ECI 411 Education Research

Practitioner articles are primarily written by a professional in a given field to support colleagues in a variety of ways including advising, establishing best practices and noting trends. Frequently, these are based on real-life experiences or observations ("in the classroom"). These are often seen in trade publications.

If the article has sections for Method, Results & Conclusions, it is likely a research article not a practitioner article. 

Literacy Reference Center Plus

This database contains many of the trade publications below, plus other types of works (book reviews, author interviews, etc.).  To search for a practitioner article:

Search for your interest, in this example we'll use "reading". If you just search reading, you'll get a ton of results but you'll also get works of poetry, books and more.  There's definitely practitioner articles in there but you'll have to weed through some results

A good shortcut in this database is to combine it with one of these terms:

best practice

teacher practice

Classroom practice

"in the classroom"

Education Full Text

This database allows you to just search trade publications, which can be a great way to easily find practitioner articles. On the landing page for this database, before you do your search, scroll down until you see a box that says "Publication Type" then select Trade Publication from the list

Then scroll back to the top & do your search. 

You don't have to go through a full database! That can often be overwhelming, especially when you are looking for something very specific. A great alternative is to search through individual publications that contain practitioner articles. Below are a few trade publications (there still may be some research articles mixed in) that the library has access to or is available online:

Reading and Writing

Reading Teacher

Reading Improvement

Literacy Today

Teachers & Writers Magazine

How to search within a specific journal

To search any of the first four on that list, click on the title you want to search.  Then find the "Search within this publication" link that sits right about Publication Details

This will bring you to a search box that has the letters JN "Reading & Writing" already in the search box.  Just put what you are searching for in the box below that and then hit "search".

Teachers & Writers Magazine is available online. To search within it, just click on the link above and then scroll past the top images. In a full browser, the search box is on the right above "join us". On mobile, it's towards the bottom above "join us"