How can educators, whether in schools or universities, cope with the accelerating demands of teaching? We address this issue head on in our book, published open access by Springer on 1st Feb, ‘Research Thinking for Responsive Teaching: Research Skill Development with In-service and Preservice Educators’. The book has chapters written by authors from Australia, Canada, Indonesia and the USA: https://link.springer.com/book/9789819966783
The demands of the classroom often require decisions to be immediately actioned and the pressures of policy and curriculum elicit longer term planning. Sudden disruptions, such as the move to online learning in COVID-19 lockdowns and the ready access to AI for teachers and students, fall somewhere in-between immediate action and considered response.. In the immediate, long-term and in-between demands on educators’ time and effort, research thinking is needed by teachers to make professional judgements to improve their students’ learning.
Chapter 1 outlines what we mean by ‘research thinking’ and Chapters 2-8 provide studies of educators responding to immediate, long-term, and in-between demands with their research thinking to guide them. Chapters 2-4 concern in-service secondary teachers, variously responding to the immediate demands of the classroom in a geographically remote school, drawing on and synthesising the literature to solve problems and creating their own research-based resources for other teachers to access in Canada and Australia. Chapter 5 demonstrates the research thinking developed by university educators during Educational Development programs in the USA and Canada. Chapters 6 to 8 present preservice teachers engaging in digitally-rich learning that develops their research thinking, including during COVID-19 lockdowns, in Indonesia and Australia as well as engaging in undergraduate research in the USA.
Thanks to University of Calgary, Canada, Monash University, Jambi University, Indonesia, and the University of Adelaide for their willingness to support this book to be Open Access and so available to teachers and university educators globally, whether in nations with developing or developed economies.
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