This book presents information on action research for teachers and administrators. Chapter 1, Reflective Professional Practice, discusses reflective professionals, urges active use of solitary dialogue and personal journals to enhance reflectiveness, delineates concerns of maturing educators, and summarizes meditative steps of reflective practice used by maturing educators. Chapter 2, Conceptual Bases of Action Research, describes how action research differs from traditional research, presenting a conceptual basis of action research, comparing two types of social scientists, and describing a high school English teacher's use of action research. Chapter 3, Defining Action Research, presents a working definition of action research, emphasizes the importance of group work, compares proactive and responsive action research, and explains how reflective practice, action research, and problem solving are interrelated. Chapter 4, Phases of Action Research in the Classroom, introduces three phases of action research (initiation, detection, and judgement) and describes data collection via questionnaires, interviews, observations, and documents. Chapter 5, Proactive Action Research, and chapter 6, Responsive Action Research, explain how to conduct proactive and responsive action research. Chapter 7, Processes of Cooperative Action Research, introduces the group processes of cooperative action research. Chapter 8, Types of Cooperative Action Research, describes diverse types of cooperative action research in school districts. Chapter 9, Prominent Researchers, examines the contributions of 13 researchers in the history of action research. An afterword explains how school-based action research has become the teacher research movement. (Contains 56 references.) (SM)