, Development, and Research
March 1999, No. 23

"Impacting" Practitioners with "Enhanced" Research
by Barbara O. Taylor

We want to promote the attitude that most educational research should have practical applications, that research is necessary to increase the skills and knowledge of our noble profession, and that research skills are of value to all members of the teaching profession.(1)

Now there is a radical statement if ever there was one! Education research should have practical applications? It should advance our profession by increasing the knowledge of practitioners as well as researchers? All members of the teaching profession should own basic research skills? Is this asking too much?

The current relationship between education research and the application of practical knowledge in the field is almost nonexistent. There is little common language between university researchers and practitioners, which may explain the lack of communication between the two groups.

The delivery of research findings to practitioners in a way they can use to create pragmatic knowledge bases and improve practice is a worthwhile purpose of research. But how can this transfer of information from researcher to practitioner and practitioner to researcher take place in a field where researchers seldom address the needs of practitioners and the language of research and the language of practice differ in extremis?

How can researchers provide research results to practitioners in a form that practitioners understand and find useful, when their basis of operation and professional goals differ from those of practitioners? Currently most university researchers operate as though dissemination of the findings of their studies means simply presenting a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association; that is, researchers speak to researchers. Indeed, academics offer few concepts in these papers that can actually be applied. Their research designs and methodologies frequently preclude this important outcome of research and development that is necessary to enable the field to grow and improve. Their defense is that research only guides practice, it does not specify it. Who, then, will specify practice and suggest changes in practice that emanate from research?

THE LANGUAGE GAP

Even if researchers understood that the pragmatic development and improvement of practice resulting from their research is as important as basic inquiry and discovery, they would be hard pressed to come up with useful information written in terms that practitioners can understand and use.

The hard facts are these: Good research findings are simply not being transformed into the pragmatic terms of practice. The gap between the methods of basic research and applied research is not as great as the gap between the language used by each sector. Staff development programs attempt to bridge this language gap but often suffer from episodic delivery and inconsistent interpretations of the research involved. Consultants are generally schooled in research methods and language if they come from universities. If they come from the field, they usually are schooled only in their unique experiences as practitioners. The choice for clinical direction is between theory and war stories.

Most prominent educational researchers and practitioners were formally trained in only one or two specialties at most. These leaders only recently have discovered that they can not implement curriculum development without including administration, changing policy, and training teachers. Most only now realize that both district and school structures must be changed if we are to reform the schools successfully. If these educators had been exposed to all of the specialties in a cluster of core courses in their undergraduate and graduate years, they might have envisioned the whole cloth sooner and with deeper understanding. One possible way to improve communication between practitioners and researchers would be to require that both learn a cluster of core courses so that the language of education is common among all educators.

Real boundaries are difficult to draw in the pragmatic world of education. Conceptual paradigms in the field of education demand that the elements of process cut across subject matter, as well as levels or organization of schools and school districts. So-called discrete elements favored by researchers serve only to describe and define these process elements. A core of fundamental courses for all educators would serve to make this conceptual distinction.

Practitioners do not understand the basic processes or languages of research. Consequently, they find it difficult to understand the purposes of research, the source of research information, and how research is formulated and interpreted. Only by understanding the sources and basic processes of research will practitioners and staff developers be able to apply findings accurately and sustain change in schools. Only upon its application does information provided from research become knowledge. This knowledge base then becomes valued by practitioners in their attempts to improve practice or knowledge in action.(2)

It is time to suggest that schools and colleges of education teach fundamental research techniques in their undergraduate, as well as graduate, courses. Changing how research methods and practice are taught would go a long way in crafting a language common to researchers and practitioners alike. Medicine has developed a common language, as has business, law, and the performing arts. These professions carry out research targeted for use by practitioners. The exceptions are the hard sciences. There basic and applied research maintain a useful separation.

Most soft sciences remain just that: soft. And in some cases they remain obstinately inarticulate. One ideological camp remains settled in its own territory, while the other squats in indignation, refusing to make the smallest concession. Practitioners and researchers alike identify with and own these separate ideological camps. And within each camp there are serious rifts. A good example is the ongoing argument in education and other fields about qualitative versus quantitative research designs. This debate has no place in the field of education, because both qualitative and quantitative research play important roles in sophisticated educational inquiry. Both are important to the discovery of new knowledge. Yet the debate persists, fueled by misinterpretation of terms and the languages involved; and this misinterpretation drives misunderstanding for both researchers and practitioners.

One reason the language of education practitioners is distinctly different from that of education researchers is that the language of researchers is typically written in the third person present or past tense with passive verbs. In its attempt to be accurate, it often seems stilted to the untutored mind. The language of practitioners is typically expressed in the first or third person with active verbs in the present, past, or past progressive tense (or all three within the same paragraph). It changes easily to tell a moving story.

Each language is instructive to the other. While the language of practice generally describes and that of research analyzes, each language does both; it is a matter of emphasis. The practitioner is a constant interpreter of what is going on and "makes sense" of the actions, discussions, and behaviors in the school as they take place. Analysis for the practitioner is almost concurrent with description. The "why" of practice is generally up front: Give reason to the student, give reason to the teacher, give reason to the administration as the conversation happens.

In their effort to represent interesting day-to-day experiences, practitioners design sentences that pull together many threads or elements of which they are aware, knowing that this whole cloth is the way things happen in school. The researcher's job is to sort out the patterns, the paths, the relationships, and the symmetry of development. Indeed, most practitioners would argue that it is impossible to separate content and process elements in daily deliberations inside the school house; only the researcher can do that on paper and at a distance, looking back on what happened and trying to distinguish process from content.

The language of practice in this way often appears too personal, too anecdotal, even disorganized in its presentation. And yet practitioners' reflections upon their actions, decisions, and roles is an authentic sort of applied research. What practitioners link together and the emphasis they give each action tells the researcher a great deal. Building on the strengths of direct experience and the immediacies of special situations, of constant synthesis in interpreting organizational dynamics that include a bias for what really matters, the spoken words of practitioners are invaluable data.(3) The practitioner's written word is just as helpful as the spoken word and is easier to analyze because it is permanent and decidedly thoughtful.

The researcher, on the other hand, is told to keep distant from whatever is being studied in order to analyze after the fact what indeed did occur. Then the researcher must interpret and answer why it occurred. The "why" of research comes after lengthy methodologies as mature evidence manifests itself within an accepted model.

Both languages are important sources of social data, but the data of practitioners are more difficult to recognize. In case studies the hard data are only suggested by the narratives and are interpreted within the rich context of daily work and professional judgment. Students' test scores and other indicators are compared over time, and then each school's educational program and procedures are called into question when student outcomes are not improving. Precise delineation (the researcher's hallmark) gives way to the dynamic description of the practitioner's language, and the phenomena being discussed are rendered extremely complex.

The language of practitioners is not easy for the novice to understand, and the analytic process needed to understand it has only recently been developed. The first requirement for conducting naturalistic research is to understand the context of the situation. The researcher then has two fundamental jobs to perform: 1) to delineate the contextual milieu, and 2) to report clearly the specific elements or components of interest. This makes an investigation very risky and time consuming.

The gap between what educators know and what they do in schools and in the process of teaching is enormous. Even the research that is conducted well does not get used because of communication problems, such as the conceptual quandaries mentioned above. This same research generally is written in research language that is abstract, dense, and often pedantic. It is plainly uninteresting to the pragmatic mind.

NEW NAMES FOR OLD IDEAS

Education is stuck at this juncture, favoring cautious concepts that pale when compared to the real touchstones that reveal the quality of vision that is needed. School reform with high standards for all students is still a dream for most districts. Yet over the years most school improvement articles in journals about school improvement have attempted to be of help. However, certain topics emerge again and again. There is a sameness about them.

For instance, many researchers for the past half century have been about the task of discovering the necessity to change culture to reform organizations, though this issue was very nicely delineated by George Homans in 1950.(4) But the concept of school culture still appeals, and some prominent researchers continue to thrash the term. Culture is a warm, fuzzy concept for researchers and practitioners alike. Everyone likes to touch it; and when we read about it, we experience a feeling of progress, though little progress occurs. It is difficult to apply the elements of culture in the context of schools, each of which is unique in its culture. It would be more useful for practitioners if researchers dug deeper into the concept of school climate.

School climate, the embodiment of school culture, is a concept both practitioners and researchers can understand, discuss, and learn about, using commonly understood terms. But in the present research arena, school climate is not described in terms of a pragmatic process. Researchers treat school climate in the same manner as they treat school culture: They describe the elements that make up school cultures or climates, forgetting to link them according to the school's particular mission and vision and to the process of implementation.

This is a sorry statement about research design and research questions. How well do researchers really understand how such topics as culture and climate manifest themselves in schools? Where is the information about culture that can be transformed into knowledge for daily use in real learning communities? How well do researchers pick up the nuggets of culture found in the language of practice in the speech of teachers and administrators, parents, and even state officials? How can they describe school culture and climate and the process of cultural change so that practitioners can apply these research findings in their own contexts?

Why is school culture so far removed from school climate in the researcher's mind? Indeed, to most "basic" education researchers, they seem to be two separate concepts. In a recent education magazine, two articles, both written by academics and published back to back, evidence this problem. One discusses school climate and the other school culture. The article on culture mentions the word "climate" once as an aside. The article on climate never mentions "culture." And yet, for all intents and purposes - research and practice - school climate is the manifestation of school culture. (One prominent researcher has even separated school climate from school learning climate to make certain the strand of hair is sufficiently split.)

When practitioners read about culture or climate in education magazines or journals, many times they question where this knowledge comes from. Because research articles and research studies use terms and concepts strange to practitioners, the research causes confusion and most often goes unapplied. And so we keep investigating school culture and school climate and never the twain shall meet. Can these confounded concepts be indicators of the failure of communication between researchers and practitioners?

And then there are the buzz words, freely used by many staff development trainers and researchers. Buzz words are not helpful, yet there is the hope that by using them educators can muddle through. Buzz words impart little information, so they do not become useful knowledge in the field. What has happened to Total Quality Schools, "brain-based" learning, "best practices," Authentic Assessment, cross-disciplinary approaches, multiculturalism, and concept-based curriculum? Their residue may be present in recent research; but because these buzz words are not linked to a change process, previous knowledge, or a common language in practice, they are here today, gone tomorrow, without a trace. Most practitioners are smart enough not to acquire these terms for their repertoire of teaching or administration. They have little time to work out for themselves the meaning, let alone the implementation of these ideas. Most practitioners also recognize the new concept with the new name as the old concept that did not work.

It is almost as if the buzz words of research become the jargon of practice. There is a quid pro quo that harbors the agreement, "If you don't tell, I won't tell." Researchers use buzz words to target the publishing houses. Unethical practices abound. A concept called one name a decade ago is resurrected by researchers and given a new name today. (Rewards go to those who brandish new names.) Practitioners are confused, because this questionable "research" goes unpunished by peer reviews and the same concept is allowed to be named twice.

On the other hand, practitioners glibly use buzz words to explain what they are doing, especially when they are not certain what to do. This puts the imprimatur of the phrase, "research shows," on their actions. Seldom does anyone ask, "What research?" because they are confused: Is this a new concept or the one I read about ten years ago with a new name? No one will tell. The secret is safe.

Most of these buzz words do a disservice to researchers and practitioners alike. The status of the field of education as a source of social research inside and outside of schools is questioned. The proliferation of buzz words and misunderstood popular terms, such as "impact" and "enhance," reinforces the image of "fuzzy minded" educators. Just as changing the names of old concepts to offer "new" concepts is decidedly unethical research practice, buzz words are a fabrication of serious research intent. Buzz words smack of intent from the field of marketing, especially promotion. They are inappropriate for education.

Do these practices become more prevalent and justified because the language of education research is different from the language of practice? Are buzz words and the cryptic concepts they suggest indicators of the difficulty of communication in the field of education? The primary assumption is that the field of education will profit greatly if researchers and practitioners can learn to communicate more efficiently and use common language predicated on a common core of knowledge.

CONCLUSION

Researchers and practitioners have a very difficult time communicating with each other. As researchers attempt to explain their findings, practitioners are mystified not only by the terms used but also about the sources of these findings. As they read research, practitioners are so distracted by the unfamiliar logic that they easily find the conclusions superficial or untrustworthy.

Practitioners should learn in preservice training the craft of educational research at an introductory level. This knowledge would help them carry out action research in the classroom and school, and it also would help them understand more thoroughly the research findings in the field. Application and implementation should become easier.

Researchers, on the other hand, should learn how to understand the language of practitioners and how to analyze and use its elements to build their grounded theories and describe the variables of interest in their work. Their studies would then carry terms that are recognized by practitioners as useful, and possibly the results would be used to improve practice.

As practitioners explain their observations of students, the classroom, or school and district operations, researchers realize that many of the concepts used in the field carry no meaning for them. Thus real understanding of school processes is beyond their knowledge base. The practitioner's world is one of process, with few discrete acts. Interaction with students and colleagues is continuous, and boundaries are blurred. Researchers abhor elements that are not discrete. Therefore they choose not to analyze this type of element or understand its patterns. In the future, core courses must be designed and taught to all educators in schools and colleges of education. Indeed, research on language should be developed and its protocols made more systematic. Research methods and language should of necessity change when the messy reality of practice is thoroughly investigated and the concept of process is finally recognized by the education researcher.

All educators must understand the concepts behind the words, the meanings and implications that follow, the peculiar contexts that each group finds that must be dealt with and integrated as factors of experience. Both researchers and practitioners must be willing to compromise and craft a common language. Currently both groups hold tightly to their own sources of wisdom in learning from experience and pursuing creative endeavor.

This wisdom will remain stuck at the sources until departments of education and schools of education create core courses and build a language common to all educators. In the future, collaboration between researcher and practitioner should grow measurably from its meager beginnings. This collaboration has barely begun, yet it is necessary so that educators can use what is known and know what is useful. Now there is a radical statement!

ENDNOTES

1. Larry Barber, Roy Forbes, and Jim Fortune, foreword to Developing Research Skills for Professional Educators: Participant's Manual (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa, n.d.).

2. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

3. Henry Mintzberg and others, "The Structure of 'Unstructured' Decision Processes," Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (June 1976): 246-75.

4. George Homans, The Human Group (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950), pp. 125-27, 266, 330-33.