Reviewed by:
Gail V. Ritchie, PhD, NBCT
Fairfax County, Virginia

I volunteered to review this book because I am passionate about
teacher research. I've been a teacher researcher since 1991,
I've been a teacher research facilitator since 2001, and I
just completed a dissertation titled Teacher Research as
a Habit of Mind. I was very excited about the prospect
of finding another wonderful resource to guide teachers through
the process of conducting action research.

Unfortunately, the book did not live up to my expectations. The book is a
quick and easy read, very user-friendly, but somewhat superficial
in comparison to more scholarly treatments of teacher research.
While it does include the typical components of the teacher
research process, it is not in the same league with several
excellent resources already available. In the university courses
I teach, I've used Mills (2003), Hendricks (2006), and Falk
and Blumenreich (2005) as textbooks. I would not use this
book for a course textbook. The authors advocate using Google
as part of the literature review; I find this very condescending
and poor advice. Google has no quality control, and teachers
are certainly capable of using traditional resources, such
as an actual library and/or ERIC, for their literature review.
I was also offended by their use of the term research "project."
Projects have specific timeframes and endings. Teacher research
is a process that can be applied to any question or problem
of practice. Teacher researchers don't engage in projects,
they study their classroom contexts systematically and reflectively
through the process of teacher research.

That being said, the book does have several positive elements.
The authors have cleverly organized their sections into headings
that end with the word "work." For example, the first chapter
is called "Prepwork," the chapter on methods is called "Eyework,"
and the data analysis chapter is called "Deskwork." The first
chapter, "Prepwork" is a very nice overview of all the other
chapters; as such, it provides an overview of the entire teacher
research process. Throughout the book, the authors provide
"Mindwork" exercises, designed to engage the reader in specific
aspects of teacher research. There is a strong emphasis on
thinking through questions and issues by writing about them.
The book also invites readers to take an in-depth look at
assumptions in their chapter titled "Headwork."