Action Research and Teacher Professional Development: "Action research/teacher research and teacher inquiry is part of a new vision of teacher education and personal/professional development. It suggests that what educators need are opportunities to explore and question their own and others’ interpretations, practices, and ideologies..."
Every educator is a researcher. After spending a few years in a classroom, she/he will have developed an array of practices and habits often reflecting current formal research (I teach a variety of educational theory/practice courses to college instructors and regularly hear comments like "oh, I do that already, I just didn't know there was a phrase for it"). Action research becomes particularly attractive when a distributed group of educators connect via social software and begin to dialogue about their experiences. As Chris notes in his post, educators do not often clearly document their research. Blogs and wikis are effective documentation tools...adding significant value (in terms of communication, dialogue, and sharing) to the general concepts of action research. As those experiences are shared - particularly strong within the K-12 sector - a rich pool of information becomes available for formal research activities as well.