Teacher-Carried Research as a Tool for Teachers' Professional Growth

Inquiry among the schoolteachers' needs to be embedded, cultivated, sustained and nurtured as a tool for a better understanding of the processes in the education and for fostering teachers' ongoing professional growth. This study explores teachers' self-evaluation of their competency to conduct research and to incorporate it in the classroom. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed to seek answers about teachers' engagement with research and to explore the factors of resistance for carrying out research in the classroom setting. This study also dwells upon some mechanisms that lead teachers to carry out research. The focus group interviews which were conducted reflect on the factors that encourage teachers to become more involved in the research and point to the advantages they perceive as emanating from the research. The qualitative part of inquiry reflects teachers' narrative ways of construction and reconstruction of their personal and professional knowledge. The authors discuss the processes that foster teachers to move from the fragmentary use of research strategies to the ability to live in the inquiry, practice new behaviours in the classroom, unlearn the old ones, reflect in action and stay open to a range of new initiatives.