DEFINING THE QUALITY OF PRACTITIONER RESEARCH

Practitioner research is conducted by teachers seeking to improve prac tice, generating research findings in the same settings in which they will be utilized. For those of us engaged in practitioner research, th ere is a wealth of resources to help conceptualize, organize, and impl ement our work; however, we have not yet found a common language for d iscussing the quality of the research that we do. This article briefly compares the central assumptions of practitioner research with those of other, more predominant research paradigms. Based on these assumpti ons, a framework for discussing the quality of our research efforts an d outcomes is proposed.