Book review: McDonagh, C., Roche, M., Sullivan, B., & Glenn, M. (2019). Enhancing Practice through Classroom Research: A teacher’s guide to professional development. UK: Routledge.

Structured in the form of an action research process with vignettes from the authors’ research accounts, this highlyreadable book includes five main sections: the process of a self-study action research project is described in the first four sections with the last one concerned with the contribution that action research can make towards wellbeing in the teaching profession. It features classroom action research which aims to support professional development and is a follow-up to Volume One, with the same title, published in McDonagh et al., 2012.

In each of the first four sections, the author describes and explains the process, gives a personal example, and provides reflective questions and suggestions for further reading. Like Dewey (1933), they identify openmindedness, whole-heartedness and intellectual responsibility as qualities of reflective practitioners and add ‘intellectual curiosity’ to Dewey’s list. Throughout the book, self-study action research and Living Theory are closely linked in using values as standards of judgement or criteria for evaluating the research, in the concept of ‘experiencing oneself as a living contradiction’ (Whitehead,1989) and in drawing frequently on Whitehead and McNiff (2006).