Knowledge, Inquiry and Concern

Teachers need to be reflective if they want to develop. They can do this in the following ways:

• Professional Knowledge (reading)

Teachers need to be current in their professional knowledge and recognize its relationship to practice. There is a lot of content available for teachers to read and when they encounter new situations or experiences they should research further for more insight or reasoning.

• practice inquiry

Practice-based learning and improvement should be guided by the following principles:

- It is interdisciplinary

- It is concerned with complex problems with not just one or two variables but problems which are multivariate

- The procedures and instruments used must be capable of examining many variables, but not necessarily through complicated statistics

- It is not necessarily generalizable

- It is not located in any one paradigm - research of this nature tends to be eclectic

- The researcher must be as unbiased as possible (this may well be an issue in interpretive research), must not have a vested interest in the outcome - commitment and interest should not interfere with objectivity

• Identifying teachers' concerns

Teachers need to take the time to talk to their colleagues and find out their concerns, these concerns could be common amongst the teachers and therefore form the basis of practitioner inquiry.