Abstract:

Teachers’ roles and society’s or policymakers’ expectations about their teaching are always changing. According to the expectations formulated on the international level (e.g., European Commission document named Rethinking Education: Investing in skills for better socio-economic outcomes) or in the national educational policy documents (e.g., Estonian Occupational Qualifications for Teachers) teachers should nowadays be innovative, digitally competent and learner-oriented. In order to meet all these requirements teachers need to undertake continuous professional development with consistent reflection on their work. This requires analyzing their teaching with valid methods – in other words, teachers should act like researchers. This paper presents some reflections on the concept of teacher as a researcher. Forty-four Estonian pre-school and basic school teachers were surveyed in order to identify their understanding about the concept of the teacher as a researcher. Teachers were asked to describe the role of the teacher as a researcher, their motivation to adopt research activities in their work, and the main obstacles in the way of being a teacher as a researcher. The results indicate that teachers relate common research activities only to, e.g., analyzing their students’ work process during the lesson. Although doing research is important according to the teachers, they fail to engage in it in practice owing to the lack of knowledge and time. All the outcomes of this small-scale study are discussed in this paper.

Keywords:

Teachers as researchers, teaching, professional development.