I find this an interesting question because it brings one/me back to first principles.  

I think teachers do need to be researchers.  The contributory disciplines to research on education such as sociology, psychology, philosophy and history of education are not very effective in informing the practitioner about what strategies s/he should use
employ in his/her particularly unique classroom setting with the group of salient individual personalities present.  That is something that needs to be reflected on and mediated by the teacher himself or herself, and different teachers may come to different conclusions about how best to go about their work.  There are many roads to Rome and it is not a one size fits all exercise - commonly described these days as 'best practice'.  

Schon described reflective practice as a non-rigorous form of inquiry/research.  He went on to claim that the scholarly warrant to knowledge of reflective practice was Action research in his 1995 article "The new scholarship requires a new epistemology".  

There are a couple of points that maybe worth noting here:

1.	There are differences between Action research and Reflective practice.  They are not one and the same thing.

2.	Just because Reflection is part of Action research, it does not follow that Action research is part of Reflection/Reflective practice.  That is a kind of false logic.

3.	Action research takes many different guises, there's 'Living I' via Bath, 'Practical Action', Research via Centre for Reseach in Education at University of East Anglia, 'down under' Action Research at Deakin(?) University following in the 'Critical' tradition of Carr and Kemmis, and there are others.

4.	No individual 'school' of action research has a monopoly on the field nor should any school or framework claim any monopoly, or exclusive inheritance rights to Schon's work.

5.	Teacher-research is not confined to Action research.  Case Study could be used by teacher-researchers as an alternative to action research (which confusingly is often referred to as a form of case study but that is not what I had in mind here).  What I have in mind here is the work of Robert Stake - "The art of case study research" and the papers that Lawrence Stenhouse wrote in his last four or five years e.g. "Case study methods" (1985), "Case study and case records: towards a comtemporary history of education" (1978).  

6.	There is a danger that in hitching reflective practice as an activity to the wagon of action research as a warrant to knowledge, that the somewhat ephemeral and amorphous nature of reflection is reduced a mechanistic series of steps or stages that oversimplify the process.  This was a crticism of John Elliot's model of Action research that was included in his book on action research in a foreword by Christopher Day.  I think the same criticisms could also be applied to other models of Action Research.  Stenhouse (1983) wrote: "the real danger is that teacher research will assume the character of the objectives model so that people will know where to dig without having to know why".

7.	Finally, as has been discussed on this list, rightly or wrongly - action research is often perceived as a ‘defecit’ model of professional development – something is not quite right, something has to change.  It is susceptible therefore to the new managerialism and can be highjacked and dovetailed into managerialist imperatives such as constant review, constant change, quality assurance ‘cycles’ etc.  all of which can undermine a lot of the good work and morale that already exists in schools and create a stream of useless paperwork.  Far from being professionalising, action research can undermine teacher professionalism if co-opted by our political masters for political/ideological ends.
8.	I am not suggesting that this is what is going on with teacher-researchers on this list, I am merely trying to highlight the potential for harm.

Conclusion
In conclusion, what do teacher researchers need?  I suppose they need to be given a broad overview of the field of educational research and indeed research on education.  How the field has evolved over time should be explained to them, as should the different approaches taken to research in the field today.  The teacher-researcher should then be afforded the courtesy of choosing which method they consider best suits their particular needs and values and most importantly they should be supported in their choice.  As with the choice of strategy to employ in their classroom, choice of research method is something that needs to be reflected on and mediated by the teacher himself or herself, and different teachers may come to different conclusions about how best to go about their research.  

Being a teacher-researcher, I would like to see diversity of research approaches better supported by academics. 




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