**3. The researcher's role**

#### **3.1 Related research**

In an action research study Postholm and Skrøvset [34] emphasized the importance of the researcher's reflections on their own role during the research period. They described three factors that are of particular relevance to the present study. First, they pointed to the importance of the researcher having communication skills and

#### *The Researcher's Role: An Intervention Study Using Lesson Study in Norway DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101100*

an attitude that signals symmetry with the participants; this is crucial for creating and maintaining a research community. Second, they focused on the importance of the researcher's ability to redefine their own role and to adjust content and direction during the research period; this can for example, mean that an ongoing project may be steered in unexpected directions or that teachers' desires may change mid-process. The third important factor is the researcher's awareness of the need to establish complementary relationships and trust among the participants. Hargreaves [35] observes that it is only when the participants trust the researcher that they feel emboldened enough to raise questions and voice thoughts without experiencing concern that their professionalism, competence, or knowledge is being called into question.

In a study combining LS and microteaching, Fernandez [36] emphasized the importance of the researcher's ability and willingness to support and challenge teachers in processes of analysis and reflection related to their practice. Fernandez [36] also highlights the researcher's role in maintaining focus on the overarching goal as well as the researcher's ability to collaborate with the participants in a way that ensures both parties, (i.e. researcher and teachers) learn within the project. In a study concerned with teachers' learning processes, Tan [13] focuses on the researcher's ability to encourage new ways of thinking about teaching and learning and new approaches to organizing and enacting teaching. Tan also believes that policymakers afford insufficient attention to the quality of the researchers who front the agenda for promoting teachers' professional development, claiming that the researcher's role is often taken for granted [13]. In a collaborative project between researchers and teachers, Jung and Brady [37] identified the importance of the researcher's ability to launch the discussion within the research community and to address teachers' concerns and challenges.

#### **3.2 The researcher's role in this study**

My role as a researcher, as communicated to the teachers in this study, was to lend support and be a driving force in the developmental processes. This necessitated finding a balance between the need to provide support and the need to drive the process forward, while ensuring that the project was managed and owned by the teachers [22]. I was, therefore, concerned not only with understanding the social interactions and the social structures among the participants, but I also shared with the teachers' aspiration that the project would contribute to improvements in their practice.

As a researcher, being a participant observer in the various LS processes gave me opportunities to gain a broader insight into the teachers' thoughts about teaching and about the challenges they experienced in their practice. Through critical reflective thinking and by challenging the teachers' "commonsense" beliefs about teaching [15], I could seek to promote and maintain an expansive transformation process [24]. Given my own professional background (I was a teacher for several years), I was also aware that I was entering a field of research and practice with which I am familiar.

#### **4. Methodology**

This paper reports a qualitative study that focuses on the researcher's role during development work with teachers. Overall, this is an ethnographic study that is aimed at understanding the teachers' learning culture and the ways in which it may be developed. I have examined my own role as a researcher to address the study's primary research question. This approach required an interrogation of the researcher's role.

Considering my role as a case study or a self-study, I determined that the situation corresponded to what Stake [38] described as an intrinsic case study; that is, the case itself was of primary interest, and I needed to learn more about the particular case in point, namely the researcher's role. Yin [39] emphasized that a case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates by addressing the "how" and "why" questions concerning the phenomenon of interest. Data collection in case studies and self-studies is often extensive and draws on multiple sources to from a comprehensive picture of the topic at hand [40].

#### **4.1 Data collection**

The data collection process in this study took the form of participation in 15 planning meetings and 15 reflection talks, 2 group interviews with the teacher teams (at the project's culmination), and the completion of 40 individual reflection notes by the teachers. Throughout the study, I wrote a research log focusing on my role as researcher. I also had several informal conversations with the teachers, and relevant material concerning the researcher's role from those conversations has been included in the research log.

In this study, I have work with and collaborated with two teacher teams consisting of five teachers on each team, a total of 10 teachers. Among the participants in the study, there were two men and eight women. The one with longest experience as a teacher had worked as a teacher for 35 years and the one with the least experience had worked as a teacher for two years. **Table 1** shows an overview of the participants in the study. Many of the participants had previous experience with professional development work and projects in school, while some had little experience related to such work. The table also shows how many planning- and reflection conversations the participants participated in during the study.

Participation in planning and reflection meetings gave me valuable insight into what the teachers discussed and how they discussed it. This allowed me to formulate further thoughts about how I, in my capacity as researcher, could both support and challenge them in their efforts to establish and maintain an expansive transformation process [24]. The interviews gave me the opportunity to question the participants


#### **Table 1.**

*Overview of the participants in the study.*

#### *The Researcher's Role: An Intervention Study Using Lesson Study in Norway DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101100*

specifically about their perception of the researcher's role and the importance of collaborating with a researcher. I adopted a semi-structured format for the interviews [41, 42], and conducted them as an academic conversation where the researcher's role had a central focus. The objective of the interviews was to gain access to the participants' perspectives on the researcher's role and the importance of cooperating with a researcher in developing their knowledge and learning. I also wished to capture critical perspectives on how the researcher's role could have been improved and adjusted in this project. These perspectives laid the foundation for developing questions and topics for the interviews.

From the teachers' individual reflection notes, I gained insight into their personal thoughts about collaborating with a researcher and the influence it had on their learning and development. The research log became a tool for understanding my own role and permitted me to adopt a meta-perspective on the research process and on my role as a researcher. Since the study is a study of my role as a researcher, the researcher log is an important data source in this study.

All meetings and interviews were audio-recorded, and I personally transcribed the interviews verbatim. Parts of the meetings containing material pertaining to the researcher's role were also transcribed. The study thus generated large amounts of data from multiple sources, as was necessary to assemble as much information as possible about the researcher's role.

#### **4.2 Data analysis**

In addition to exploring and understanding the researcher's role, it was my goal that the project should contribute to developing the teachers' practice. It was therefore necessary to analyze the data continuously throughout the collection process. This gave me the opportunity to form an overview of the project in its entirety and to monitor my own role to ascertain where and how I could support and challenge the teachers in subsequent development work. It was also important to capture the participants' own interpretations and opinions about the researcher's role in the project (the emic perspective) [42, 43], as these perspectives had the potential to inform and enrich my own interpretation. To this end, I also collected the teachers' individual reflection notes throughout the project. This allowed me to form a more holistic perspective on the researcher's role and informed me in designing approaches for sustaining the project's learning and development direction.

To develop a structure for the material, I used the open coding phase described by Strauss and Corbin [44] in the constant comparative method of analysis. In the open coding phase, the data are studied and compared, and categorized according to specific terms [45]. The analytical work commenced with the transcribing of the recordings from the planning meetings and reflection talks. This process gave me an overview of how the teachers were addressing the challenges facing them. Furthermore, I gained some insight into how the teachers were collaborating, what they were discussing, and, not least, how they discussed. To capture a holistic view of the researcher's role, my logbook entries and the teachers' reflection notes were important sources. In moving back and forth between these three data sources, which became the most salient sources in the course of the study, I laid the groundwork for how I, as a researcher, perceived the challenges facing us and how we could work with them. The interviews were also useful in evaluating the researcher's role, but because their value came to light at the project's culmination, they served as secondary sources.

During the process of coding and categorizing the data, some challenges arose in relation to the researcher's role, which have been grouped into the following categories: (1) creating deliberative processes; (2) creating justifications and arguments for actions; and (3) creating exploratory dialogs in cooperation with the teachers. To ensure the quality of the data used, I applied "member-checking" as described by Lincoln and Guba [46], where I continuously analyzed the collected data and presented them to the participants to check whether they matched their experiences and perceptions. These member-checks also helped to ensure the quality of the study. Participation was based on informed consent, and the article complies with the ethical principle of participant anonymity [47]. Consequently, none of the teachers is named.

## **5. Findings**

Within the overall frame of the main research question, the three challenge categories mentioned above are used to structure the presentation of the findings related to the researcher's role. I will present those findings in the current section and elucidate them in the analysis and discussion section. Quotations from my research log and statements from teachers are numbered, and I refer back to them in the analysis and discussion section.

#### **5.1 Challenge 1: creating deliberative processes**

LS as a framework is time-consuming for teachers. If teachers are to work thoroughly in accordance with the various LS processes, it is important that the school management devote sufficient time to the work. In this study, the school management adapted well and planned for the teachers to have the time that they needed. As a result, the first challenge that arose was, unexpectedly, a challenge for me rather than for the teachers. At the end of the first LS cycle, the teachers informed me that the time allowed for preparation, for analyzing the challenge, and for planning the research lesson was too much and that they would probably be able to complete it in half the time. In sifting through the data, I found that the teachers had not sufficiently highlighted the challenges from various perspectives. Factors related to the challenge—such as what the challenge consists of, when and for whom it is a challenge, what the current situation is, and what the desired outcome is—were not discussed thoroughly. This finding forced me to reflect on how the development work might best be taken forward, and in my research log, I wrote:

*I had thought that the teachers had sufficient knowledge of analyzing and exploring their own practices. When my observations and analyses reveal something to contradict this, I question the effects of LS, one of the main tasks of which is to explore, reflect on, and analyze the challenges of one's own practice thoroughly. When teachers lack this competence, it is here that we must begin. This competence needs to be strengthened. (Research log, 1)*

I was fully aware that I had identified something that I felt was lacking in the teachers' practices and that I had touched on an important part of their work. Prior to the study, I had visited the school several times to plan the project and to become acquainted with and establish a relationship of trust with the teachers. Therefore, it was important for me to consider carefully how to convey to them what had emerged from the preliminary analysis. I wrote in my log:

*I know that in order to drive development I have to challenge the teachers on what I perceived as weaknesses in their practice. At the same time, I am afraid to break down the mutual trust we have gained … If I had been one of the teachers, I would also want to hear about what was positive. (Research log, 2)*

In this quote from my log, it is clear that there were tensions to resolve with respect to how the findings should be presented to the participants. In reflecting on this, I used myself as an example, as I attempted to gain insight into the participants' point of view: How would I have reacted to being told this?

In a group interview in the middle of the study, I asked the teachers how they perceived the way I, as a researcher, presented the preliminary findings. These were the responses from two of the teachers:


When we discussed why the planning phase lacked the thoroughness that is essential for fully addressing the challenges, the teachers felt that there were various reasons. Two of them had this to say:


The teachers were honest and open in this discussion which laid a foundation for deeper and more thorough planning that we could develop and strengthen in cooperation. To sustain this mutual trust, it was important that I maintain awareness of the approaches that could help strengthen the planning process. The comment reported above, that two new things at the same time could be too much, also provided an opportunity to reflect on how to take the process forward:

*I must be aware that we have to think and do things gradually, and that development and change takes time and cannot be expected to occur within a short period of time. (Research log, 3)*

As researcher, it challenged me both emotionally and cognitively to point out deficiencies in the ways in which the teachers had analyzed the challenges: emotionally, because I had addressed and pointed out weaknesses in their practice and, cognitively, because these are demanding processes to go through and I (we) had to

find approaches that could create meaningful and evolving dialogs. While this was demanding and difficult for the teachers, they also expressed the view that an analytic and exploratory approach to the challenges laid a foundation for learning and development. As one teacher stated in a planning meeting:

*We have never worked in this way with challenges before. Challenges have previously been discussed there and then in a simple way without us having gained a better understanding of them or solved them. However, to really get into them and work with them has been very meaningful and has clarified for me that parts of my practice must be changed. (Meeting, 2).*

This statement indicates that, prior to the study, the teachers had lacked experience in applying thorough analysis and exploratory conversations to challenges that they faced.

### **5.2 Challenge 2: creating justifications and arguments for action**

This category of challenge was probably not experienced by the teachers themselves as a difficulty that they encountered in their practice. It is a challenge that I identified, but, in my opinion, it represents a crucial element in teachers' learning. Although the teachers had begun to develop a more thorough analytical process, I observed a lack of justification and argumentation for actions in their teaching. In planning meetings and planning documents, there was little justification of practice, and it was clear from observing their teaching that the specific teaching activities related to the challenges were inadequate in addressing the complexities involved. Here, they largely discussed what actions they should choose, with less focus on why and how these specific actions would support the students' learning. This was particularly challenging for me, since it appeared that I had identified a weakness in the teachers' approach to their students. This approach lies at the core teaching, and it was inevitable that they must be challenged further on this point. At the same time, however, I was unsure how they perceived my reflections, and consequently I undertook several rounds of thinking and reflection before I presented my feedback to them. In my research log, I wrote:

*I know that, from my point of view, I am touching a core function when it comes to the practice of the teaching profession, but do the teachers feel the same? However, I must be honest with both the participants and myself so I must address this somehow. How should I present it? How will the teachers react? What have the teachers done before, and what knowledge do they have that can be built on? Which approaches are most likely to be beneficial and meaningful to the teachers in the process of developing justification? (Research log, 4)*

During my reflection process, I was constantly aware of the need to avoid presenting what I perceived as a lack in the teachers' practice as mistakes or weaknesses in their thinking and teaching. I focused, therefore, on determining and building a constructive approach to the development of justifications by asking questions, supporting the teachers, and cooperating with them.

Although the teachers found it tough to have their practice scrutinized, they were also clear that they valued my honesty and that I pointed out potential issues. As one of them stated in an interview:

*We are so accustomed to our culture and ways of doing things that we do not see what we can do differently. Therefore, it is necessary that someone should come from outside who can see things with new perspectives and who is interested in working together with us. (Group interview, 2)*

#### **5.3 Challenge 3: creating exploratory dialogs in cooperation with the teachers**

The following statement appeared in one of the interviews midway through the study:

*Pedagogical discussions and meetings are important to us, but they rarely have a clear agenda or goal. We meet and talk about what we need there and then, occasionally as a debrief, occasionally as planning. We generally share ideas, support each other, and are not critical of others' ideas. The problem is that we tend to lose focus and start talking about other things. (Group interview, 3)*

As somebody who taught for many years this statement did not surprise me. In this regard, another finding from this category—one that emerged during informal one-to-one dialogs with participants, is particularly interesting. During these conversations, the teachers asked more questions and shared thoughts, ideas, and new perspectives that had not arisen during planning meetings or in reflection talks between teachers.

Compared with the two previous challenges, this challenge was easier to handle. In this case, the challenge did not derive from any lack or weakness in the participants' knowledge; rather, knowledge and thoughts had emerged in one context that had remained unspoken in another context. In my research log, I wrote:

*It is clear that teachers have knowledge and perspectives that do not emerge in teacher conversations. Could there be anything in the school's culture that compromises the trust between teachers? Is it a culture that simply prioritizes a nice time at work and agreement on most issues? Are teachers afraid to voice their opinions to other teachers? What has created this culture? (Research log, 5)*

The research log was my tool for reflection, wherein I could outline several possible reasons for the phenomenon and devise possible solutions. This time, however, I wished to push the teachers further to identify their own reasons and solutions, because I perceived this as a positive finding and felt encouraged to challenge them more. After presenting my findings, I asked the teachers, "Why do different knowledge and different perspectives emerge in conversations with me but not in talks between teachers?" In discussion, the teachers pointed to several factors:


These statements from the teachers were valuable to me as a researcher, and they became important for our subsequent collaboration. None of them mentioned that they lacked the knowledge necessary to enter into pedagogical discussions. The issues they raised concerned perceived lack of security and trust, lack of confidence, and a desire for colleagues to ask questions and be honest. In the research log, I wrote:

*I have visited the school often and invested a lot of time in building trust and openness. I made a conscious effort to praise what should be praised and, although it has been challenging, I have the courage to challenge the teachers where necessary … One does not engage in challenging dialogs if there is no trust present. A sense of security is necessary to negotiate the unknown. (Research log, 6)*
