What do participants learn from participating in a research group?
What do participants learn from participating in a research group?
Samenvatting
Teacher educators' role in in being an active researcher is more and more acknowledged: teacher educators need to be able to do practioner research themselves and they are expected to support student teachers in doing research as well. This is a rather new role for most teacher educators and therefore there is a need to develop research competencies (Lunenberg et al, 2014). There are several opportunities to develop research competencies (Willemse & Boei, 2013) and one of them is to participate in a research group. As Boei et al (2014) suggest, it is beneficial to start with small research projects with a focus in one's own practice and to collaborate with others.
In our institute, several research groups exist. In these groups, 5 to 8 teacher educators participate. They all receive 4 to 6 hours per week to work on their own inquiry and they discuss their work in monthly group meetings. The group is supervised and guided by a senior researcher (professor).
The central question in our study is: 'what do participants learn from participating in a research group?