The research in teaching, on teaching and on the teachers' reflection about their teaching

This text expounds the work carried out at the LaPEF - Laboratory for the Research and Teaching of Physics - where elementary and high school teachers which have been working with us in projects of the FAPESP/Public School program, graduate students, and teachers from the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo develop research in teaching, on teaching and on the teachers' reflection about their teaching, i.e., about teachers' education. Those three lines of research evolved from the following question: How does the teaching we plan, with the theoretical assumptions we make, and based on the results of research we have carried out, modifies the students? The problems that originate our research in teaching are perceived by teachers in the classroom at public schools, and then debated and transformed into research issues by that same group in collective discussions at LaPEF. Research on teaching is developed by master and doctoral candidates who investigate important variables for the development of such teaching. The fundamental difference between these two kinds of research is not who carries them out but the objectives they seek. Research on the teachers' reflection about their teaching focuses on the issues of teachers' continuing education. This article deals with the questions of how those three levels of investigation related to each other, and what are their differences and similarities, mainly by describing the objectives of each of those groups and how they define different problems, each with their particular structure of gathering and analyzing data.

Research in teaching; Research on teaching; Teacher Education; University-Public School interaction