Supporting the Continued Professional Development of Teachers through the Use of Vignettes.

Introduction Over the last decades qualitative inquiries have become increasingly common in the field of educational research. Often, researchers report having struggled to collect, manage, and analyze their data. Existing methods usually require long-term engagement with the research context and, as a result, generate great volumes of data which are difficult to manage. In addition, they are time consuming and demanding of resources. This suggests that there is a need to find new ways of collecting and analyzing data in order to make qualitative inquiry more feasible, not only for experienced researchers, but also for schools and teachers who want to carry out investigations in their school contexts. This article reports on a method developed for teacher self development. It is grounded in the classroom and within the everyday repertoire of skills and resources available for teachers. It is developed under the general rubric of action research which positions teachers as insider researchers of their own practice. Action research techniques attempt to engage teachers with their practice, to heighten their awareness of action within the process that affects change in the classroom. For this to be effective the actions of teachers and the feedback on their consequences of theses actions need to be provided to teachers rapidly and in context so teachers can fully reflect and re-conceptualize their actions. In this article, we suggest one feasible method of qualitative inquiry which can help in the development of teachers within the context of their own school communities. Although the existing research literature has many references to the philosophies of action research and their application in many educational contexts (e.g., Harrington et al., 2006; Warwick & Blatchford, 2006; Ponte, 2005) it is not rich with examples of actual methods which can be used for collecting and analyzing data to inform teacher practice. We recognize though that there has been some notable work in this area. For example, in a paper written mainly with external researchers in mind, Ainscow, Hargreaves, and Hopkins (1995) report the development of three techniques for collecting data for teacher development purposes. They argue that the rationale for these techniques is to help in the generation of research data leading to refinement of relevant theory. Angelides (2001) developed a further technique for analyzing school practice: the analysis of 'critical incidents.' The critical incident analysis is a technique by which certain outsiders (e.g., inspectors or academics) collect, analyze, and interpret critical incidents that have occurred in a classroom, and then, in collaboration with teachers from a school, explore how that interpretation could inform improvement efforts. This technique could be useful to researchers and those within schools who are interested in identifying the details of practice, since it offers an efficient means of probing into the deeper working assumptions of stakeholders. It can also be used alongside others in creating a case study of a school and for making sense of the role of culture in school improvement (Angelides & Ainscow, 2000). In this article, we take the idea of Miles (1990) about vignettes and the direct impact they can have on school practice, synthesize it with ideas from other scholars who worked with vignettes, eventually modify it by using a different definition of vignettes, implement the process, and try to find out whether it could be useful for collecting and analyzing data that can be valuable for professional development purposes. Defining Vignettes Different researchers refer to vignettes with different definitions, and they use them in a rather different manner (e.g., Ainscow, 2000; Alexander & Becker, 1978; Barter & Renold, 2000; Erickson, 1986; Finch, 1987; Miles, 1990; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Poulou, 2001; Pransky & Baily, 2002; Schoenberg & Radval, 2000). …