A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

3. What is Exploratory 
Action Research?
In the last chapter, we considered the general characteristics of research,
and also saw what ‘teacher-research’ can look like and why it might be 
beneficial. In this chapter let’s look in more detail at what is involved in a
teacher exploring her own practice and then acting on her findings to improve 
the situation, in a process of ‘Exploratory Action Research’.

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| What is Exploratory Action Research?
3.1 The value of ‘exploring’ 
Exploratory Action Research, as explained in this chapter,
is a way to explore, understand and improve our practice
as teachers. We will first discuss the value of ‘exploring’
and later we’ll move on to show how this can contribute
to appropriate forms of ‘acting’ for change. Let’s start by 
looking at two example situations which involve a teacher 
managing a puzzling or a challenging classroom situation. 
Task 3.1 @
Answer the question below about these situations. You can 
check your answer in the answer key. 
1. A teacher feels her students are 
not motivated enough in her class. 
She wonders whether she could 
improve this by using videos in 
her class so she decides to plan a 
lesson including videos showing 
songs, funny clips and film extracts. 
2. A teacher has noticed that his 
students’ speaking abilities are 
limited since they hardly 
communicate using the target 
language. In order to change this 
situation, this teacher decides to 
add more group work to his classes. 
What do these situations have in common?
Choose (a), (b) or (c)
A. Teachers in both examples collected data about
the situation.
B. Teachers applied some sort of ‘intervention’
or ‘action’ to solve the situation.