Over the past decade there has been a substantive change in the role of practitioners in educational research. Grassroots efforts in action research highlight the importance of educators' own understanding of their practice. This book, which stems from a school-university collaboration, describes the theory and methods for conducting "action-oriented," qualitative practitioner research and guides educators through the research process. The volume is organized into six chapters. The first chapter offers a definition of action research and lays out a series of assumptions. Chapter 2 reviews various ways that practitioner research has manifested itself in different times and social contexts and provides a sense of epistemological and political issues. Chapter 3 discusses current approaches to action-oriented research and summarizes a variety of studies. Chapter 4 provides a process-oriented narrative of a 3-year practitioner research study. The fifth chapter provides a user-friendly guide to qualitative methods and indicates how practitioners modify them to meet constraints and opportunities encountered in their schools. The final chapter examines some ways in which practitioner researchers are pushing the edges of what currently "counts" as research. Contains 224 references. (LL)