A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

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Introduction
This is a practical handbook, written in a non-academic, teacher-friendly
style, to show teachers how they can engage in practitioner research for 
continuing professional development and for the benefit of their students.
The book is unique in the literature on teacher-research in ELT in being 
particularly targeted at secondary and primary school teachers working
in relatively difficult circumstances. 

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4 
| Introduction
Difficult circumstances and
Exploratory Action Research 
Teacher-research has long been considered a desirable form 
of professional development, and we will go over some of 
the arguments for this in Chapters One and Two of this book. 
However, one thing teachers often wonder is: ‘How can I as
a teacher find time to do research when I don’t even have 
time to cope with all the normal demands in my classroom?’.
The kind of practitioner research we are presenting in this 
book – Exploratory Action Research – has been developed 
with and for secondary school teachers in classes of up to 
40 students, where teachers are teaching up to 40 lessons
a week. The original context for this was a project with 
teachers in Chilean secondary schools (the ‘Champion 
Teachers’ project – more below). We have strongly in mind 
the difficulties faced by teachers in such circumstances.
In fact, based on teachers’ actual experiences in the projects 
we’ve been involved with (in Peru, India and Nepal as well as 
Chile), a major point we want to make is this: Exploratory 
Action Research can in itself be an effective way to address 
and cope with difficult circumstances (heavy teaching loads, 
large classes, a lack of material resources, and so on) since
it enables teachers to gain a better understanding of their 
classroom contexts and so develop more appropriate ways 
of teaching, without waiting for solutions from outside.
We stress in this book, then, that a particular way of doing 
teacher-research – Exploratory Action Research – is 
desirable as well as feasible in relatively difficult 
circumstances.
Teachers often report feeling rather like an octopus in such 
situations, needing to deal with the many things that are 
going on at the same time, under continual stress and with 
continual pressures to act quickly to solve problems. When 
something is not working, a quite normal response is to try 
out different solutions until you find one that works. But 
when problems are multiplied there comes a point where it 
just isn’t possible to address all the problems you’re facing. 
What to do in such circumstances? Our main suggestion is
to step back from the situation and take a good careful look 
at the nature of the problem rather than jumping in with a 
possible solution that hasn’t been thought about enough
and may, then, be inappropriate.
So, what we recommend here is not adding to your existing 
burden with extra actions but instead taking a step back, 
creating a space for reflection and exploration in order to 
understand a situation better before taking action. 
In short, in this book we provide an introduction to action 
research while emphasising that before the ‘action’ that 
‘action research’ implies, there is a need for a careful 
exploratory phase. Accordingly, a large part of the book 
takes you step by step through the careful exploration
of a situation, only later coming to the ‘action’ phase which
is normally associated with action research.