AARE

Annual Conference

29 November-2 December 1999

Melbourne

Brenda Cherednichenko, Neil Hooley, Tony Kruger and Rod Moore

School of Education

Victoria University of Technology

Connections between the broad restructuring of schools and improvements in student learning outcomes are not well understood. The work in progress reported in this paper attempts to provide some insight into this issue. It arises from a three-year ARC Collaborative Research Grant involving teams from Victoria University of Technology, Queensland University of Technology and the National Schools Network as industry partner. The Victoria University of Technology team adopted the techniques of collaborative action research as its framework methodology and classroom teacher Case Writing as the first step in data collection. Compilations of cases, commentaries, student work samples and discussions, involving teacher and university researchers, provided the basis for a layered analysis and interpretation of reform in four schools. An example of the research in one school will be presented. The purpose and nature of case writing in creating the educational conditions for the development of practitioner reflection, meaning and theorising are explored. The paper will also discuss how generalisable findings might emerge from practitioner research and how those findings might claim validity.

Researching school change is no simple matter. It is a politically charged activity for all who participate. From the multiple perspectives present in a school staff room, contending groups can find support for practical proposals in published research. As a result teachers who seek better ways to teach and to organise schools risk becoming entangled in national debates on education as research findings increasingly are being implicated in the funding and policy preferences of political parties. Research findings and resultant recommendations get 'read' differently as each group within the education community interprets the research from the perspective of their own interests.

The task of researching school change is complex also because of the range of methodologies which can be used to study schools as they change; from large scale studies designed to establish the validity of school and teacher effectiveness criteria to micro-level biographical accounts which seek to gain a practitioner view. This paper will present an outline of the methodology of a longitudinal study of school change in a research project which arguably fits somewhere between the methodological extremes. It will outline how cycles of Case Writing by teachers over the period of the project have formed the starting point for reflective interpretation by teams of teachers in collaboration with university research colleagues. The paper will report how successive phases of interpretation are enabling the developing accounts of school change to be validated through collaborative reflection by teams of teachers within and across participating schools and the research team from the School of Education at Victoria University of Technology.

The Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring, initiated during 1995 and nearing completion in 1999, has been the outcome of a long-term collaborative relationship between the School of Education at Victoria University of Technology and the National Schools Network (NSN). In its small scale (6-8 research sites), the Longitudinal Study sought to investigate change at the classroom level in schools newly inducted into the NSN, and in receipt of the Network’s highly targeted collaborative support and funding. Each of the project schools had volunteered their participation: firstly in the NSN, which had accepted their membership applications, and in the Study, whose form was made known well before the research program commenced.

The Study intended to obtain a view, from the intimate perspective of teachers’ practices, of the impact of school reform on students’ learning: to report any generalisable connections between structural and cultural change in school, the practices of teachers and students in classrooms and learning, the outcome of students’ practices. The Study was not an inquiry into change in schools, randomly chosen and relatively isolated in terms of their community settings and educational profiles. From the outset, the research teams anticipated that the participating teachers would be receiving continuing professional development from the NSN in the particular restructuring approach adopted by each school. The research teams therefore, were working with teachers who were ideologically committed to varying degrees and who were 'tuned into' a greater diversity of educational discourses than might normally be expected.

The research design intended that participating teachers would work in teams with university research colleagues in generating collaborative portrayals of a policy-supported and funded school change. As much as possible, the Study sought to establish the reflexively aware and democratic relations of collaborative Action Research between the researchers - teacher researchers and university researchers - and the reform agencies, which were the National and State NSN offices and their staff. The recurring cycles of Action Research commence with Case Writing which experience has suggested (Western Melbourne Roundtable 1997) is a means of documenting practice accessible to teachers and supportive of ongoing reflection on action.

The schools were drawn from Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria (2 schools). None of the schools, interestingly and possibly unfortunately, were mainstream Victorian Government schools, which has meant that the 'self-managing/self-governing schools' development in that Australian State was not explicitly included in the research.

Initiated with funding in 1996 from the National Schools Network, the 'Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring' has been supported during the period 1997-1999 by an ARC Collaborative Research Grant. The application for ARC funding presented the context and nature of the research project.

The university research teams sought to work within a set of principles derived from NSN interests:

• The connection between student learning outcomes and equity, as exemplified by the research of the Center for Educational Restructuring at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Lee, Smith and Croninger 1995 and Gunn and King 1996).
• The related proposition that student learning outcomes can be improved most successfully through the adoption by teachers and schools of authentic pedagogy, which requires students to learn through disciplined inquiry based on an active construction of their own knowledge.
• Authentic pedagogy cannot be an imposed technical development in a school. It can only be introduced if teachers are working together in a collaborative organisational culture, in which the change process arises from a sense of shared purpose and values and ongoing means for collegial reflection on and development of change.
• Professional development is critical in the development of such an organisational culture. The NSN was to be an active contributor to the research through its support for schools and teachers in their rethinking and restructuring plans and through its national program of teacher professional development, in which teachers in the research project were to be regular participants.

University researchers who seek to work with teachers in the interest of progressive school reform cannot choose to ignore 'system' demands and be critical only. Teachers are expected to make a purposive contribution; they answer to educational and bureaucratic authority, and in some jurisdictions depend for their continuing livelihood on the perceived improvement they have made to school and system priorities. In any collaborative venture whose aim is to understand schooling and to improve it, the inquiry necessarily transforms the intentions and practices of school and university colleagues. Collaborative research is primarily practitioner research, where teacher researchers and university researchers come to a 'co-learning agreement' (Wagner 1997: 17) which is a 'Reflexive, systematic inquiry, stimulated in part by ongoing collegial communication between researchers and practitioners'. Research of this nature will be directed towards the interests of the practitioners in constructing the possibility of 'alternatives that may be necessary to make good on particular reform ideals' (Wagner 1997: 17).

Being constructive in research, as distinct from being analytical or critical,

means that the researchers - normally university-based researchers - must locate themselves where their school colleagues stand: within the debates about mainstream school reform, school and teacher effectiveness and related questions such as the meaning of learning outcomes. Of course, the adoption in this investigation of action-based and dialogic investigation opens up the field of research to other non-functional understandings derived from interpretive narrative inquiry and the critical potential of action research.

Collaboration by the university research teams with the National Schools Network has led to the open politicisation of the research. The NSN chose the university teams through a competitive process whose selection criteria reflected the Network's interests and commitments. Those criteria have provided a structural field for the research which has emphasised that the study should respond constructively to government-sponsored school reform by using methods which directly include teachers in data collection, interpretation and the proposition of findings. The research is thus unashamedly socially progressive; both from the institutional level of schooling and also in its recognition of teachers as social agents.

The NSN evolved from the tripartite pact of the Hawke Labor Government with the trades unions and employers. In its aims, the NSN sought improved learning outcomes through changes in school organisation and teachers' work practices, brought about by teachers' collaborative action in particular schools, 'networked' throughout Australia .

The NSN, therefore, connected directly with mainstream efforts at restructuring schools, such as the Coalition of Essential Schools and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools in the United States of America. While it may have attracted academics committed to critical/political analyses of education, the NSN was more concerned to work on practical educational questions with which the broad range of teachers identified. The unifying theme of the work of the NSN has been that enhanced students' learning is the outcome of school reform led by collaborative action and reflection by teachers. NSN supported research into school reform, the research teams recognised, would require direct participation by teachers in the framing and execution of the research, for example through Action Research which had already been adopted by the Network as its principal research methodology.

Teacher documentation of school reform has been one of the enduring commitments of the NSN, contained for example in the 'Snapshots' of the NSN Newsletter and the active contribution of teachers to other NSN research projects (Groundwater-Smith 1997 and Dobbins et al 1997). Those accounts of restructuring accorded primacy to teachers' descriptions and understandings of their schools and their own practices in reporting, in the cases of the earlier NSN research projects, the importance of assessment and collaboration in school restructuring. What those projects and the NSN 'Snapshots' may not have made sufficiently clear was how those changes affected students' learning. That impression has informed the Longitudinal Study and presents a challenge: the extent to which the Action Research process might elicit evidence that particular kinds of school restructuring will enhance students' learning.

The VUT research team, therefore, has faced a methodological dilemma about the goals of the research and the role of the research team members'. Participatory action research offers the potential for teachers, and researchers too, to become 'transformative intellectuals' (Aronowitz and Giroux 1985). Are the university researchers, for example critical friends in action research, committed to the generation of 'new ways of knowing that interrupt power imbalances' (Lather 1991:12)? Or as Niemi and Kemmis (1998) contend are action researchers using the communicative possibility of action research to change the 'interpretive horizon' of participants so that they can respond to and reconstruct relations between 'system' and 'lifeworld'. Either formulation locates the teacher-as-effective practitioner in conflict with the teacher-as-researcher: interesting for the critical friend but hardly the basis for collaboration between university and school colleagues.

The question for the research methodology is not to find a resolution of that conflict, but to find a means of documenting how teachers might experience it. That is, the central data collection question was to find a means - accessible, limited in time demands and non-threatening - for teachers to document practice. The journal, typically used in Action Research to record and reflect on practice, may be a risky approach for teachers given the need in the Longitudinal Study for public disclosure.

Journal keeping also confers an additional editorial demand on the research: what to report, what to omit, how teachers might be compromised if the contents of their journals might be publicised. The research design has proposed the use of Case Writing (eg see Shulman 1992) as an alternative to the journal, for teachers to record their practices and participation in school reform. Thus one of the subsidiary questions which has faced the research teams has been the testing of teachers' Case Writing as a valid approach to data collection in educational research; and as the basis for practitioner reflection in Action Research. Located within ongoing collaborative reflection on action involving teachers and university colleagues, cycles of case writing, the research intended, might enable a documentation of the complex layering of school restructuring and teachers' work practices.

The use of Case Writing in the research deliberately applied a strategy which the Victoria University research team had trialed in the Innovative Links Project, as a means for teachers to document their practices. Over a three year period, the teachers in the Western Melbourne Roundtable wrote and published, in individual accounts of school change, over 100 cases. In itself that is a noteworthy achievement. But even more striking was the way in which the cases enabled teachers to use their descriptions to reflect on practice and to initiate change. That is, the writing of the cases was the critical first step in teachers reflexively and reflectively understanding and acting to reform school organisation and pedagogy. Reading and discussing cases followed, a process which inducted colleagues into the reform and thus strengthened it. The relevance of Case Writing for practitioner documentation of school reform was recognised jointly by the Victoria University team and the NSN - a partner in the Innovative Links Project - which has subsequently published a selection of the cases (Western Melbourne Roundtable 1997).

Case Writing, as elaborated in this study, draws together narrative and practitioner research which are two developing themes in current discussions of educational research. For example, recent editions of Educational Researcher have given prominence to discussions of both approaches (Eisner 1997, Kennedy 1997, Constas 1998, Howe 1998, Anderson and Heer 1999, Burdell and Swadener 1999, Coulter 1999). According to Constas (1998) narrative is located appropriately within research which he identifies with post-modernism. As an unnamed colleague asserted to Campbell and Kane (1998: 141), in their 'fiction' of school-based teacher education, 'Any account of anything is no more than one person's description of what he or she thinks they are hearing or seeing'. That is not the position taken in this research.

On the other hand, Anderson and Heer (1999) propose a less relativistic conception of practitioner research and suggest that practitioner research and validity might not be mutually exclusive. For the Longitudinal Research team at VUT, the transformation of Case Writing from narrative only to data in collaborative practitioner research emerges from the research design negotiated with the National Schools Network and the participating schools. In establishing the research as a 'Co-learning agreement' (Wagner 1997), the teacher practitioners/researchers and the university researchers grounded the research in an ongoing dialogue on the meanings contained within practitioners' descriptions and understandings. Successive episodes of Case Writing and collaborative reflection arguably will lead the teacher researchers and the university researchers, at the very least, to propose findings which have locally agreed significance.

Accounts of school restructuring, initiated through teachers' narratives such as Case Writing, consequently will open up the possibility that the teacher researchers and university researchers will be able to talk to 'each other, often across the borders of discipline and identity locations' (Burdell and Swadener 1999: 26). From that perspective, a conversation among practitioners might be possible, and lead to common understandings which have moment within the realm of practice. But how does the 'freedom' of case writing fit within a project which is located uneasily in the intersection of school reform and school effectiveness research? The demand of the research has been that case writing provide evidence about the relationship between change, structure, teaching and learning. Teachers' writing and interpretation have been the basis of data collection and the first level of analysis in the project. For Case Writing to be data in a Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring, the teacher researchers will need to adopt a narrative structure which explicates the connections between organisation, pedagogy and learning. How the teacher researchers and university researchers compose those relationships in both their writing and subsequent collaborative reflections will directly affect the extent to which the research reveals the effect of restructuring on learning outcomes.

By articulating a philosophy and a set of aims which couple school organisation, teachers' practices and student learning, the NSN is occupying similar conceptual territory to that of school effectiveness programs and research. The emphasis is seen most clearly in the work of the Center of the Organization and Restructuring of Schools at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The research of the Center has established a connection between improved learning outcomes as measured by test scores and by the application of the Center's own typology of learning, and the extent to which teachers and schools have adopted pedagogically 'authentic' work practices. The claim made by the research is that, not only does authentic pedagogy improve learning, it also 'pays off in a more equitable distribution of achievement' (Newmann and Wehlage 1995: 27).

School effectiveness research seeks to develop criteria for school organisation and curriculum which can be generalised across schools; eg statements such as 'clear school mission' and 'strong leadership' are common in the genre. But effectiveness prescriptions contradict the NSN's commitment to teacher agency contained within its adoption of Action Research as preferred research methodology, not only in this study, but more generally in its work with teachers and schools. In its diagnosis that improvement in learning outcomes results from teachers' collaborative rethinking and action in restructuring school organisation and pedagogy, the NSN is seeking a basis for teaching which is quite different from the technology of teaching for which Reynolds (1998) has pleaded. It is closer to what Elliott (1993: 84-85) has termed a 'practical science paradigm', which will bring school and university colleagues together in research involving 'the collaborative production of joint case studies and cross-case comparisons that represent dialogues about, and understandings of, educational situations, problems and issues'. In these accounts, assertions about effectiveness are likely to be no more important than insights about participation, teacher agency and critique.

On the 1996 election of the Federal Coalition Government, the organisational and funding assumptions of the research design substantially altered. From 1997, the participating schools and teachers faced diminishing professional and financial support. The cessation of Federal funding for the NSN weakened the direction of the intentionally national aspect of the changes being planned in each school. And funding for change in each school, never generous at $2-7000 per school per year for NSN membership, essentially was non-existent; the funding paid to each school to support the research became the funding supporting the re-structuring.

Clearly the partners in the Longitudinal Study of School Re-Structuring have faced a crisis. The connection of the NSN with the participating schools has become less certain as the Network has re-established itself as a non-Government organisation. An even more dramatic diminution in the Network’s effect on change in the schools has become evident. The collaborative approaches to school re-structuring, promoted by the NSN are now just one influence among many on decision making by teachers and principals in schools. The emphasis of the research project has continued to be school re-structuring. But the collaborative and teacher-centred nature of change may lack a common and national change focus. Collaborative approaches to school re-structuring will take their place uncomfortably alongside the hard reality of national and state education policy which now emphasises, in the words of 'The Adelaide Declaration on Schooling' (DETYA 1998), 'key performance measures' and 'national targets or benchmarks in relation to the agreed key performance measures'. As the NSN and its ideology and practices of collaborative teacher-initiated reform recede from the consciousness of participating teachers, the research undertaken in the Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring may reflect more, how teachers' work is being reconstructed by a new politically driven agenda.

The way out - at least, the way taken by the VUT research team - of the difficulty of developing collaborative teacher-generated research within a policy context which is framed by the discourse of effectiveness is to move beyond either simplistic compliance or resistance. In their respective critiques of effectiveness and the application of the discourse of outcomes in education Elliott (1996) and Smyth and Dow (1998) acknowledge that teachers and students are active in the construction of teaching, learning and knowledge. Making that construction explicit, within an ongoing collaborative inquiry, has been the methodological impetus for the research. The school reform literature (eg Fullan and Hargreaves 1992) is only broadly informing on the teacher-as- researcher approach of the NSN. Apart from the adoption of the case study as the principal method of reporting small scale investigations and statistically framed effectiveness research in large samples, the literature, including the influential work of Hargreaves (1994), is quite silent on the methodological question of how the effect of restructuring on learning might be established through practitioner- researcher methods.

Through cycles of Case Writing and collaborative reflection on action the research in this project has supported teachers in describing and proposing explanations for school restructuring experiences. The reliance on Case Writing as a primary source of data might be taken as the 'naïve search of authenticity' (Delamont 1997: 605) of narrative forms of research. But located within an ongoing action research framework, Case Writing arguably opens up the 'complexes of meaning, networks of interpretation' (Fraser 1998: 124) which reflect and constitute teachers' pragmatic theories about 'the social context and the social practice of communication' (ibid: 139). Here action research is less the early Habermasian 'critical social science' than it is collective 'communicative evaluation' which 'invites participants - to the extent that they can do so under the demands of practice - to set aside the exigencies of practice to reflect as openly, thoughtfully, critically and self-critically as possible on the nature and consequences of their work' (Niemi and Kemmis 1998). Outcomes are to be explicitly acknowledged and understood, if not pre-determined.

Altrichter (1998), writing on the contentious relationship between action research and 'quality' in research has posed two ethical conditions for an 'alternative methodology' which can guide the practitioner-researcher.

•  Action research should be compatible with the educational aims of the situation under research. E.g., data collection by performance tests based on individualistic competition will be incompatible with a classroom which aims to develop students' co-operation.

• Action research holds that profound and lasting development of practice will only occur in collaboration with other persons concerned with the situation under research and not against their will. Thus, the research strategy must build on democratic and cooperative human relationships and contribute to their further development.

These conditions have provided an ongoing justification for the research reported here. The connection between school restructuring and learning outcomes is fundamental to the research. But the particular definitions of 'outcome' are not determined by the methodology, but are those which the practitioners use to bring meaning to their classroom activity. The result of this methodology will be no claim about 'valid' correlations between effectiveness factors and measurements of students' learning. If generalisations are possible in this research study, they are likely to be both approximate and temporary, always dependent on teachers' validation of the findings in their own practices.

Practitioners' Case Writing is the lynchpin of the research method in this research. The Cases record teachers' knowledgeable portrayals of practice through which practice becomes understood and justified. In that way Case Writing is like the case study of social inquiry (Walton 1992: 122) which comes

The application of Case Writing to research appears to be novel; most reports of Case Writing have been of its use in support of teacher education or as a basis for teachers’ collaborative reflection on practice (eg see Shulman 1992, Brady 1999, Purdie and Smith 1999). Case Writing as a form of data collection in research, and as a starting point for teachers and researchers to come to agreement about practice-related insights, assumes that teachers’ writing is a reflection of practice, however one-sided and approximate. The Victoria University approach to the Longitudinal Study research expects to generate understanding of teachers’ knowledge and practices and students’ learning through the accretion of descriptions and collaborative analysis of teaching and learning practices which emerge from collections of Cases which emerge from practice over time.

The Victoria University team conceived the research as a dialogical engagement by the participating teachers and the researchers with practice as described in the text of Cases. The principal basis for analysis and understanding is the interpretations of Cases made by practitioners. Thus the question of teachers’ judgement about practice is the cornerstone of the research . The direction of analysis is the reflective and reflexive connection of text with practice, not the separation from the text of a ‘story' or ‘discourse’ which exists abstractly removed from practice.

Schematically, the Action Research form of the study is shown in Figure 1. Collections of teachers' Case Writing, prepared twice per year, initiate collaborative analysis and reflection in each school. Local findings inform local practice in the fashion of Action Research. The research also exposes local practice and understanding to a broader evaluation through an annual 'validation conference' which brings teachers from all participating schools and the university research team together. 'Validated' findings are then available for local testing.

The research is thus composed of 'layers' of practitioners' description and interpretation, from which explanations and proposals for action emerge.

Layer 1: Case Writing

From these Action Research cycles, the teacher researchers and university researchers will be able to generate individual case studies of restructuring in each school. Through the multiple layerings, the case studies and the findings implicit in them will be more than disconnected examples of change. The cycles of reflection and the testing of understandings in renewed practice suggest how the findings of the research might be able to advance stronger claims for validity than in conventional case studies.

The Appendix contains a brief portrayal of the research in one school. It presents an extract of a teacher's Case Writing and a summary of the reflective analysis and development which occurred in the initial years of the research.

However much practitioner research is growing in popularity and perceived usefulness, its enduring difficulty will be the claims that researchers can make about the validity of its findings. No a priori solution exists for the problem, which appears to be an inevitable result of the 'soft' nature of educational research (Larabee 1998). Mishler (1990) has argued that validity in the conventional scientific sense has less relevance in social science inquiry than 'trustworthiness' or 'validation'. The test for the researcher is not if findings are objective and neutral, but that 'for more and more investigators' that they 'work' (ibid: 419), a recognition that they are a part of 'the social world - a world constructed in and through our discourse and actions, through praxis' (ibid: 420).

Anderson and Heer (1999:16) have proposed five tentative tests of validity which may enable explanations of practitioner research to acquire the 'status' of the generalisations expected of 'research':

The methodology of the Longitudinal Study in School Restructuring has sought to include such practice-based tests of validity. Assertions about the validation of findings, which the Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring makes, emerge from the layered methodology of the research:

Its commitment to practitioner research locates the research team in a methodological framework whose axes are school effectiveness, narrative inquiry and the democratic field of practitioner action research. The research team has faced considerable difficulty in sustaining the principle that the participating teachers hold the primary responsibility for describing, interpreting and theorising change. At this late stage, approaching four years after the commencement of the study, the VUT team has deferred any conventional research analysis, preferring to delay that task, until school colleagues have had as much opportunity as possible to propose collective understandings of their experiences of school restructuring. As those agreements become clearer, the study will enter its final phase as the university research team relates the findings of the collaborative inquiry to the key concepts contained in the school reform literature. The challenge for the research team will be to undertake that meta-analysis while preserving the integrity of the insights of the teacher-researchers.

The tests of the validity of practitioner research proposed by Anderson and Heer (1999) are effectively internal - to the research and to practice more broadly. If the findings of practitioner research are to be accepted as having generalised applicability, they will need support from multiple sources, such as provided by similar studies reported in the educational literature. Thus a future task for the research is to develop a means of proposing generalisable findings from the Longitudinal Study of School Restructuring. An essential condition of that phase of the research is that it does not apply an externally generated analytical framework, such as one which the university researchers might impose on the data, after the teacher-researchers have completed their work in the project. The project is collaborative research!

Elsewhere the VUT team (Cherednichenko et al 1998) has reported a framework for analysing practitioners' documentation of their practice. The framework - practice described, practice interpreted, practice theorised, practice changed - allows the researcher to analyse Case Writing, for example, without evaluating the practice reported, the teachers' discourse in the Case and the nature of the educational arguments which are evident. In the view of the VUT research team, maintaining practitioners' explanations is critical in the research. The role of the university researchers is to 'bundle' school-based findings and to relate those findings to published accounts of school reform.

There is no place in the research design for independent university researcher analysis, which applies theoretical constructs which the teacher-researchers have not applied themselves. The university researchers are not seeking to be passive recorders of teachers' discussions in this research. Their participation is evident at all stages of the research, by agreement: in the 'co-learning agreement' (Wagner 1997) with the schools and the NSN which initiated the study; in the use of Case Writing and the desired internal structure of the Cases; in the initial analytical framework for collaborative reflection; and in the organisation and agenda of the validation process.

Altrichter, H. 1998. 'Quality Features in an Action Research Strategy'. Proceedings of the Second International Practitioner Research Conference. July 1998: University of Sydney: http//www.edfac.esyd.edu.au/projects/rescon/Papers/altrichter.html

Anderson, G.L. and Heer, K. 1999. 'The New Paradigm Wars: Is There Room for Rigorous Practitioner Knowledge in Schools and Universities'. Educational Researcher. June-July: 12-21, 40.

Brady, L. 1999. Teacher Cases: A Qualitative View of Teachers' Work. Sydney: Prentice Hall Australia.

Burdell, P. and Swadener, B.B. 1999. 'Critical Personal Narrative and Autoethnography in Education: Reflections on a Genre'. Educational Researcher. August-September: 21-26.

Campbell, A. and Kane, I. 1998. School-Based Teacher Education: Telling Tales from a Fictional Primary School. London: David Fulton.

Cherednichneko, B., Gay, J., Hooley, N., Kruger, T. and Mulraney, R.. 'Case Writing: Making Teachers' Knowledge Public', , in Down, B., Hogan, C. and Swan, P. 1998. Reclaiming Professional Knowledge: New Ways of Thinking About Teachers' Learning. Murdoch University: Centre for Curriculum and Professional Development.

Constas, M. 1998. 'The Changing Nature of Educational Research and a Critique of Postmodernism'. Educational Researcher. March: 26-33.

Coulter, D. 1999. 'The Epic and the Novel'. Educational Researcher April: 4-13

Delamont, S. 1997. 'Fuzzy Borders and the Fifth Moment: methodological issues facing the sociology of education'. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 18(4): 601-606.

Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs 1999. The Adelaide Declaration on Schooling.

Eisner, E.W. 1997. 'The Promise and Perils of Alternative Forms of Data Representation'. Educational Researcher. August-September: 4-10.

Elliott, J. 'Professional Education and the Idea of a Practical Educational Science' in Elliott, J. 1993.

Elliott, J. (ed) 1993. Reconstructing Teacher Education. London: Falmer Press

Elliott, J. 1996. 'School Effectiveness Research and its Critics: alternative visions of schooling'. Cambridge Journal of Education. 26(2): 199-224.

Fraser, N. 'The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics', in Mariniello and Bove 1998.

Fullan, M. and Hargreaves, A. (eds)1992. Teacher Development and Educational Change. London: Falmer Press.

Groundwater-Smith, S. 1996. Let's Not Live Yesterday Tomorrow. National Schools Network Research Paper, No 3. Ryde, NSW: National Schools Network.

Gunn, J. and King, M.B. 1996. 'Authentic Pedagogy and Achievement in School Restructuring: Lessons from Research and Practice'. Conference Papers of Reform Agendas Conference: Making Education Work. 29 June- 1 July, University of Sydney. National Schools Network.

Hargreaves, A. 1994. Changing Teachers, Changing Times: teachers' work and culture in the postmodern age. London: Cassell

Howe, K.R. 1998. 'The Interpretive Turn and the New Debate in Education'. Educational Researcher. November: 13.

Kennedy, M.M. 1997. 'The Connection between Research and Practice'. Educational Researcher. October: 4-12.

Lather, P. 1991. Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Post-Modern. New York: Routledge.

Larabee, D.F. 1998. 'Educational Researchers: Living with a Lesser Form of Knowledge'. Educational Researcher. November: 4-12

Lee, V.E., Smith, J. and Crooning, R. 1995. 'Another look at high school restructuring'. Issues in Restructuring Schools' No 9. Madison, Wis: Centre on Organisation and Restructuring of Schools.

Mariniello, S. and Bove, P.A. 1998. Gendered Agents: Women and Institutional Knowledge. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Mishler, E.G. 1990. 'Validation in Inquiry-Guided Research: The Role of Exemplars in Narrative Studies'. Harvard Educational Review. 60(4) November: 415-442.

Niemi, H. and Kemmis, S. 1998. A New View of Evaluation: Communicative Evaluation. Mimeo. Article prepared for LlinE(Lifelong Learning in Europe).

National Schools Network

Newmann, F.M. and Wehlage, G.G. 1995. Successful School Restructuring: A Report to the Public and Educators. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Peters, J., Dobbins, R. and Johnson, B. 1996. Restructuring and Organisational Change. National Schools Network Research Paper, No 4. Ryde, NSW: National Schools Network.

Purdie, N and Smith, D. 1999. Case Studies in Teaching and Learning: Australian Perspectives. Sydney: Prentice Hall Australia.

Ragin, C.R., and Becker, H.S. 1992. What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reynolds, D. 1998. 'Better Teachers, Better Schools'. Presentation by Professor David Reynolds University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 30 October. 6 pages. http://www.teach-tta.gov.au.uk/speech.html.

Shulman, J. 1992. Case Methods in Teacher Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Smyth, J. and Dow, A. 1998. 'What's Wrong with Outcomes? Spotter planes, action plans and steerage of the educational workplace'. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 19(3): 291-303.

Wagner, J. 1997. 'The Unavoidable Intervention of Educational research: A Framework for Reconsidering Researcher-Practitioner Cooperation'. Educational Researcher. October: 13-22.

Walton, J. 'Making the theoretical case', in Ragin and Becker 1992.

Western Melbourne Roundtable 1997. Teachers Write: A handbook for teachers writing about changing classrooms for a changing world. National Schools Network: Sydney.