This playbook is a practical guide to designing, conducting, analysing, and defending research in education, curriculum, and policy. Its central argument is that research is best understood as a series of informed decisions rather than a collection of isolated methods. The book emphasises maintaining a coherent "golden thread" linking:

Research problem → aims → objectives → questions → methodology → methods → data → findings → conclusions.

Major Sections

Practitioner Inquiry

• Action research, lesson study, learning study, reflective practice, improvement science, and self-study.
• Focuses on researching and improving one's own educational practice.

Research Problems and Questions

• Multiple ways of identifying research problems:
• Literature gaps
• Problems of practice
• Policy-driven issues
• Equity and justice concerns
• Theory-driven inquiries
• Problematisation and discourse approaches

Sampling and Participants

• Probability and non-probability sampling approaches.
• Emphasis on transparency, transferability, and analytical rather than statistical generalisation in small-scale educational research.

Research Ethics

• Informed consent, confidentiality, safeguarding, insider research, power relations, data protection, AI use, and BERA ethical principles.
• Distinguishes procedural ethics from ethics-in-practice.

Argumentation and Discourse

• Toulmin
• Walton
• Freeman
• Pragma-Dialectics
• Habermas
• Aristotle
• Perelman
• Fisher
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• Bacchi's WPR framework

Research Methods

• Interviews, focus groups, surveys,
• observation,
• document analysis, visual methods, diaries, artefact analysis,
• learning analytics, and elicitation techniques.

Data Analysis

• Qualitative: thematic analysis, grounded theory, IPA, framework analysis, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis.
• Quantitative: descriptive and inferential statistics suitable for smaller samples, effect sizes, confidence intervals, non-parametric methods.

Research Approaches

• Case study
• Ethnography
• Phenomenology
• Grounded theory
• Narrative inquiry
• Action research
• Design-based research
• Mixed methods
• Q methodology
• Policy analysis
• Systematic reviews

Research Paradigms

• Positivism
• Post-positivism
• Interpretivism
• Critical theory
• Pragmatism
• Critical realism/social realism
• Post-structuralism
• Post-qualitative/new materialist perspectives

Philosophical Foundations

• Ontology
• Epistemology
• Methodology
• Axiology
• Praxeology

Putting Research Together

• Final chapter presents an eight-stage inquiry design process:

1. Define problem
2. Form research questions
3. Select methodology
4. Choose participants
5. Address ethics
6. Develop argument
7. Gather and analyse data
8. Clarify positionality and theoretical framework

Overall Character

The playbook is:

• Practitioner-oriented
• Methodologically pluralist
• Strongly focused on curriculum and policy scholarship
• Explicit about philosophical assumptions
• Rich in comparative tables, frameworks, examples, and decision-making tools

Its distinctive contribution is connecting practical educational inquiry with deeper methodological, theoretical, and philosophical foundations while maintaining a consistent focus on research coherence and defensibility.