What Works?: A Practical Guide for Teacher Research

With teacher research you can make practice-changing discoveries inside your own classroom. But first you must understand the process itself:
How do you do it? How do you make the time for it? What can you learn from it? How do you tell the world about your findings?

In What Works? Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater and Bonnie Sunstein have answers to these questions and many more.

What Works? is a comprehensive look at what goes into teacher research and what you'll get out of it. Whether you're answering some persistent question about your classroom, thinking about your curriculum, taking a course, researching for a grant application or National Board Certification, Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein have laid out action research as an easy-to-understand process. They've organized What Works? as a teacher-friendly instruction manual, introducing each of the tasks of teacher research one by one-from shaping a question, to designing a study, to conducting it, to disseminating your results. Each step of the way you'll read supportive advice, see illustrations from projects around the U.S., find exercises that hone the skills necessary to do research, encounter numerous creative suggestions for expanding the range and scope of traditional action research, and learn what a vital and important influence it can be on your instruction.

Whether you're a veteran teacher or a novice, What Works? will answer your toughest questions about teacher research so that you can get down to the business of improving your teaching by using research to answer your toughest classroom questions.

Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she directs composition and is on the Women's and Gender Studies faculty. She has been colleagues and collaborators with author Bonnie Sunstein for many years, teaching separately in K-12-school and college settings, and together at professional-development workshops and institutes across the country, including Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Summer Institutes and the University of New Hampshire's summer programs. Both are longtime Heinemann authors of books, chapters, and edited collections. They coauthored FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research, Third Edition (Bedford/St.Martin's). Elizabeth lives in Durham, New Hampshire, with her two daughters, Tosca and Alisha, and her husband, Minshall.

Bonnie Sunstein is professor of English and education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Writing in English and Program Chair in English Education. She teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She has over thirty years of teaching secondary and college English in New England, where she continues to teach in the summers, at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Institute on Writing and Teaching. A practical and engaging consultant, keynote speaker, and workshop leader, Bonnie works frequently with departments of education, universities, local school systems, and conferences of teachers. Her workshops on writing, literacy, portfolios, teacher-research, and cultural studies offer hands-on experience. Bonnie's books for Heinemann include What Works, Composing a Culture, Portfolio Portraits, The Portfolio Standard, and she has contributed many chapters in other collections about writing and research. Her articles, poems, and chapters appear regularly in professional journals and collections. She is co-author of three editions of FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford St.Martins). Bonnie has received Iowa's Collegiate Teaching Award and the English Department's John Gerber Award for excellence in teaching, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Foundation "Imagining America" grant for her FieldWorking Online project. She has led two national portfolio projects, served on NCTE's CEE executive committee, Standing Committee on Research, and was a Trustee of the Research Foundation.